ABSTRACT
No twentieth-century British political leader has been more reviled than Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister. He was Prime Minister in 1924 and again between 1929 and 1931. However, his decision to offer the resignation of the second Labour government and to accept the King’s commission to form a National Government during the financial crisis of August 1931 provoked much animosity among his former supporters and sustained the myth that he had planned to ditch the second Labour government all along. It has long been an axiom that his actions in 1931 marked him as a traitor, and William Lawther MP remarked that MacDonald was ‘bereft of any public decency’. To many Labour activists, the man who created the Labour Party had helped to destroy it as a political force in the 1930s. His reputation was thus one of a traitor until, in more recent years, David Marquand and Duncan Tanner revived his reputation and assessed his very considerable contribution to the growth of the Labour Party.
