Socialites' Swag

Teatime Switch

(See front cover)

In the crowded knickknack splendor of Buckingham Palace one day last week Queen Mary's costly phalanx" of long case clocks marked a fateful teatime. James Ramsay MacDonald's last hour as Prime Minister was striking.

Imperceptibly the silver-haired, silver-tongued Evangelist-politician's popularity has ebbed away. The throng which gathered to see him quit No. 10 Downing St. after a longer tenure of power than any other Prime Minister since Mr. Asquith consisted last week of exactly ten frumpy women--the type that can be seen in London waiting for the emergence of any celebrity from Princess Marina to Polly Moran. Thin indeed was their cheer, but, fortunately for himself, James Ramsay MacDonald is a Scotsman. His inner light has always burned brighter than adversity, criticism or contempt. Like all Scots he is the captain of his soul. Last week, knowing perfectly well that the Empire considers him a traitor to the Labor friends of his youth and a mealymouthed, vain, vaporing shadow at Peace Conferences, Mr. MacDonald looked as he left No. 10 not downcast but happy at the prospect of declining years of ease.

As the Prime Minister's purring Daimler slid into Whitehall, then turned for Buckingham Palace, Mr. MacDonald could scarcely have failed to recall his short, fateful ride to the same destination in 1931. The King, on his own initiative, had rushed down from the royal country seat in Scotland, and it was His Majesty's pleasure that Laborite MacDonald should break with his Labor friends--the men who had raised him from a $3.25 per week clerk to be Prime Minister--and form a so-called "National Government." That master stroke has given Britain a Cabinet Conservative in fact which has carried on for nearly four years under the pretense that Mr. MacDonald, having ditched his Labor friends, yet remained a "National Laborite," and somehow represented Britain's proletariat. Because this political fac,ade must soon crumble before the reality of a general election, Conservative Party Leader "Honest" Stanley Baldwin was ready last week to step out candidly as Prime Minister. He has lived all this while at No. 11 Downing St., next door to Prime Minister MacDonald. Holding the sinecure called Lord President of the Council, he has in fact made the National Government's most vital pronouncements, such as his famed "The Rhine--that is where our frontier lies!" (TIME, Aug. 13). Last week Mr. Baldwin, arrayed by his valet for audience with the King-Emperor, waited serenely while George V in Buckingham Palace had a nice long tea with James Ramsay MacDonald.

The monarch and Subject MacDonald can be said to owe each other much. Warm friends, they took their time, a whole hour of tea. Then the Prime Minister kissed hands and was Prime Minister no more. Driving away down the Mall, he passed Stanley Baldwin driving toward the Palace, and silk hat was gravely raised to silk hat. Mr. Baldwin, seated far back in the depths of his Daimler, was unnoticed by passers-by until he alighted to step on the red carpet of Buckingham Palace. In a hurry, he kissed hands and became Prime Minister about four minutes after Mr. MacDonald ceased to hold that office.

Driving back to Downing Street, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin found the outgoing Cabinet at No. 10, proceeded to reorganize it as his new Cabinet on the spot. The sinecure he had held, Lord President of the Council, he bestowed on Scot MacDonald, who is thus assured of -L-2,000 ($10,000) per year for the further loan of his prestige. To the nation Lord President of the Council MacDonald soon declared: "I hope the confidence and support given the National combination I headed will be renewed to the same combination under its new Prime Minister."

Time has so mellowed British Labor's bitterness at "Ramsay's Betrayal" that Labor Party Leader "Old George" Lansbury commented with gentlest irony: "I am very glad that all pretense has been swept away and that we have now a good true-blue Tory Prime Minister and an excellent Cabinet to represent the Tory Party. Anyhow, there has never been a National Government except in words."

National Combination. The new Cabinet announced by Prime Minister Baldwin was of interest chiefly in terms of the same old National Government personalities reshuffled to meet their personal idiosyncrasies, political expedience and the public temper.

