ABSTRACT
Five men served as Foreign Secretary between the collapse of the Labour Government in the summer of 1931 and the outbreak of the Second World War eight years later. The Liberal peer Lord Reading was only at the Foreign Office for a few weeks at the start of Ramsay MacDonald’s first coalition government. Sir John Simon served there from the autumn 1931 until the summer of June 1935, whilst Sir Samuel Hoare’s brief tenure of office ended in his resignation from office just six months later, in the wake of the political storm that erupted following publication of his agreement with the French premier Pierre Laval over the future of Abyssinia. His successor Anthony Eden also resigned from office, in February 1938, ostensibly because he no longer felt able to support Neville Chamberlain’s search for improved relations with Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. Lord Halifax, who took over at the Foreign Office following Eden’s resignation, was at first happy to support the Prime Minister’s policy, but he too became increasingly critical of Chamberlain’s handling of foreign affairs in the months following the Munich crisis of September 1938. The Foreign Office proved to be even more of a poisoned chalice in Auden’s ‘low, dishonest decade’ than was the case in the 1920s.
