ABSTRACT
The appointment of Arthur Henderson as Foreign Secretary in the minority Labour Government that came to office in 1929 created considerable tension in the higher reaches of the Party hierarchy. Ramsay MacDonald was at first inclined to appoint J.H.Thomas to the post, but his hand was forced when Henderson made it clear that he was unwilling to accept any other position. The Prime Minister even considered taking the Foreign Office himself once again, but his experience five years earlier had convinced him that ‘such dual posts were too much for the power of any man’.1 He therefore decided to appoint Thomas as Lord Privy Seal, allowing Henderson to take the position that ‘he had set his heart upon’.2 Although Henderson and MacDonald had for years been the two most powerful figures in the Labour Party, there were important personal and ideological differences between them. MacDonald was by instinct and aptitude a far more cerebral figure than his Foreign Secretary, whose mind was described somewhat unfairly by Beatrice Webb as ‘a clumsy instrument’. She was nevertheless sensitive to the fact that Henderson possessed ‘a shrewdness in his judgement’ that had allowed him to play a critical role in the development of the Labour Party during its first quarter century.3 Nor was Henderson only interested in domestic issues. As a member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet he had played a major role in preparations for the controversial international socialist conference in Stockholm, as well as making a high profile visit to Petrograd in 1917 to persuade the Russian socialist parties to support the continued participation of their country in the war. In the years following the end of hostilities, he helped to establish the ‘Hands-Off Russia’ campaign that was designed to stymie any attempt by the British government to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime in Moscow. Henderson wrote a number of pamphlets on foreign policy during the years after 1918, which reflected both his strong commitment to the League and his dislike of the Paris peace settlement.4 He was also of course a central player in the tentative moves by the first Labour Government to negotiate the Geneva Protocol in 1924. Henderson was inclined to look with some scepticism on the activities and demands of the French government, widely identified within the Labour Party as an obstacle to attempts to build a genuinely new international order capable of overcoming the kind of national enmities that had erupted in 1914. Although he was sensitive to the fact that the League’s origins made it
vulnerable to the charge that it was little more than an organisation designed to police the peace treaties, Henderson always remained fundamentally optimistic about its potential to prevent a repetition of the events that had plunged Europe into war in 1914.
