Maurice Cowling on Stanley Baldwin

“Baldwin did not succeed as "a man of the highest character" until the election of 1924. What his victory then showed was that his function was to tie together the moral, industrial, agrarian, libertarian, Anglican and nonconformist bodies of resistance in a not yet fully demagogic combination of naïveté, decency and understatement... If Baldwin ever wanted to do anything positive with power, December 1923 seems to have cured him. Thereafter at the same time as a rural social order was passing, he invented a mindless rural persona which, through a new image of pipe-smoking simplicity, aimed to lessen the distance from an electorate whose voting practice at last had shown that "at core...the working man [was] sound". He peddled a modest morality which, even if not "the old England of the villages...getting a bit of its own back for once", made a point of distinguishing its own reputation from the reputations attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Rothermere the "lecher", Northcliffe the syphilitic, Derby the pantaloon, Birkenhead the drunk, Beaverbrook the adventurer, Horne the "Scotch cad", commercial traveller and smooth ladies' man, Salvidge the "Tammany boss" with his hand in the till and the moral and political indecency of Lloyd George... There can still be no doubting the intention of the nervous imagination with which the "real pen" in Kipling's family approached the task of governing a nation in which a million men had died and 8½ million women had got the vote since Birkenhead's sword had first been sharpened.”

“Baldwin's methods had been slow. He avoided detail; critics said that he avoided thought. He did not avoid thought about the major problem of the time. He assumed that, since constitutional safeguards would not stop socialism "if the Socialists [were] determined", persuasion had to work instead. Considering that he was a reactionary Tory, his achievement was remarkable. By the time he began his third period as Prime Minister, no politician doubted that his freedom from "high and dry Toryism" made him "totally acceptable" to his non-Conservative colleagues, to the "mugwumps", "clericals" and earnest, theoretical "liberals" who were to be found in all parties and to the many Labour politicians for whom his "quintessentially English" combination of peaceful intentions and a "modern outlook" provided a social reassurance which no other Conservative could provide. Baldwin aimed to demonstrate the humanity, responsibility and social edgelessness of industrial wealth... [H]is speeches became statements of decency and law in face of the "wild menace of totalitarianism". He talked about England and the English and did not "hesitate to speak in plain terms of Christianity".”

“Baldwin presented the working-class movement as created by average men who were very much like himself and would respond to a message of conciliation. In implying the existence of a strong, gentle and happy people who had not been perverted by "intellectuals" and "press-lords", he held up a repertoire of social heroes, none of whom resembled Beaverbrook or Layton and most of whom reflected, in sometimes eccentric ways, the qualities which the English were supposed to admire. The context was pre-industrial. Though "rural society" had "disappeared" in Baldwin's lifetime, his rhetoric implied an admiration of its virtues... Was Baldwin creating a myth? Probably not... It is likely that Baldwin felt as he spoke, meant what he said and really thought, like his admirers, that he was "recalling" them to "the fundamentals of life".”

“Baldwin had moral, social and aesthetic beliefs, and also a religion, but few of his beliefs were political. He was pessimistic about purpose and felt an instinctive resistance to it. Though he succeeded, where necessary, in mastering the reluctance that he felt, his interests were spiritual and atmospheric, his instrument of demonstration the wand rather than the baton. What he wanted to express were the feelings of a "decent Englishman". In imagination he lived a version of what these were and created a teaching about what they should be. In doing so, he did something that no twentieth-century politician, except Grey, had quite done before. In doing it he implied a consonance between the politics of the public-school gentleman of middle-rank, literary interests and rural tastes and the reticence of the body of the people as a whole. "Englishmen", he wrote in 1935, "may appear to take [their] mutual loyalties for granted: we don't talk about them. But it is good once and again to break the silence of our instinctive reserve and say to each other what we might regret never having said if death came to one of us unexpectedly."”