The death of Northcliffe was a relief to almost everybody, including Steed, who fell soon after him. The Times moved curiously but not causally in step with British politics. This provides perhaps the best evidence of its position as a national journal. In Lloyd George’s time it was febrile. Coincidentally with his fall it moved into a period of Baldwinesque calm. The ownership gap left by Northcliffe was filled by the junior branch of the Astor family, Major (later Colonel) J. J. Astor, later still Lord Astor of Hever, providing most of the money and moving into a partnership with a revived John Walter IV. Dawson was brought back as editor and stayed for another nineteen years, until 1941. Together with John Reith of the BBC and Archbishop Lang of Canterbury, Dawson of The Times formed a tripod of slightly self-righteous respectability which sustained the British establishment of the inter-war years.
The Times’s semi-official position, never exactly sought, sometimes embarrassing both to the government and to the paper, but sometimes valuable too, particularly for the prestige that it gave its correspondents abroad, was strengthened during this period. So was the pre-eminence of some of its features, most notably the correspondence columns. In 1917 it had rejected (by decision of Dawson, not, as was commonly thought, Northcliffe) one of the most resonant, if to some eyes infamous, letters to the editor in British political history. The Lansdowne ‘peace letter’ went to the Daily Telegraph instead. In 1919 this was compensated for by Baldwin’s ‘FST letter’ (he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time and used the initials to achieve at least the appearance of anonymity), in which he announced that he was giving a fifth of his fortune to help reduce the national debt, and by two extraordinary effusions from Bonar Law. In one he sounded the death-knell of Lloyd George’s Coalition. In the other, written during his brief period as Prime Minister, he castigated under the curious pseudonym of ‘Colonial’ the American debt settlement his Chancellor had just negotiated.
Dawson was always an appeaser, in the better as well as the worse sense of the word. Therefore he liked Baldwin’s general approach to politics, and Baldwin in turn was always close to him. On a crucial morning in August 1931, having reluctantly returned to London from Aix-les-Bains to deal with the crisis that led to the formation of the National Government, Baldwin was ‘lost’ for several hours. He had, in fact, slipped away to consult his trusted friend Dawson. As a result he missed a summons to see the King before Herbert Samuel did so, and plans for a coalition gathered almost irresistible momentum. By the time he had his own audience, Baldwin, against his better judgement, could only acquiesce. British politics were distorted for a decade, and the new balance which Baldwin had devoted the twenties to achieving was seriously upset. The incident was a tribute to the drawing power of Dawson, but not an indication that a politician is always best employed in calling on the editor of The Times.
The paper was far from being alone in its support of Neville Chamberlain’s foreign policy. It did, however, carry its enthusiasm beyond the call of duty. For Christmas 1938 it offered its readers the opportunity to buy cards showing the Prime Minister waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on his return from Munich. It opposed Churchill’s inclusion in the government as late as July 1939. And it had the power, unlike most of its contemporaries, to help make policy as well as merely to comment upon it. The most famous (or notorious) example was the leader of 7 September 1938, which first advocated the handing over of the Sudetenland to Germany. The Foreign Office disowned it to the Czech government, but there is evidence that the article had been inspired by Halifax, the Foreign Secretary. His contact with Dawson was intimate and continuous.
As appeasement collapsed war came, and the Chamberlain Government tottered towards its fall. The Times inevitably suffered somewhat for its over-commitment. Stephen Koss in his Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain makes a fine distinction: ‘Its influence had declined but not yet its reputation.’ The period of The Times’s being almost a great Department of State and its editor almost an honorary member of the Cabinet was over, and not merely for Dawson’s day.
His long day came to an end on 1 October 1941. The History’s ‘obituary’ says: ‘He gave lifelong adherence to his chosen leaders, above all Milner, Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax.’ It was not an eclectic choice of friends. In particular it left his successor, who had been his co-adjudicator for the previous fourteen years, somewhat isolated from the War Coalition, and indeed the Churchillian Conservative Party.