The 191 seats Labour won at the 1923 election made it the largest party to espouse free trade. Since voters favoured that policy over Tory protectionism, Labour had, Asquith declared, earned the right to govern the country with the support of his pro-free-trade Liberal party. Privately, the Liberal leader was hopeful that a minority Labour government would soon mutate into a free-trade coalition that he might lead. The ‘wild’ and ‘beggarly’ men who sat beside MacDonald on the front bench were, Asquith felt, likely to bring down his feeble government. There was a sense among the political elite that a Labour administration was inevitable, and that it could not be tried under safer conditions. Baldwin and Chamberlain espoused this argument – a minority Labour government ‘would be too weak to do much harm’, the latter commented, ‘but not too weak to get discredited’.
Even so, some prominent members of society were appalled by the idea of Labour governing the country. When the idea of a Labour administration was mooted, there was considerable nervousness over the prospect of a socialist ‘power grab’. The City and the press echoed the establishment’s fear and anger, and Asquith received ‘appeals, threats and prayers from all parts to step in and save the country from the horrors of socialism and confiscation’. Yet in the end the Liberal leader and his Tory counterpart decided that their parties ought not to stand in the way of MacDonald’s men, in case it provoked outrage in the country.
Would Labour accept what might turn out to be a poisoned chalice? Many in the movement advised against doing so, for fear that a minority government was bound to fail. Others warned that the party of idealistic socialism would be tainted by an inherently conservative political system. Yet MacDonald argued that it was only by accepting office that Labour could prove it was ‘fit to govern’. They must, he said, demonstrate that they could work within the existing political framework. If they rejected the opportunity, they would risk losing all of the electoral gains they had made since the war. In the end, MacDonald’s view prevailed.
And so Britain had its first ever Labour government, to the trepidation and astonishment of some party purists. One member of the new government remarked on the ‘strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought a ‘starveling clerk’ (MacDonald), a foundry labourer (Henderson) and ‘Clynes the mill hand’ to receive the seals of office from the king at Buckingham Palace, and George V himself was no less astonished: ‘I wonder what Grandmama [Victoria] would have thought of a Labour Government,’ he commented. Nevertheless, the king was impressed with the new prime minister who, he felt, ‘wishes to do the right thing’. In fact, the apparently ill-matched pair struck up a friendship that would prove to be an enduring one. So far as King George was concerned, the ‘socialist’ MacDonald was an improvement on the discourteous Lloyd George and the ‘indolent’ Baldwin, while the Labour party was now much less of a menace to the crown, having expunged all traces of republicanism from its constitution in the early Twenties. As for MacDonald, the king’s good opinion offered an entrée into society. In a development that perhaps did not bode well for harmony in the Labour party, some of MacDonald’s backbenchers began to refer to their leader as ‘Gentleman Mac’.
As a minority government, MacDonald’s administration had no scope to introduce a radical social or economic programme, yet this may have suited the new prime minister’s purposes. Although there was a majority of workingclass men in the cabinet for the first time in history, MacDonald also selected various ex-Liberals and a number of aristocrats. He gave the key position of chancellor to Philip Snowden, who agreed with MacDonald that Labour should ‘show the country we are not under the domination of the wild men’.
Accordingly, Snowden produced a budget in the Gladstonian rather than the socialist mould. He reduced food taxes and set aside money for the historic Wheatley Housing Act, by which half a million council houses would be built for low-paid workers. Yet the Labour chancellor was unwilling to increase the country’s debt by using public spending to counteract unemployment, which remained stubbornly above 1 million. During one debate on the issue, the new minister of labour confessed that he could not ‘produce rabbits out of a hat’.
Industrial action was an inevitable consequence of the parlous economic situation. The strikes forced Labour politicians to condemn as ‘disloyal’ and ‘Communistic’ protests with which they had formerly sympathized. They also had to refuse the demands of the very unions who funded them. Some trade unionists now openly defied the government; Ernest Bevin, leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, refused to call off a strike when requested to do so by MacDonald, and there was also discontent among Labour backbenchers. Even middle-class MPs such as Attlee were disappointed by the party’s failure to produce effective policies, and concerned by the disdain MacDonald displayed for some of his proletarian colleagues. Meanwhile, relations between the administration and Asquith’s Liberals had also deteriorated, and without a majority in the Commons it was impossible to carry out parliamentary business.
Yet it was not internecine warfare or Asquith that brought down the government, but its supposed sympathy towards Soviet Russia. When MacDonald’s administration signed a commercial treaty with the country and quashed the prosecution of a communist British journalist, there was shock and anger. But it was nothing compared to the furore that followed the publication of a letter from the Russian President of the Communist International, implicating the government in communist activities. The letter was a fairly obvious forgery, but following its publication in the Daily Mail, ‘red peril’ hysteria spread throughout the country. It was an early example of the domination of British democracy by the popular press, which would become even more pronounced over the course of the century. The controversy gave the Conservatives an opportunity to attack the weak government; MacDonald resigned, and an election was called.
The Conservatives were in a better position to fight an election in 1924 than they had been a year previously, with Baldwin’s protectionist programme having united his party. Now the Tory leader made another astute move, dropping his unpopular Tariff Reform programme to deny the Liberals their traditional election cry of ‘anti-protection’. He shrewdly declined to set out detailed policy proposals during the campaign, but instead concentrated on criticizing MacDonald and his ministers. With the help of their friends in the press, the Tories communicated a simple message to the electorate: ‘a vote for Socialists is a vote for the Communists’.
At the election the Tories polled around 47 per cent of the popular vote and gained 67 per cent of the seats in the Commons. Liberal voters had turned to the Tories in their thousands; Asquith’s party lost 75 per cent of its seats and was reduced to a mere forty MPs, with the leader himself one of the casualties. Keynes predicted that the party would never again hold office but would instead become a political finishing school, supplying Labour with ideas and the Tories with ministers. Churchill would soon rejoin the Conservative party, retracing the steps he had made two decades previously. His desertion of the Liberal party was understandable. As an idealist intent on opposing socialism and promoting ‘Tory democracy’, it would have been pointless to remain. It was now obvious that the Liberals had no hope of challenging Labour as the main opposition party to the Tories: MacDonald’s men had increased their share of the popular vote to 33 per cent.
The election finally delivered the political stability the Tories had promised voters after the fall of Lloyd George two years earlier. There had been three elections, three prime ministers and two leadership battles since then, but the political turbulence was stilled. Clear battle lines were now drawn between the Conservatives and Labour, who had between them obliterated the Liberals and nullified the influence of that party’s mercurial genius Lloyd George. The two major parties were united under skilful leaders, both of whom had the experience of an unsuccessful term of government behind them. Given its superior resources, the backing of the press and the vagaries of the electoral system, it was inevitable that the Tory party would enjoy the larger share of power for the foreseeable future.