Free Baldwin by Roy Jenkins Page A

would rather walk and gossip, or withdraw for a Sunday evening to sit alone with Mrs Baldwin, than work on Cabinet papers or even a speech. What he did not realise at that stage was that it was meaningless to compare Baldwin’s speed with that of Bonar Law, for Baldwin did not work at all in Law’s sense. Law was a highly efficient, rather unimaginative, detailed administrator, given political force by a strong sense of partisan combativeness. He worked on paper, and derived a sense of duty fulfilled as he proceeded through his Cabinet boxes. He ran a Department of State with the detailed application which he had devoted to making his way in Glasgow business.
    Baldwin never attempted to do this. He was not afraid ofoverall responsibility. Indeed, for the first three months of his premiership he performed a feat which had seemed remarkable even when Gladstone had last done it forty years before and retained the Chancellorship as well as being First Lord of the Treasury. But it was all done on a light rein and with the minimum of paperwork. He did not even pretend to a crushing burden of work, only enough to complain comfortably about. ‘The work goes on, one week like another, and pretty incessant until Friday night, and then the break which gives one time to get one’s breath again,’ he wrote to his mother two months after becoming Prime Minister. ‘So far … it is not too heavy…. When you are at the beck and call of everyone for 14 hours a day for four days and for 8 hours on the fifth day each week you want a short space in which you relax and do just what you like.’ 2 All subsequent Prime Ministers would, I think, have regarded a sixty-four-hour week which closed at 5 p.m. on Friday as a semi-holiday.
    He was able to achieve this amount of leisure because he did not intervene much in the work of the Departments. Partly as a reaction against the restless interference of Lloyd George, he believed in giving his ministers the maximum freedom. He was always available for consultation, but rarely forced it upon them.
    He devoted a lot of time to the personal relationships of politics and to conducting them in a mollifying, unhurried way. This took priority over the reading of briefs, the annotation of Cabinet papers, or the swift making of minor decisions. This was not a question of either niceness or laziness. It was a question of how he believed he could best attain his major political purposes. This practice extended far beyond the circle of his Cabinet colleagues. It led him to spend endless hours in the House of Commons, far more than any Prime Minister for many years before, far more than any of his successors. Sometimes he would merely sit on the Government bench, half listening to some minor debate, half wrapping his mind round the backgrounds and appearances of different members. Thenhe would use this information to chat knowledgeably and sympathetically to them in the lobbies or the smoking room, often concentrating as much upon the opposition as upon his own supporters. 1 Sometimes he just sat. ‘What can you do’, an exasperated colleague once complained, ‘with a leader who sits in the smoking room reading the
Strand Magazine
?’ 3
    The interesting point is not the seeming indolence but the subject matter and the
venue.
Asquith would never have chosen the
Strand Magazine
or the House of Commons as a place in which to read. He would have read more reconditely but equally haphazardly in some more private precinct. Churchill in office would never have wasted time in the smoking room without an audience. Lloyd George would never have wasted time there at all, but he might have chosen the
Strand Magazine
had he been left waiting upon a railway platform. Neville Chamberlain would never have read haphazardly. Ramsay MacDonald would never have exposed himself so apparently free from the burdens of state.
    Yet it is doubtful whether Baldwin was in fact wasting time. He was most likely not even reading