British Prime Ministers From Balfour to Brown

Robert Pearce, Graham Goodlad

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135045388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The origins of the post of Prime Minister can be traced back to the eighteenth century when Sir Robert Walpole became the monarch's principal minister. From the dawn of the twentieth century to the early years of the twenty-first, however, both the power and the significance of the role have been transformed.

British Prime Ministers from Balfour to Brown explores the personalities and achievements of those twenty individuals who have held the highest political office between 1902 and 2010. It includes studies of the dominant premiers who helped shape Britain in peace and war – Lloyd George, Churchill, Thatcher and Blair – as well as portraits of the less familiar, from Asquith and Baldwin to Wilson and Heath. Each chapter gives a concise account of its subject's rise to power, ideas and motivations, and governing style, as well as examining his or her contribution to policy-making and handling of the major issues of the time. Robert Pearce and Graham Goodlad explore each Prime Minister's interaction with colleagues and political parties, as well as with Cabinet, Parliament and other key institutions of government. Furthermore they assess the significance, and current reputation, of each of the premiers.

This book charts both the evolving importance of the office of Prime Minister and the continuing restraints on the exercise of power by Britain's leaders. These concise, accessible and stimulating biographies provide an essential resource for students of political history and general readers alike.

1 Arthur Balfour (1848–1930)

Prime Minister: July 1902– December 1905

‘Arthur could never bring himself to dip his hands into dirty or troubled waters.’

One of Arthur Balfour’s Cabinet colleagues, quoted by his niece and biographer, Blanche Dugdale, 1939.¹

Arthur Balfour has frequently been dismissed as a dilettante who was ill-equipped for the pressures of an increasingly democratic and professional political environment. In the cutting words of David Lloyd George, ‘he will be just like the scent on a pocket handkerchief’.² Posterity has not been kind to a premier who was believed to have owed his elevation to aristocratic family connections rather than to personal merit. The once popular phrase, ‘Bob’s your uncle’, refers to the fact that Balfour served his political apprenticeship under his uncle, Robert, Marquess of Salisbury, whom he succeeded without challenge as the tenant of Number 10 in July 1902. His premiership was one of the shortest and least successful of the twentieth century. His resignation, after just three and a half years in office, paved the way for a general election in which his government’s record was comprehensively rejected and in which he suffered the humiliation of losing his own parliamentary seat.

Balfour’s premiership was an unhappy interlude in the career of a man whose total of 27 years in office made him the longest serving Cabinet minister in British political history. Uniquely, he served in the Cabinets of three later premiers – Asquith, Lloyd George and Baldwin – and was arguably more effective and at ease in a subordinate role. As Foreign Secretary during the First World War he issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration, offering the Jewish people a ‘national home’ in Palestine and indirectly laying the foundations for the future state of Israel. Our concern here, however, is with Balfour’s period as Prime Minister. First, however, it is necessary to give some account of his personality and ascent to the highest office.

The rise to the premiership

The product of a wealthy Scottish landowning family, Balfour was sophisticated, charming and well-read. He never married and was happiest in a small circle of like-minded friends and family members. He had a wide range of interests, writing several volumes of philosophy and in 1882 co-founding the Society for Psychical Research, whilst remaining a committed member of the Church of England. He was fascinated by technology, becoming the first Prime Minister to own a motor car. Erudite conversation, tennis, golf and country house parties occupied a great deal of his time. All of this tended to create an impression not only that he was to some extent bored with politics but also that he lacked steel and determination. Yet as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887–91, he responded to Irish nationalist agitation with a combination of stern police measures and constructive reform designed to win support for the Union with Great Britain. With the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, in the upper house, Balfour was the indispensable manager of government business in the Commons in 1891–92 and again in 1895–02. He was an excellent debater who impressed both his supporters and his adversaries in the parliamentary arena.

Nonetheless there were real grounds for doubt about Balfour’s fitness for the highest office. Although he sat for a ‘popular’ constituency, East Manchester, he was never comfortable with the rough and tumble of mass electoral politics. A leading Conservative newspaper, the Morning Post, hinted at his aloofness, noting that the party’s commercial interests admired him as an individual but ‘from the business point of view they are not absolute devotees of his’.³ Balfour retained a lofty detachment from average party opinion and press comment. At the time of his appointment as premier he told Winston Churchill, then a backbench Conservative MP, that ‘I have never put myself to the trouble of rummaging an immense rubbish-heap on the problematical chance of discovering a cigar-end’.⁴

Balfour was fortunate not to face an acceptable alternative candidate for the premiership in 1902. Salisbury had presided over a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, which had come together after 1886 in opposition to the Liberal Party’s plans for Irish Home Rule. Although popularly known by the end of the nineteenth century as the ‘Unionist Party’, the two sections did not formally come together as one organization until 1912. The outstanding personality was the radical Liberal Unionist, Joseph Chamberlain, who had served as Colonial Secretary since the formation of Salisbury’s last administration in June 1895. Although the Conservatives admired his dynamism and wished to harness his presentational skills, they were not prepared to elevate a member of the Unionist alliance’s junior wing to the highest position. At a time when the party did not formally elect its leader, Balfour’s undisputed succession was assured when the ageing Salisbury retired.

