Baldwin by Roy Jenkins

London until 25 August, and he was back in Paris by 18 September for the only attempt which he ever made, as head of government, to negotiate direct with a foreign statesman. Twenty-four hours of Monsieur Poincaré was more than enough for him. Thereafter he decided that this was a job for Foreign Secretaries. It was left to Neville Chamberlain, fifteen months after Baldwin’s retirement, to revive Prime Ministerial diplomacy at Berchtesgaden.
    That summer at Aix was not only brief but troubled. The past year, since his previous sojourn at the Hôtel Splendide, had been by far the most spectacular of his life. He had gone home to face crisis and, as he persuaded himself, subsequent obscurity. In fact he had broken the most famous statesman ofEurope, and within six months succeeded to Lloyd George’s place if not to his fame. He had already imposed his personality upon the country in a way that Bonar Law in eleven years of intermittent Conservative leadership had never succeeded in doing. But he had not moulded the politics of Britain into a form which he thought he could control. His Cabinet was not his own but an inheritance from Law. The only appointment of significance which he had made himself was that of Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor, and that had been done only two days before the beginning of his holiday. Until then he had, like Law before him, been waiting for McKenna. The hold of that secondary Liberal figure upon successive Conservative leaders is one of the least easily explicable features of the politics of the early 1920s. Baldwin’s real need was to reunite the Conservative Party. The Exchequer was the only great plum at his disposal for this purpose. Why he should have dangled it for three months before an undistinguished ex-Chancellor of another party who did not even possess a seat in Parliament defies explanation.
    The superficial justification was that he was frightened of the emergence of a centre party, and thought he must try to pre-empt this. But the danger of a centre party came not from McKenna but from the Unionist ex-Coalitionists, led by Austen Chamberlain, who had twice previously been Chancellor, and who, if he was to be brought back into the fold, would clearly require some substantial offer. Instead of the Exchequer, Baldwin had offered him the embassy to Washington, which Chamberlain had rejected with anger. ‘The discourtesy shown to me, down to the last detail … was not expected and I profoundly resent it,’ 5 he wrote to his brother after a visit to the new Prime Minister at Chequers. 3 It was one of Baldwin’s rare failures in human relationships. There were understandable complications. He had been Chamberlain’s junior minister,and the rapid reversal of position, combined with Chamberlain’s habitual stiffness of manner, probably made his touch less sure than usual. In addition, Chamberlain was not willing to join the Government without Birkenhead, and Birkenhead was strongly disapproved of by the Conservative rank and file, both in the House and in the country, and particularly by those somewhat prim and self-righteous parts of it in which lay Baldwin’s greatest strength.
    After three months of office Baldwin was not very happy either with his Cabinet or with the state of his party. His pleasure that Curzon had agreed to serve under him had quickly evaporated. He had got the weakest of the Coalitionists, and the one whose health was beginning to fail. In addition Curzon fairly soon reverted to his habit of complaining about the way in which he was treated by his Prime Minister. 4 Altogether Baldwin, like most Prime Ministers who succeed a member of their own party during a Parliament, felt that he would be happier and stronger if he could make his own Cabinet afresh, and yet was inhibited from so doing.
    More importantly, he felt uneasy with the pattern of politics. What Baldwin wanted was a reversion to the firm two-party system of his youth, but with the Labour Party