prepared to retain Curzon as Foreign Secretary. He said that he would welcome this, but queried whether Curzon would be willing to serve, and also indicated that he would endeavour to bring Austen Chamberlain and Horne back into the Government. These replies were highly satisfactory to the King, who summoned Baldwin to the Palace at 3.15 p.m. and charged him with the task of forming a Government.
He returned to Downing Street and asked the waiting journalists for their prayers rather than their congratulations. He was Prime Minister at fifty-five, after less than three years’ Cabinet experience. He wrote to his mother: ‘I am not a bit excited and don’t realize it in the least.’ But to Phyllis Broome, a Worcestershire neighbour, writer and walking companion, he wrote: ‘Here is the biggest job in the world and if I fail I shall share the fate of many a bigger man than I. But it’s a fine thought, isn’t it? And one may do something before one cracks up.’ 9
CHAPTER THREE
An Unsettled Leadership
Baldwin of course did not ‘crack up’ for many years to come. He held the leadership of the Conservative Party, to which he was unanimously elected (proposed by Curzon) immediately following his accession to the premiership, until 1937, a longer period than any of his predecessors since Salisbury, and a longer period too than any but one (Churchill) of his seven successors has since attained.
Yet the suggestion of ‘crack-up’ was not wholly fanciful. A bucolic English gentleman ‘by election’, in G. M. Young’sphrase, he was always very highly strung. He was full of minor nervous habits: an eye-twitch, a frequent snapping of the thumbs and fingers when reading or in conversation, a flicking of the tongue before starting a speech, and, in a rather different category, an addiction to putting objects, particularly books, but matches, pipes, paper knives and almost anything else as well, to his nostrils and audibly sniffing at them.
More importantly, he had a metabolism which reacted strongly to crisis. He performed well but not easily during periods of strain. He then slept badly and became more silent and withdrawn than was his habit. But his power of decisionmaking improved, and his gift of calming, persuasive oratory rose to its heights. After such a period he was left exhausted, sometimes near to nervous prostration. But a long holiday would revive him quickly: if he had the prospect of a month of freedom he would began to feel well after a week or so.
As a result he was good at crises provided they did not occurfrequently. He enjoyed the aftermath of a successful battle. He did not want the next one to start soon. He had no desire to defeat boredom by provoking political excitement and keeping himself constantly at a stretch. He was mostly happy without an excessive amount of work, and when it was not there he did not invent it. It is not altogether easy to understand his methods of discharging business. The charge of simple laziness can be dismissed. Had this been his dominating characteristic, he could not possibly have retained his position through the vicissitudes and challenges of a decade and a half. Nor was he like Asquith, whose urbane liberal gravitas he greatly admired, and who, of all the leading politicians he knew, was probably the one he would have most wished to emulate. Asquith worked with unusual speed and intellectual certainty. He operated, in Churchill’s view, like a great judge. He listened to the pleadings. He absorbed the arguments. He gave his verdict. And then he closed the court and turned his mind and his emotions to the pleasures of the day, literary or social.
Baldwin had no comparable speed, no comparable rational processes. Tom Jones,one of his most intimate associates and normally a very shrewd observer, at first thought him very slow. ‘Bonar Law would do as much work in an hour as S.B. in four or five,’ he wrote in November 1923. 1 He also noted that Baldwin
He returned to Downing Street and asked the waiting journalists for their prayers rather than their congratulations. He was Prime Minister at fifty-five, after less than three years’ Cabinet experience. He wrote to his mother: ‘I am not a bit excited and don’t realize it in the least.’ But to Phyllis Broome, a Worcestershire neighbour, writer and walking companion, he wrote: ‘Here is the biggest job in the world and if I fail I shall share the fate of many a bigger man than I. But it’s a fine thought, isn’t it? And one may do something before one cracks up.’ 9
CHAPTER THREE
An Unsettled Leadership
Baldwin of course did not ‘crack up’ for many years to come. He held the leadership of the Conservative Party, to which he was unanimously elected (proposed by Curzon) immediately following his accession to the premiership, until 1937, a longer period than any of his predecessors since Salisbury, and a longer period too than any but one (Churchill) of his seven successors has since attained.
Yet the suggestion of ‘crack-up’ was not wholly fanciful. A bucolic English gentleman ‘by election’, in G. M. Young’sphrase, he was always very highly strung. He was full of minor nervous habits: an eye-twitch, a frequent snapping of the thumbs and fingers when reading or in conversation, a flicking of the tongue before starting a speech, and, in a rather different category, an addiction to putting objects, particularly books, but matches, pipes, paper knives and almost anything else as well, to his nostrils and audibly sniffing at them.
More importantly, he had a metabolism which reacted strongly to crisis. He performed well but not easily during periods of strain. He then slept badly and became more silent and withdrawn than was his habit. But his power of decisionmaking improved, and his gift of calming, persuasive oratory rose to its heights. After such a period he was left exhausted, sometimes near to nervous prostration. But a long holiday would revive him quickly: if he had the prospect of a month of freedom he would began to feel well after a week or so.
As a result he was good at crises provided they did not occurfrequently. He enjoyed the aftermath of a successful battle. He did not want the next one to start soon. He had no desire to defeat boredom by provoking political excitement and keeping himself constantly at a stretch. He was mostly happy without an excessive amount of work, and when it was not there he did not invent it. It is not altogether easy to understand his methods of discharging business. The charge of simple laziness can be dismissed. Had this been his dominating characteristic, he could not possibly have retained his position through the vicissitudes and challenges of a decade and a half. Nor was he like Asquith, whose urbane liberal gravitas he greatly admired, and who, of all the leading politicians he knew, was probably the one he would have most wished to emulate. Asquith worked with unusual speed and intellectual certainty. He operated, in Churchill’s view, like a great judge. He listened to the pleadings. He absorbed the arguments. He gave his verdict. And then he closed the court and turned his mind and his emotions to the pleasures of the day, literary or social.
Baldwin had no comparable speed, no comparable rational processes. Tom Jones,one of his most intimate associates and normally a very shrewd observer, at first thought him very slow. ‘Bonar Law would do as much work in an hour as S.B. in four or five,’ he wrote in November 1923. 1 He also noted that Baldwin
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