Governing style

Like Anthony Eden in 1955, another premier who succeeded a dominant and long-serving leader, Balfour made very few alterations to his ministerial team. The only really significant move was the appointment of the Home Secretary, C.T. Ritchie, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. This change occurred only because the previous incumbent, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, insisted on retiring. Like his uncle, Balfour showed a preference for surrounding himself with family connections in government, including his brother Gerald as President of the Board of Trade and his brother-in-law, Lord Selborne, as First Lord of the Admiralty. This perpetuated the image of the government as a cosy aristocratic club, the ‘Hotel Cecil’, a tag which recalled the outgoing Prime Minister’s family name.

Although Balfour was capable of ruthlessness – Churchill memorably wrote that ‘had his life been cast amid the labyrinthine intrigues of the Italian Renaissance, he would not have required to study the works of Machiavelli’⁵ – he did not find it easy to dismiss close colleagues. Balfour did not want to remove George Wyndham, a friend who served as Chief Secretary for Ireland, when it became clear in March 1905 that he had caused political embarrassment by allowing a senior civil servant with nationalist sympathies to formulate a scheme for devolution. He also allowed a dispute between the Viceroy of India, George Curzon – another personal connection – and the commander-in-chief, Lord Kitchener, over civil-military control of the Indian army, to drag on. Cabinet colleagues noted the greater informality of meetings. The premier’s intimates were addressed by their Christian names rather than, as had been the custom under earlier premiers, the titles of their government posts. After the fall of the government the Unionist MP, William Bridgeman, recalled a gathering of ex-ministers at Balfour’s house, in a room dominated by the painter Burne Jones’ ethereal female figures, ‘whose anaemic and unmanly forms seemed to give the meeting a nerveless and flabby character, and were to me painfully symbolic of their owner’.⁶

The key relationship in the government was between Balfour and Chamberlain, who continued as Colonial Secretary. The latter accepted that his radical, nonconformist past disqualified him from the leadership of an alliance which was still dominated by landowning, Anglican Conservatives. Nonetheless Chamberlain remained in politics in order to rally Unionist forces around what he deemed a worthwhile cause. As Prime Minister, Balfour would unavoidably be overshadowed by his energetic colleague, whose background and political creed were so different from his own. Lord George Hamilton, the Conservative India Secretary, later reflected that in spite of the two men’s undoubted strengths as individuals, in association their clashing personalities were a recipe for disunity. ‘Balfour’s philosophical temperament and indifference to attack’, he wrote, ‘made him a master of original and tenacious defence.’ Meanwhile Chamberlain’s ‘impulsive and imperious temperament’ inclined him to an aggressive approach to political issues, so that ‘coupled together as the leaders of a single party they were a hopeless combination’.⁷

The record in government

The tension at the heart of the Unionist leadership was to be demonstrated after May 1903, when Chamberlain decided to initiate a campaign for tariff reform or imperial preference – a proposal to reverse Britain’s relative economic decline by turning the empire into a united trading bloc through a system of selective taxes on imports. The policy was controversial because it represented a breach with the tradition of free trade, which had been established as economic orthodoxy since the 1840s. Chamberlain’s scheme would require Britain to impose taxes on foreign goods, including foodstuffs, in order to give preferential treatment to empire produce. Support for these proposals extended beyond traditional advocates of agricultural and industrial protection, who faced growing foreign competition. Chamberlainite ‘whole-hoggers’ viewed tariff reform as a means of consolidating the ties between Britain and the empire countries, whilst funding old age pensions, which were moving up the political agenda by the turn of the century. The policy met strong opposition from the Liberals and from a section of the Unionist Party, who viewed free trade as the foundation of Britain’s prosperity. They regarded tariff reform as economically unsound and likely to lose the party support from an electorate which would react adversely to the threat of higher food prices.

