Baldwin by Roy Jenkins Page A

securely established as a great party of state and the Liberal Party tucked up in the history books. He wanted Asquith on a pedestal and Lloyd George in an isolation hospital. He was much clearer in this view than any of his Conservative contemporaries. He had been almost the first to express his belief in the certainty of afuture Labour Government. 5 He wanted a reunited Conservative Party, with himself firmly in the saddle, sharing power on a somewhat unequal basis with a Labour Party purged of its extremists by the occasional responsibilities of office. He wanted no instability in the middle.
    The two threats to this development which he saw in that late summer of 1923 were Lloyd George and unemployment. Unemployment, which had risen beyond 2 million with the collapse of the post-war boom, had settled back to about 1 ½ million. This was much higher than pre-war figures, and there seemed little prospect, on existing policies, of any significant decline. Indeed the position of coal, still by far Britain’s largest industry, was artificially and temporarily favourable because of the French occupation of the Ruhr.
    Baldwin disliked the level of unemployment both for its own sake and because he believed it worked against the evolution of a moderate Labour Party. In common with most of his contemporaries, he comprehended few methods by which governments could affect the total of demand. The best that could be done was to influence its shape in a way that gave the greatest help to the home market. This meant protection. But protection also meant an early election, for Bonar Law had given a pledge a year earlier that there would be no fundamental change in fiscal arrangements without another appeal to the country.
    Lloyd George was about to go to America, but Baldwin believed that, on his return in late October, unless pre-empted, he would play the protectionist card. Certainly Lloyd George had never been a doctrinaire free-trader. Nor had he ever allowed such doctrines as had influenced him to sit too heavily upon his shoulders. And if he went protectionist while the Government havered, his attraction for the dissident Conservatives would become still stronger.
    Baldwin contemplated all this at Aix, and made up his mind both to go for protection and to put at risk the first independentConservative majority for two decades. About the time and place of this extraordinarily bold decision there seems little doubt. Baldwin confirmed it twenty years later, when he wrote to Tom Jones from the depths of his retirement: ‘I spent a lot of my holiday in 1923 walking in the hills around Aix and thought it all out by myself. I came to the decision by myself and how I drove that Cabinet to take the plunge I shall never know! I must have more push than people think….’ 6
    By itself this statement, unequivocal though it was, could not be regarded as decisive evidence. Even the most honest of men find it surprisingly easy, through the film of time, to recall their own actions quite differently from the way in which objective evidence makes it clear they in fact occurred. And Baldwin in 1943, isolated and unpopular, might well have been tempted, as the tone of his note indeed suggests, to exaggerate his erstwhile capacity for independent decision. But the objective evidence is here on his side. And so is the subjective evidence. He had decided at Aix the year before to break one mould. His decision had been triumphantly vindicated. Now, once more, he found an uncomfortable mould setting around him. It was naturally tempting for a rather superstitious man to trust again to an intuitive judgment of his own made in much the same circumstances as in the previous year.
    What is much more difficult to know is what were his motives for the decision, and what he expected to be the likely outcome. Was it the pattern of politics or the future of Britain’s trading arrangements which he wished primarily to influence? If the former, then the decision,