Baldwin by Roy Jenkins Page B

me than Lloyd George ever did,’ he said. 17 So, indeed, Baldwin had. He had also paid a substantial price for the pleasure, not merely of looking at the corpse of the idea of a centre party, but of stamping upon it several times over.
    He made Joynson-Hicks(good on penal reform but illiberal on all else) Home Secretary, and thus firmly launched the Home Office, which had been different in the days of Harcourt, Asquith and Churchill, upon a course of dour obscurantism from which it took three or four decades to recover. His worst mistake was at the Ministry of Labour, which, foreseeably, turned out to be the crucial sector of his Government’s battlefront. He appointed Steel-Maitland,another ten-minute decision, after Horne had refused, despite the fact that he told Tom Jones he had spent eighteen months contemplating the importance of the post: ‘Neville recommended S-M. He is able enough—got all those Firsts at Oxford—but is he human enough? … He will do well administering the Office, but I am frankly afraid of him in the House.’ The outcome (perhaps this would have happened whoever had been at the Ministry of Labour) was that most of the principal figures of the Government devoted a good part of their time to assisting Steel-Maitland in his job.
    Baldwin’s other error was not to include Balfour. That magnificent old cat of British politics was seventy-six. But as he was brought in six months later when Curzon died, age was hardly a reason for excluding him from an office without portfolio in 1924. Hankey,the Secretary of the Cabinet, thought it was because he gave Baldwin ‘a certain sense of
gaucherie
and inferiority’. 18
    So Balfour did to many people. But Baldwin had less occasion to feel it than most. He may have constructed his Cabinet a little amiss, but he had constructed his power-base superbly. After an uneasy eighteen months he was in a stronger position than any Conservative leader since Lord Salisbury.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Perplexity of Power
     
    Baldwin’s second premiership lasted four and a half years. It was the second longest period of party power, uninterrupted by either an election or a change of leadership, of this century. 1 It was also a government of great stability of men in offices. Baldwin was perhaps the last Prime Minister to treat his Cabinet colleagues, as Gladstone had done, as members of a college of cardinals. Once nominated, he had to live with them. He would no more have thought of behaving as Harold Macmillan did in 1962, and dismissing nearly a half of them as though they were junior executives in an ailing company, than it would have occurred to him to divorce his wife and marry one of his walking companions. Nor did he shuffle them around, as an almost annual political gymkhana, in the way that Harold Wilson did. Once a minister in the main Baldwin Government, you were there, and in the same office, for the duration. Only death or impending death (Curzon and Cave), acute shortage of money and the need to seek the sustenance of the City (Birkenhead), a policy resignation (Cecil of Chelwood), or appointment as Viceroy of India (Edward Wood, later Lord Irwin, later Lord Halifax) produced changes. For the rest, the only variety was provided by the decision of the President of the Board of Trade, somewhat eccentrically as it now appears, to change his name from Lloyd-Greame to Cunliffe-Lister. 2
     
    This did not mean that there were no undulations in Baldwin’s relations with his Cabinet. With the exception of Bridgeman,the First Lord of the Admiralty, it is doubtful whether he was on close personal terms with any of them. Neville Chamberlain, the Minister of Health, would probably, and with justice, have been his choice as the most efficient minister. There was a close working partnership between them, in governments and in opposition, for fifteen years, but it was untinted by much mutual affection or even comprehension. Chamberlain was constantly irritated by Baldwin’s