Intellectually Balfour had long been sceptical of pure free trade orthodoxy. As party leader he was concerned to find a position around which he could unite the bulk of his followers. Near the end of his life Balfour told his biographer that he had been determined not to repeat the example of Sir Robert Peel, the nineteenth-century Conservative leader who had twice split his party by executing U-turns on the issues of Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Corn Laws: ‘he smashed his party, and no man has a right to destroy the property of which he is a trustee’.⁸ In pursuit of a viable middle way Balfour entered into a devious series of manoeuvres. In November 1902 Chamberlain had secured Cabinet agreement to use a one shilling duty on imported corn, which had originally been imposed for revenue-raising purposes during the Boer War, as the basis for a tentative move in the direction of imperial preference. The duty was to be remitted in the case of Canada, to reward the latter for cutting tariffs on British goods. In the Colonial Secretary’s absence on a visit to South Africa, Balfour and his colleagues gave way to pressure from the pro-free trade Chancellor, Ritchie, to abandon this initiative. With hindsight this was probably a tactical error since it removed the opportunity to test the impact of preferential taxes.

By September 1903 the division between the Unionist free traders and those who supported tariff reform was widening. In order to keep control of his Cabinet Balfour effectively dismissed Ritchie and two other committed ministerial supporters of free trade. In a highly devious manoeuvre, he provoked them into resigning whilst concealing the fact that Chamberlain had secretly undertaken to leave the government in order to initiate a public debate on his proposals. Only the slightly delayed resignation of the widely respected Duke of Devonshire, a moderate free trader, spoiled the plan. Balfour had hoped to retain him as a reassuring symbol of stability. At the same time the premier sought to paper over the cracks by articulating a more limited plan, entailing the use of retaliatory tariffs as a bargaining tool in international trade, a position which he elaborated in speeches at Sheffield in October 1903 and Manchester in January 1904.

Balfour’s machinations gave him the option of leading the government in the direction of full-blooded tariff reform if Chamberlain’s campaign won wider support, without committing him in advance to a potentially risky new departure. He was, however, unable to reconcile two deeply held, conflicting positions. Failing to appreciate the depth of feeling aroused by tariff reform, he alienated free traders without winning the confidence of Chamberlain’s hard-core supporters. ‘Retaliation’ was too complex and subtle a concept to appeal to the wider electorate. Much more powerful was the argument, put by Liberal Party spokesmen, that tariffs would unavoidably raise the cost of daily necessities. They portrayed Balfour’s stance as an unworkable, incoherent position, which failed to offer clear leadership. One memorable image, by the Liberal cartoonist, F. Carruthers Gould, depicted him as a storm-tossed sea captain on the flooded deck of a ship, with the caption: ‘Please do not speak to the man at the wheel. He has no settled convictions. An inquiry is being held as to the right course.’⁹ The spectacle of division presented by the Unionist Party contributed to their reduction to a mere 157 seats, out of 670, in the January 1906 general election.

Nonetheless it would be unfair to see Balfour’s administration exclusively through the prism of tariff reform. He became Prime Minister at a time of rising concern, across the political spectrum, with Britain’s capacity to remain a pre-eminent imperial power. The fact that it had taken three years to achieve victory in the Boer War, a localized colonial conflict, had encouraged a vigorous debate on the theme of ‘national efficiency’. Attention focused on the backwardness of provision in a number of fields, including military planning, education and social welfare. Although he did not possess an overarching reform programme, Balfour was in sympathy with some aspects of the contemporary desire for modernization. He had been involved in educational reform before his appointment as Prime Minister. Balfour described current provision as ‘chaotic’ and ‘utterly behind the age’.¹⁰ Although primary education was a responsibility of the state from 1870, its provision was complicated by conflict on religious lines. At local level education was provided by voluntary schools, most of which were controlled by the Anglican Church, and by state schools run by locally elected boards, which were more popular with the nonconformist community. In 1901 the landmark Cockerton judgment ruled that it was not legal for the board schools to provide education beyond the age of twelve. The 1902 Education Act, which Balfour piloted through Parliament, abolished the school boards and placed responsibility for primary, secondary and technical education in the hands of local education committees of the county and borough councils. It also allowed Anglican schools, which were closely associated with Conservative interests, to receive support from local taxation. The move infuriated nonconformist activists and helped to galvanize support for a reviving Liberal Party. Viewed from a broader perspective, however, it was a much needed measure of administrative rationalization, which cemented local accountability and created a structure which endured for the greater part of the twentieth century.

An area of greater personal interest for Balfour was the reform of defence policy, which assumed considerable urgency in the light of Britain’s poor performance in southern Africa. The Committee of Imperial Defence, created in December 1902, was his response to the need for a body capable of assessing the overall strategic needs of Britain and its empire. Unlike a weaker forer...