Stanley Baldwin used a seemingly disastrous election defeat 100 years ago to realign British politics forever

One of his daughters, Louisa (1845-1925) married Alfred Baldwin, a Midlands ironmaster. She became the mother of Stanley who became prime minister of the UK on three separate occasions: from 1923 to 1924, from 1924 to 1929 and from 1935 to 1937. In practice he was deputy prime minister in the National Government of 1931-35.

This Midlands industrialist of Ulster-Scot descent is one of the significant figures in 20th-century British politics and Conservative Party history.

Avuncular and pipe-smoking, Baldwin was a shrewd politician masquerading as a simple one. His easy conversational style made him an effective communicator. He could refer to ‘my old friends the steelworkers’ without embarrassment.

When he said that he wanted to be ‘a healer’ he was telling the truth. His ‘main ambition’ was ‘to prevent class war becoming a reality’. By integrating the labour movement into the political system, he succeeded.

On October 25 1923 Baldwin announced his intention to call a general election. As Baldwin had inherited a very healthy parliamentary majority from Bonar Law with four years to run, Lord Curzon, who had been Baldwin’s only rival for the Conservative leadership when Law stepped down, was not alone in thinking that the decision was ‘idiotic’.

Baldwin’s rationale for fighting an election was that he wished to introduce tariffs to address the deteriorating economic situation but Law had pledged not to do so in the general election of November 1922. Believing he could not honourably introduce tariffs without securing a mandate from the country, on November 12 he asked the King to dissolve Parliament. Polling took place on December 6.

The British electorate does not like unnecessary elections and punish those who call them. (Edward Heath in February 1974 is the obvious example. The election called by Theresa May for June 2017 might be considered another example.) Baldwin was no exception. The Conservatives lost their very healthy majority.

The Conservatives won 258 seats, the Liberals 159 but the Labour Party won 191. The Conservatives had a net loss of 88 seats, the Liberals a net gain of 42 and Labour a net gain of 47.

In the new Parliament Baldwin could have entered an arrangement with Asquith’s Liberal Party to exclude Labour. Although there was no great love between the two anti-Conservative parties (actually none because they were competing for the leadership of the ‘progressive cause’), on December 18 Asquith, the leader of a reunited Liberal Party, announced that his party would not enter any arrangement to keep Labour out.

Baldwin had no desire to exclude the Labour Party from office either. He took the view that as the country had voted for Free trade, one of the Free trade parties should form the government and the parliamentary arithmetic ordained that it should be Labour.

Essentially a fair-minded man who liked and admired many of Labour’s leaders, Baldwin believed that by the rules of British political life Labour was entitled to govern and deserved to be given a fair chance to so.

Being a shrewd politician, Baldwin would also have calculated that if Labour was to be excluded from office by a discreditable political manoeuvre, the position of the moderates in the Labour Party would be undermined and the position of the extremist and revolutionary elements of the party would be correspondingly strengthened.

As the leader of the largest party, Baldwin met Parliament on January 21 1924 and was defeated on a confidence motion by a majority of 72 votes. The following day saw Labour under Ramsay MacDonald take office for the first time.

Some Labour MPs did not wish to take office without a majority but Ramsay MacDonald was anxious to demonstrate that Labour was a ‘constitutional party’ and to put the Liberal Party out of business. By occupying the government front bench, the Labour Party would be sending out a powerful message to the country: the Labour Party was the alternative party of government to the Conservatives and represented the future, not the Liberal Party. And so it has proved to be ever since.

Although Baldwin is unlikely to have set out to lose the general election, defeat arguably served his purpose very well. Several historians correctly contend that Baldwin’s strategy was to recast British politics into a straight choice between Labour and the Conservatives. This required the destruction of the Liberal Party by appealing to the middle ground, reuniting and reorganising the Conservative Party after the divisions and dissensions of the post-war period and avoiding an auction with the Labour Party on policy. This implied a repudiation of the Lloyd George coalition and of Lloyd George himself whom Baldwin regarded as ‘dynamic’ (not a compliment in either 1923 or 1924), ‘devious and corrupt’. Baldwin brought down the coalition at the Carlton Club meeting in October 1922. Lloyd George never held office thereafter.

Perversely, defeat served Baldwin well in another sense. A weak government and the Parliamentary arithmetic suggested the inevitability of another election before the end of the year and the Conservatives prepared accordingly.

Opposing a weak government was easy – a situation rendered even easier by the government’s lack of control over its backbenchers –and the Liberal Party’s state of perfect disarray. On important votes, it was not unusual for the Liberals to split three ways which greatly undermined their credibility.

Possessing the largest cohesive bloc of votes in the Commons, Baldwin could dominate the House and appear as prime minister in waiting.

In the general election of October 1924 the Conservative Party was duly returned with 412 MPs, making an astonishing 154 gains. Labour with 151 seats remained ‘the alternative party of government’ – well ahead of the Liberals who were reduced to a rump of only 40. Thus, with the benefit of hindsight, from a Conservative perspective, defeat in 1923 could be construed as a remarkable blessing in disguise.