The Cancelled Prime Minister, by Walter Reid review: 'expands the case for the defence'
This biography of Labour’s first prime minister certainly casts his “great betrayal” of 1931 in a new light, but it still leaves one important question unanswered, writes David Robinson
George V was a stickler for protocol. No-one, he decreed, would be received at court if they were divorced, no matter if they were the innocent party. Yet there he was in 1924, receiving as his prime minister a Scot in a hired Moss Bros suit who was born illegitimate, grew up in poverty, left school at 14, and was passionately opposed to the world war through which the king had led his people.
Oddly, the two men became friends - indeed George V rated Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937) above all the other politicians he dealt with. That friendship had greater political consequences than that between any British sovereign and politician in the last century. In 1931, when MacDonald resigned after his Labour cabinet split over massive public spending cuts, the king asked if he would continue to serve as the head of a national government. This was a true economic crisis: the Treasury’s reserves were just four days away from being wiped out.
The Conservatives and Liberals had already assured the King that they would support MacDonald as leader of a National Government. So when his “kingly friend” asked MacDonald to save the country, it would have been hard to say no. He didn’t.
This is the reason Walter Reid’s book has the title it does. MacDonald knew his decision would split the party. Although he only envisaged the National Government as a temporary sticking plaster until the financial crisis could be resolved, it has so damned his reputation among subsequent generations of Labour voters that he has indeed effectively been “cancelled”. Not resigning in favour of a Conservative-Liberal coalition was, said Attlee, “the greatest betrayal in the political history of the country”.
Reid disagrees. MacDonald, he argues, spared Labour the taint of collusion, so that when it took power in 1945 it was free to live up to its ideals. This isn’t, he accepts, an original thesis - David Marquand expounded something similar in his mammoth biography almost 50 years ago - but he certainly expands the case for the defence.
MacDonald, he points out, grew to political maturity at a time when political parties were less rigidly defined: in 1885, there were only about a thousand members of socialist societies in Britain, and for the next half-dozen years people like Keir Hardie and MacDonald found their political home in the radical wing of the Liberal Party. Emanuel (Manny) Shinwell, the Labour veteran who defeated MacDonald as MP for Seaham in the 1935 general election, doubted whether Labour’s two-time prime minister had ever believed in socialism. He might well have been right: certainly MacDonald had no time for ideologues or militant trade unionism.
But he was an idealist too. Hardie called him “the ILP’s [Independent Labour Party] greatest intellectual asset” and he was to the left of Fabians such as George Bernard Shaw in his opposition to the Boer War. His support for British neutrality and opposition to conscription in the First World War made him profoundly unpopular, causing him to be expelled from Lossiemouth Golf Club in 1916 and from his constituency in the general election two years later, though he subsequently won respect for his principled stance.
Reid acknowledges that MacDonald’s achievements on the domestic front were rather meagre, but he was always more interested in foreign policy, where his successes included pressing the French to be more realistic over German reparations, and establishing better relations with both Washington and Moscow. He also – and quite rightly - emphasises the importance of MacDonald’s activist wife Margaret, whom he adored and from whose death from sepsis aged 41 he never truly recovered.
For me at least, though, this biography leaves one question unanswered. At no stage, not even when he meets the king, does this boy brought up by a single parent in a one-bedroomed terrace, this young man without a degree or a profession to his name, this politician speaking out against a hugely popular war, ever show any signs of imposter syndrome. Why ever not?
The Cancelled Prime Minister, by Walter Reid, Hurst, £25
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