Return of the ‘exer ex-Ministers’: The Opposition front bench, December 1923–November 1924

Abstract

At the Carlton Club meeting in October 1922 Balfour had reflected caustically that while ‘it has never been a Conservative principle to abandon a Leader … I concede it has sometimes been a Conservative practice’. At this meeting, the Conservative Party had abandoned Austen Chamberlain. A little over a year later it appeared as if a similar fate would befall his principal successor. Amid the ruins of Law's victory for ‘Tranquillity’ many observers subscribed to Hanky's view that ‘Baldwin, though a nice fellow is not the stuff of which British Prime Ministers are made’. In the immediate aftermath of this disaster, most also assumed he would be compelled to pay the ultimate price for this inadequacy. Certainly Birhenhead was one of them. Electoral defeat was a vindication of all that he had predicted since the fall of the Coalition. Rejoicing that it had finally ‘put an end to the idea that fifth rate intelligence could govern the Empire’, Birkenhead set in motion the final act in a strategy to which he had committed the Chamberlainites in November 1922. Between 6 and 10 December rumours abounded that the former Conservative Coalitionists were about to displace Baldwin, replace him variously with Balfour, Derby or Chamberlain and then form some sort of Liberal-Conservative combination to exclude Labour from office. In the event, the plan miscarried. The apparent recrudescence of the ‘old intrigue’ rallied the victors of the Carlton Club to defend the Party, their brand of Conservatism and, by necessity, its leader from coalitionist conspiracy. Virtually overnight, Baldwin was transformed from the wanton destroyer of Law's majority into the guarantor of Conservative principle. As Amery told Baldwin, ‘you embody and personify the decision of the Party to live its own life and have its own constructive policy’. Ultimately, therefore, despite much Conservative anger, frustration and despair at Baldwin's perceived folly, the impulse which brought about the coalescence of figures as diverse as the Cecils, Younger, Strachey, Gretton and the ministerial beneficiaries of the Carlton Club was the consensus that they were ‘not prepared to cut off Baldwin's head and make Austen Chamberlain King’. They were even less inclined to install Birkenhead as Regent.