Glamour Boys : The Secret Story of the Rebels Who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler (9781526601759) by Bryant Chris

Author:Bryant, Chris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Plc

13

The New Prime Minister

Colleagues liked affable, self-deprecating Baldwin. He knew how to play the House. On his last outing in the Commons, just before travelling to Buckingham Palace to resign, he announced that MPs’ salaries would increase from £400 to £600 a year ‘at an early date’. Not surprisingly, everyone cheered, but when a member pressed him on whether he would ‘consider the propriety’ of leaving this to a free vote of the House, his answer had everyone in stitches. ‘I am not certain,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye, ‘that it would be an act of propriety on my part to consider anything that this House might do next week.’1

Views about his successor, Chamberlain, by contrast, were mixed. Chips Channon was besotted with him. He was ‘so calm and yet so sensible and determined’; he was ‘the shrewdest prime minister of modern times’.2 Others were more critical, though. The senior civil servant Sir Horace Wilson reckoned Chamberlain took time before making up his mind, but that ‘when that course was settled he did not wonder whether it was right and whether it would have been better to decide to try something else’.3 Sir Alexander Cadogan, who was permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office from 1938 to 1946, saw him as a ‘man of one-track mind. If, after much reflection, no doubt, he decided on a certain move or line of policy, nothing would affect him.’4 Likewise the Italian ambassador, Dino Grandi, claimed Chamberlain was ‘not a politician, but a man of simple ideas and strong character, particularly sensitive to an act of personal trust and friendship’.5 Harold Nicolson considered there was something darker going on, as he noted that in becoming prime minister, Chamberlain had triumphed over the bullying of his father, Joe, and the ‘subtle hostility’ of his half-brother Austen, neither of whom had achieved their life goal. In short, he was complex. Distrusting others, he relied to an unhealthy degree on his own resources. He hated his judgement to be questioned. Once committed to a course of action he would deploy all necessary means to see it through, including deliberately provoking his opponents. It led the Labour Party to despise him just when the nation would have benefited from a unifying prime minister. It also led him to develop a secretive network of loyalists upon whom he could utterly depend.

This was especially apparent in international diplomacy, which was rapidly acquiring a new urgency. On the night Chamberlain took over, Bob Boothby found Baldwin warming himself in front of the fire in the Commons lobby and suggested it was a sad occasion. ‘Not for me,’ replied Baldwin. ‘It is time I went. There is only one thing I regret. I never took any interest in foreign affairs.’6 This clearly weighed on his mind, as he told Chamberlain, in his customarily languid way, ‘It will be a wonderful thing for you if you can bring about European peace. I hadn’t the energy to do it during my last two years.

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