The big plum--The Foreign Secretaryship--had to go to the man who has put through Parliament this year a measure which has necessitated Parliamentary reports and documents amounting to 20 times the length of Holy Bible: the India Bill of tall, dapper, aquiline, baldish Sir Samuel Hoare. So dubious are the merits of this measure that it has been dubbed "the Hoarefrost," but as Secretary of State for India since 1931 Sam Hoare put it through, and no other British statesman has recently done anything so big. Why Sir Sam should not now be made Prime Minister, on the theory that he is India's Emancipator, the Abraham Lincoln of 350,000,000 souls, Sir Sam cannot quite see. Therefore he absolutely demanded and got the Foreign Office as a minimum reward, ousting Sir John Simon, who was made Home Secretary last week, thus ousting into limbo Sir John Gilmour. one of the hardest-working, least appreciated Home Secretaries in many a year.

In the Foreign Office permanent officials viewed Sir Sam with alarm. The new Foreign Secretary, so far as they know, has no views on foreign affairs, many on dancing at swank night clubs, tennis playing, and fancy figure skating, a pastime which he pursues in skin-tight black professional figure-skater costume not only at St. Moritz in winter but in London at all seasons on socialite Grosvenor House's rink.

What unexpected twists or diplomatic figure eights Sir Sam may impart to Empire foreign policy Whitehall preferred not to guess. At the India Office he was noted for bullheadedness, for closing his eyes to new facts once his decisions were made, and for slogging through. Last week Sir Sam slogged his India Bill helper, the slim, grey-mustached Marquess of Zetland, into the Secretaryship of State for India he himself had just vacated. Lord Zetland wears 1910 collars, teems with anecdotes commencing "Now when I was Governor of Bengal . . .", and has a mannerism which Englishmen describe as "perpetually washing his hands with invisible soap."

War, Peace & Bashan. An even closer personal crony of Stanley Baldwin than Sam Hoare is Viscount Halifax, remembered as Lord Irwin when he was Viceroy of India. His extremely conciliatory attitude toward St. Gandhi drove Tory Die-Hards wild and stirred up more opposition to Leader Baldwin within the Conservative Party than any other issue. Sturdy Mr. Baldwin stuck by gangling Lord Irwin as Viceroy and last week made this worthy peer who got on so well with St. Gandhi the War Minister of Great Britain.

A bigger surprise in the new cabinet lineup was Prime Minister Baldwin's retention of that cheerful onetime engine-cleaner, Labor Turncoat James Henry ("Jim") Thomas as Minister for the Dominions. Notorious for months has been "Jim's" inept treading on the Dominion toes of Irish Eamon de Valera, but half a million British railwaymen still have a kind of liking for "Jim" who used to be their union secretary, and he may mean votes for the National Government at the next election.

Extremely odd to Britons, who could recall no precedent of a father and son in the same Cabinet, was the promotion of Ramsay MacDonald's studious Son Malcolm to full Cabinet rank as Secretary of State for the Colonies.

King George, according to Whitehall gossip, nipped last week the chances of brilliant young Anthony Eden to achieve a major Ministry in reward for his spectacular work this spring as the Empire's Traveling Peaceman (TIME, April 30, 1934, et seq.). Mr. Eden is 38 and that, His Majesty was understood to have intimated to Prime Minister Baldwin, is "too young." Since Mr. Eden is the Prime Minister's special protege he was nonetheless given full Cabinet rank as Minister Without Portfolio for League of Nations Affairs--promptly dubbed last week "Minister for Peace."

In most British newsorgans the National Government has so long been accepted as a group of comfortable, fairly adequate plodders that Prime Minister Baldwin's reshuffled National Government excited small comment in London, the city merely noting with vast satisfaction that "safe" Neville Chamberlain remains Chancellor of the Exchequer.*

Only one new Cabinet member was really new to the British public, ebullient Mr. Ernest ("Bashan") Brown, Minister of Labor and a National Liberal. In the House of Commons he is extremely well known as the fastest talker (250 words per minute in one magnificent spurt) and the loudest, whence his nickname "Bashan."

