In fact, it was more complicated. The election result was a rebellion made in the shadow of the war. Four years after the armistice, the conflict and its consequences were still the central issues of politics, and the Tories won the election by proposing to govern as though it had never happened. Law declared that he would give free scope to the initiative and enterprise of the people, by reining in the power of the state. His call for minimum interference by the government heralded the end of ‘war socialism’, and of Lloyd George’s ambitious plans to rebuild a better country. The Tories also claimed victory courtesy of the new electoral dispensation in Ireland and the bias of a voting system which inflated their 38 per cent of the popular vote into 56 per cent of the parliamentary seats.
Yet despite its secure majority, the government lacked strength and stability. Austen Chamberlain declined to join Law’s government, along with various other ‘Conservative coalitionists’. Meanwhile, Law’s health was failing, and he resigned after only a few months in office. Who would replace the man Asquith had dubbed ‘The Unknown Prime Minister’? Lord Curzon was regarded by many as the heir apparent. The patrician peer had been foreign secretary since 1919, and he had held office under both Balfour and Salisbury. With his experience, background and air of authority, Curzon believed himself to be destined for the leadership.
Yet the party of the old aristocracy overlooked the autocratic lord for Stanley Baldwin, the son of an iron and steel magnate, and a member of the Commons. The choice was a sign of the ascendancy of the lower house at Westminster and indicated how far power had shifted to the businessmen within the Tory party. Despite his relative inexperience, Baldwin had the confidence of the City and of the commercial sector. Tory grandees complained that their party was being vulgarized by the advent of the plutocracy Baldwin represented, but their caste no longer dominated the party or the country. With characteristic pragmatism and shrewdness, Baldwin acknowledged the aristocracy’s cultural power by posing as a countrified businessman, yet it is notable that he promoted talented men from the middling rank. The most significant appointment in his first government was Neville Chamberlain as minister of health and then as chancellor of the Exchequer.
The Tories’ decision to back a businessman rather than an aristocrat brought few benefits in the short term. Baldwin had been instrumental in bringing down Lloyd George and was consequently distrusted by the coalition Conservatives. And then, only six months into his premiership, the prime minister had a Damascene conversion to Joseph Chamberlain’s controversial protectionist programme. Since Baldwin felt he required a popular mandate to implement such a radical proposal, he called an election. The inexperienced prime minister believed he could attract recently enfranchised voters with the arguments Joseph Chamberlain had elaborated two decades previously: if tariffs were imposed on imports coming from outside the empire, then trade would be boosted within it; this would protect jobs at home and revive England’s ailing industries. It would also raise revenue without the need to increase taxes. At the same time, the embattled empire would be transformed into a single economic unit with free trade inside its frontiers.
A new generation of voters, however, showed little enthusiasm for the old Chamberlainite cocktail of economic reform, social legislation and imperialism. At the 1923 election, the Tories lost 86 Commons seats. Although they remained the largest party in parliament, they had failed to win a popular mandate for protectionism; with his flagship policy rejected, Baldwin was reluctant to form a government. Neville Chamberlain, faithful to Baldwin and to his father’s memory, blamed the defeat on ‘the new electorate’, while Curzon attributed it to Baldwin’s ‘utter incompetence’. Yet Baldwin somehow survived as leader – the first of the many escapes that would characterize his career. That was partly due to a lack of alternative leadership candidates, but it was also because his espousal of protectionism and of ‘Tory democracy’ had positive side effects. It united the Conservative party and nudged the Tories towards the centre ground of politics. In an increasingly democratic era, that was an advantageous position for the party of privilege to occupy.
The real story of the 1922 and 1923 elections, however, was the rise of Labour. The party claimed 142 seats in 1922 (up 80 from the previous parliament), and 191 seats in 1923. This figure compared favourably to the 115 seats of a Liberal party which had recently reunited under Asquith’s leadership, and was 70 seats short of the Conservatives’ total. Over the two elections Labour established itself as the main opposition to the Tories – two decades after its formation, the party of the ‘have-nots’ was close to having power. Among the causes of Labour’s ascent, the widespread radicalism in post-war Britain and the party’s broad appeal to the working and lower middle classes who had been enfranchised in 1918 played a significant part.
Labour represented the newly enfranchised classes in a literal sense, filling the benches of the 1922 and 1923 parliaments with men from the working and lower middle classes. The arrival of the ‘masses’ at Westminster led to a marked change in its etiquette. Plainly dressed MPs from northern English (and Scottish) constituencies favoured an impassioned ‘soapbox’ style when denouncing unemployment or expressing solidarity with the underprivileged. On one occasion the new men broke out into a loud rendition of the party’s socialist anthem, ‘The Red Flag’, to the horror of the Speaker who suspended the session. The Morning Post condemned such ‘Bolshevist frightfulness’, while the Conservatives denounced the song as a ‘hymn of hate’.
Yet along with these radical workingclass MPs, a new breed of middle-class Labour politician entered the Commons. None of the Labour MPs elected in 1918 had attended public school, and only one had attended university; the overwhelming majority had been working men sponsored by the unions. But in the 1923 parliament, there were nine ex-public school and twenty-one university-educated Labour men, while the union-sponsored MPs were no longer in the majority. Some of the new recruits were middle-class intellectuals with links to the Fabians and the old Independent Labour Party, such as Clement Attlee, an Oxford graduate who had fought at Gallipoli. Others had only recently joined Labour from the Liberals, out of despair at the ineffectiveness of their old party. Labour was no longer the protest party of a single class or the parliamentary wing of the unions – it was starting to resemble the socialist workingand middle-class alliance that Ramsay MacDonald had envisaged after the war.
It is entirely fitting that the party now chose MacDonald, who had returned to the Commons in 1922, as its leader. He was a much better parliamentarian than his rival in the leadership contest, the union man John Clynes, and he was also a public orator of genius. His lyricism inspired comparisons with Lloyd George, as did his sharp political intelligence and instinct for survival. If Labour had always been a party of protest and practical politics, MacDonald was a master of both.
Yet despite these qualities, MacDonald had won the leadership contest only by the narrowest of margins, and the revolutionary wing of the party would soon complain about the moderate brand of evolutionist socialism he espoused as party leader. He believed that social progress could be made through parliament alone; British society, he argued, had an ‘enormous capacity to resist change’, because of the strength of its ‘inherited habits, modes of thought and traditions’. This inherent inertia meant that change could only be gradual. MacDonald believed that Labour might permanently replace the Liberal party as the main opposition to the Conservatives; a socialist utopia could wait for another day.