Baldwin by Roy Jenkins Page B

after a nerve-testing time-lag, was a brilliant success. Within fifteen months he secured a reunited Conservative Party, which gave him the longest uninterrupted party premiership between Asquith and Attlee, the final reduction to a rump of the Liberal Party, and a brief, innocuous baptism of power for the Labour Party. The centre party was dead, Lloyd George was coralled, and the Labour front bench had become a collection of respectable Privy Councillors. It was everything for which he could have asked.
    If, on the other hand, it was the freedom to use protection as a weapon against unemployment with which he was primarily concerned, the decision was a disastrous failure. It set back this possibility for nearly a decade, until after the slump had sent unemployment to twice the ‘unacceptable’ level of 1923 and the pattern of politics had once again been changed.
    The difficulty in determining the motive for Baldwin’s decision is that he was himself as contradictory about this as he was clear about where and how he took it. In public he put it all on unemployment. In his October speech to the Conservative Party Conference at Plymouth, in which he announced his new position, he said:
To me, at least, the unemployment problem is the most critical problem of our country. I can fight it. I am willing to fight it. I cannot fight it without weapons…. I have come to the conclusion myself that the only way of fighting this subject is by protecting the home market. 7
     
    No doubt at this stage and in public he could hardly have said anything else. But at the beginning of 1925, he changed the emphasis and told the Constitutional Club that it was a long-meditated move to reunite the Conservative Party. Ten years after that he put the main weight on Lloyd George, and told Tom Jones:
The Goat was in America. He was on the water when I made the speech and the Liberals did not know what to say. I had information he was going protectionist and I had to get in quick…. Dished the Goat, as otherwise he would have got the Party with Austen and F.E. [Birkenhead] and there would have been an end to the Tory Party as we know it. 6
     
    In 1943, however, Baldwin again switched back to the economic motive. ‘I wanted it’, he concluded the note alreadyquoted, ‘because I saw no other weapon then to use in the fight against unemployment.’
    Davidson, who was probably the closest of Baldwin’s confidents at the time and who also had the advantage of being present at Aix, was equally muddled in his explanations. This may have been because, according to Jones, he attracted most of the blame. In addition he was peculiarly dissatisfied with the outcome of the election, which led to his losing his own, nominally safe, Conservative seat. He put forward the unconvincing view that an election was never part of the plan. Baldwin merely intended to fly a policy kite at Plymouth. Davidson gave the reasons for the kite-flying as partly Lloyd George and partly unemployment.
    There is, of course, no reason why Baldwin should have been influenced by one motive to the exclusion of others. It is reasonable, indeed usual, to hope that several consequences will flow from a chosen course of action. But it is desirable to know, in one’s own mind at least, what is the primary objective. One disadvantage of intuitive decision-making, or of ‘leaps in the dark’ if Birkenhead’s phraseology is preferred, is that it is not always clear what they are intended to achieve.
    The decision once taken, however, Baldwin proceeded to implement it with force and speed. The process illustrated the powers resident in even an untried and hitherto hesitant Prime Minister. There was certain to be a good deal of opposition in the Cabinet. There was indeed something bizarre about the idea that protection was the way to unite the Conservative Party. The issue had been a principal if intermittent source of internal dispute and disruption for the past twenty years. But it ought