The working class heroes who earned His Majesty’s endorsement
A century after the illegitimate son of a Scottish crofter led Britain’s first Labour government, a book tells how his Cabinet of novices touched by poverty, with a woman among them, trumped the Establishment...
THE mood in the political establishment was fearful. Talk of revolution was in the air as panic swept through the City of London and the most affluent ranks of society. The Liberal statesman Richard Haldane told his mother that “all the old ladies are writing to their brokers, beseeching them to save their capital from confiscation”.
This tidal wave of disquiet had been generated by the outcome of the December 1923 General Election, where the shift in the balance of power at Westminster left the advent of the first ever Labour government looking inevitable. It was a prospect that alarmed Winston Churchill, a long-serving former Liberal Minister – and determined opponent of socialism.
In typically striking language, he warned that the arrival of Labour in office would be “a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great states on the morrow of their defeat in war”.
The aristocracy was horror-struck.
One countess quaked that they would “cut the throats of every aristocrat and steal all their property”.
Sir Frederick Banbury, Tory MP for the City of London, declared that he would personally lead the Coldstream Guards to Westminster to protect the constitution.
For traditionalists, the old order appeared to be crumbling around them; the Bolsheviks had taken charge in Russia, the Nationalist rebels in Ireland.
One former Conservative MP, George Terrell, railed against “the Communists, the wild men, the workshy and the illiterate”, who would now have a grip on power.
The term “wild men” was also taken up by the City of London ConservativeAssociation, which urged the party’s leadership to form an alliance with the Liberals to keep out Labour. But the demand went unheeded.
As the political historian David Torrance relates in The Wild Men, his excellent new book to mark the centenary of the first ever Labour government, the Tories were too weak after the election to dictate terms.
Under the faltering, inexperienced leadership of Stanley Baldwin, their loss of 86 seats robbed them of any moral right to form a new government on their own even though they remained the largest party.
Meanwhile, the Liberals, under the former Prime Minister H H Asquith, whose intellectual firepower was matched by his fondness for alcohol, had enjoyed a minor revival, gaining 43 seats, but that advance still left them as the third largest party with 158 MPs, well behind Labour’s total of 191.
NEITHER Baldwin nor Asquith thought that Tory-Liberal coalition feasible, particularly if it was formed with the single purpose of excluding Labour. Such a move, they believed, would both offend the British public’s instinct for fair play and would prove counterproductive by enhancing the Labour movement’s sense of injustice.A minority Labour government was the only realistic alternative.
There were many voices on the Left who opposed this idea, believing the party would have no chance of implementing any kind of socialist programme. But Labour’s shrewd leader Ramsay MacDonald felt that his party would gain in stature by proving it was fit for office and willing to accept responsibility.
“Moderation and honesty were our safety,” he recorded in his diary. Crucial in all this manoeuvring was the position of King George V.
A bluff traditionalist, he was uneasy at the concept of a Labour government but was pragmatic enough to see that the experiment should be tried rather than resisted.
“My grandfather would have hated it. My father would have hardly tolerated it. But I moved with the times,” he wrote. With the King’s approval, MacDonald and his team agreed to form a new government in January 1924 once the Tories had duly lost a vote of confidence in the Commons.
The ceremony at Buckingham Palace where new ministers accepted the seals of office could have been awkward, since normal protocol stipulated that the participants should wear formal court uniforms.
But few members of the Labour cabinet had such garments and some could not afford to buy them.
Displaying his adroit willingness to accommodate these political novices, the King set aside the usual rules. Formal evening dress was the choice of most, though housing minister John Weatley turned up defiantly in a 10-year-old lounge suit.
His fellow left-winger J R Clynes was impressed by the welcoming attitude of the King, recalling how “we were making history. We were perhaps somewhat embarrassed but the little quiet man whom we addressed as ‘Your Majesty’ swiftly put us at our ease”.
It is exactly 100 years since MacDonald took power for the first time and today Sir Keir Starmer is well-placed to follow in his footsteps. A high-flying lawyer born into a loving Surrey family, Sir Keir has a very different background to MacDonald, who was
the illegitimate son of a Scottish crofter. In contrast to Sir Keir’s domestic contentment with his wife Victoria, MacDonald suffered the agony of losing his beloved Margaret – by whom he had six children – to a fatal bout of blood poisoning in 1911. Her death affected him for the rest of his life.
