ABSTRACT
For Neville Chamberlain, his succession to the Premiership on 28 May 1937 represented a supreme triumph for the entire Chamberlain ‘Click’. As such, it was a moment for becoming modesty. As he told his sisters, the post ‘ought to have come to the two senior members of the family & only failed to do so because the luck was against them in forcing them to choose between their natural ambition and their principles’. Instead, he declared it had ‘come to me without my raising my finger to obtain it, because there was no one else and perhaps because I have not made enemies by looking after myself rather than the common cause’. Yet having achieved the supreme prize, Chamberlain freely admitted his determination to ‘leave my mark behind me as P.M.’.1 Moreover, the strength of his position in 1937 was prodigious. He commanded a massive majority in the Commons, the electoral position was stable and the economy was still relatively strong. Although at 68 he was the second oldest newcomer to the post in the twentieth century, he also enjoyed exceptionally good health and fitness and he brought to the leadership a vigour, confidence and decisive style wholly beyond Baldwin even at his best. While these qualities confirmed Chamberlain’s reputation within the political community as ‘the strong man on whom it was safe to lean’, his personality was still far from well known to the general public.2 In fairness, the electorate had slowly come to know something of Chamberlain’s ability and character during his Chancellorship from annual budget broadcasts which still appear relaxed and modern in their ability to talk directly to the camera. Nevertheless, after 14 years of almost continuous ministerial prominence, the life-long aversion to doing ‘anything “out of character”’ still shrouded Baldwin’s successor in an air of remoteness and unfamiliarity.3 Moreover, what the public did know of him was not always entirely flattering. ‘There is a widespread feeling among people that Mr Chamberlain is an autocrat at heart, and that if he were to take
Mr Baldwin’s place as P.M. we should be taking a step away from democracy’, a senior party official warned during the late summer of 1936. With this in mind, the CRD took particular care in preparing and disseminating his speech for the party conference at Margate, in the belief that anything he did ‘to diminish the popular impression that he is an authoritarian at heart … would be striking a shrewd blow in his own cause’.4 Even those who knew Chamberlain rather better expressed some doubts and concerns about the new Premier’s character. As the parliamentary correspondent of the Manchester Guardian noted in a remarkably perceptive sketch, ‘Clarity of mind – and he has it in unusual degree – is not enough if the mind … sees the field with searching clearness but not the field as part of the landscape, and that kind of limited vision is not necessarily compensated by courage such as Mr Chamberlain has. The two together could be a positive danger.’5 The Manchester Guardian was no friend of Chamberlain’s, but such comments had been made before by those who were – and they would be heard far more frequently now that he was Prime Minister. In retrospect, it is tempting to suggest that the qualities which made Neville Chamberlain such an effective ministerial policy-maker and Cabinet politician were precisely those which would serve him least well when in supreme command. Above all, perhaps, the problem stemmed from Chamberlain’s approach to decision-making and his faith in the power of ‘hard thinking’ and ‘homework’. Having gathered all the necessary facts and methodically reasoned through the best line to adopt, he was as remorseless in pursuing his chosen path as he was ruthless in sweeping aside all objections.6 Such methods had generally served him well in the past and they conferred a sense of mastery when dealing with lesser mortals who did not share his unshakeable conviction in their own total correctitude. Unfortunately, what Chamberlain chose to forget, was that such an approach had brought humiliation at the hands of Lloyd George in 1917. More tragically, it would do so again when the train of logic driving his foreign policy hit the buffers of Hitlerian duplicity in March 1939. Yet in May 1937 all this lay in the future. After six years of increasing personal ascendancy, Chamberlain felt not the slightest hint of self-doubt. On the contrary, political supremacy only reinforced an innate confidence which now bordered on arrogance. Undaunted by the carping of opponents, Chamberlain took up his new post with a sober appreciation of the problems, but still feeling at the peak of his powers he believed himself more than capable of facing its challenges. ‘It is a bit late in the day to become Prime Minister at 68 and I can’t expect a very long run’, he wrote to an old friend, ‘But I am glad to have the opportunity of getting some things done that ought to be done.’7 Beneath these placid observations there lurked an iron determination to inject a new dynamism into the government and the conduct of its business. As he soon made clear to his party, ‘I can’t do all the things that S.B. did as well as the things he didn’t do and I consider that at present at any rate the latter are more important.’8