In fact his daughter Ishbel, who acted as his hostess in No 10 Downing Street, recalled that the ascent to office in 1924 was one of the rare moments of real happiness for him amid his permanent grief.
“From the moment mummy died till he was Prime Minister, he was a sorrowful man. People were afraid of him. He always seemed to be in mourning. He was not often seen laughing,” she wrote.
“As Prime Minister, the friendliness of the people and the exhilaration of victory made him forget himself. He was a different man, He was on top of the world, full of fun and vigour.”
MacDonald, with his poetic Caledonian sensibility, was a more powerful orator than Starmer ever will be, though Sir Keir is better on policy detail. But in the record of both men is fundamental seriousness aimed at reassuring voters.
So just as Sir Keir today emphasises that the hard-Left agenda of Jeremy Corbyn has been dumped, so MacDonald showed that there was no room in his Cabinet for the antics of “wild men”. In truth, his team could hardly have been more restrained.
ONLY among the small group of Clydesider radicals from Scotland was there any wildness. Within the Cabinet, most Ministers felt it their priority to show their capacity for effective governance. Chancellor Philip Snowden, the son of Yorkshire weavers, was a rigid 19th-century Gladstonian in spirit, even keener on fiscal restraint than the present Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
His puritanism, exacerbated by the permanent pain he suffered as the legacy of a serious bike accident when he was 27, fuelled his disdain for spending demands from backbench Labour MPs, whom he described as a “pack of ravenous wolves”.
The one Budget he introduced in 1924 was a triumph of Treasury orthodoxy, cutting taxes by £38million and, contrary to all the hysterical anti-Labour propaganda, leaving death duties and wealth charges untouched. In a similar vein, the ebullient colonial secretary Jimmy Thomas – a trade unionist and former train driver who was the illegitimate son of a domestic servant – promised that “there will be no mucking about with the Empire”.
Another trade unionist and illegitimate child, the home secretary Arthur Henderson, was willing to take tough action to break strikes, while the lord chancellor Richard Haldane was the epitome of enlightened, moderate reformism, as befitted a former Liberal who had held the same post in Asquith’s pre-war government.
The only minister who followed a bolder course was the housing minister John Wheatley, who embarked on a major construction programme.
Like much of the Cabinet, he had a deprived upbringing as one of eight children living in a miner’s cottage without running water or drainage.
When he told the King of the grinding poverty of his childhood, George V replied: “I tell you, Mr Wheatley, that if I’d had to live in conditions like that, I would have been a revolutionary myself.”
There were other achievements, such as the negotiation of a new war reparations agreement with Germany and an economic deal with the newly recognised Soviet Union by MacDonald, acting as his own foreign secretary.
This was also the first government to contain a woman, Margaret Bondfield, a former shop worker who became a Labour minister – and it also left a lasting mark on the fabric of Britain by initiating the design for the iconic red telephone kiosk, conceived by the great architect Giles Gilbert Scott. But its most important achievement was to exist in the first place.
Without a Commons majority, MacDonald’s administration was always vulnerable and, after just nine months, it fell from power. This was precipitated by a controversial legal case, in which the attorneygeneral Sir Patrick Hastings was accused of bowing to political pressures in abandoning the prosecution of a communist writer for inciting mutiny in the Armed Forces.
In the subsequent General Election, Labour were hammered in the press over their supposed links to the Soviet Union – with many attacks exploiting what now seems likely to have been a forged letter from the Kremlin. Even so, though Labour lost 40 seats, they increased their share of the vote. More significantly for the long term, the Liberal vote collapsed and they lost 118 seats. They were never again to be a major independent force in British politics. The two-party system of Left and Right had become firmly established. By 1929, Labour was back in power and MacDonald back in Downing Street. By his actions in 1924, he had helped turn a movement of ideals into a vehicle for power.
● The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance (Bloomsbury, £20) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25
‘George V said: “Mr Wheatley, if I’d had to live in conditions like that, I’d have been a revolutionary myself”’