Tweedy, Bible-quoting Mr. Brown lives in slummy Clerkwell, owes his post to Tory tolerance and is supposed to be under Mr. Baldwin's thumb, but makes a mighty uproar in season and out in defense of The Masses. At shouting down a Red Orator and disconcerting him with statistics from an encyclopedic memory, "Bashan" Brown has no equal. He was Lloyd George's passionate disciple once, then decided that the Welshman was "betraying Socialism," and today the two men greet each other, if at all, with frigid nods.

Slipping "Bashan" Brown in as Minister of Labor was possibly Prime Minister Baldwin's smartest election-wise move last week. His oddest was to plunge a knobby-fingered bourgeois hand into the bluest-blooded vitals of British aristocracy and pull out a Percy--Lord Eustace Percy who was made Minister Without Portfolio without further explanation.

Lord Eustace, to be sure, has a brain ever teeming with busy welfare ideas and elaborate social schemes. It was said that this blue-blooded Percy is to study Oldster Lloyd George's famed New Deal proposals (TIME, Dec. 24) and advise the Cabinet what to do about them, most of the Cabinet being anything but New Dealers and sure that a Percy can be trusted to have the sound reactions of an English Gentleman.

100 Year Program. Skipper Stanley Baldwin of the new British Ship of State, knowing that on June 15 Britain will once again default of her War Debt to the U. S., shrewdly looked ahead 100 years to the time when such trifles will surely have been forgotten. Addressing 10,000 women in Albert Hall shortly before he became Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin said: "I look forward to the future. . . . The greatest security against war in any part of the world . . . would be a close collaboration between the British Empire and the United States. ... It may be a hundred years before that end may be attained. It may never come to pass, but, sometimes, we may have our dreams."

Neat, this Baldwin pronouncement put President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull on a spot from which, on the eve of War Debt payday, they had to burble friendly rejoinders to defaulter Britain.

As Prime Minister, successful Burbler Stanley Baldwin's first act of Empire consequence was to go out to Himley Hall* and address to cheering constituents the revamped National Government's informal program speech.

Program. "If we look around the world," said Mr. Baldwin, "we see three great countries--Italy. Russia and Germany ruled by dictators, and we see the United States a great democracy, struggling. . . . Changes of the most radical nature are taking place in America. . . . Amongst these nations there is one great democratic country enjoying stability--our own.

"We are trustees," continued the Prime Minister, and as such His Majesty's Government are now rapidly increasing their armaments, for "we do not believe our defenses are in a position yet that will enable us to seek with the voice we should that collective security which is gradually recommending itself to the people of this country."

Thus Stanley Baldwin, himself a perfect John Bull in physical and mental makeup, announced as his program the Pax Britannica. In another fling at dictators, careless of enraging Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, the Prime Minister declared: "Dictators cannot gauge the currents of public opinion because public opinion and a dictatorship are self-contradictory. . . . You saw how quickly a dictatorship could move in the development of the German air force and in the swiftness with which the Ethiopian situation has arisen [see p. 16]. . . . Things like these make it more necessary that there should be stability. . . . Our stability is necessary to the world! . . . Let that be a reason for seeing that the National Government is returned to power [at the coming election], perhaps with a reduced majority but sufficiently strong to show that the British people are behind it."

As a program speech, logically considered, this was sheer bumbling and burbling, but such purely emotional talk from an Englishman like Stanley Baldwin goes straight to English hearts. Voters feel that he cares more for his bucolic pleasures, his famed pigs and still more famed pipe, than for the pig iron that made his late father a multi-millionaire and got him into Parliament.

Once in, Stanley Baldwin made Parliament his gentleman's club, developed a knack for maneuvering among the other members which eventually left them gasping and amazed. In 1923, on the death of Prime Minister Bonar Law, he maneuvered the great Lord Curzon, heavy with prestige and scintillant with dazzling intellect, completely out of the picture, becoming himself Prime Minister for the first time. Lord Curzon, heartbroken but even more amazed, ejaculated before bursting into the tears of a slight nervous breakdown: "Stanley Baldwin? A man of no consequence whatever!"

Mr. Baldwin is a first cousin of Rudyard Kipling. At the poet's house he met his invaluable Wife Lucy. Together they fear God to the point of never reading Sunday papers. From the Prime Minister's lips once fell the priceless phrase, possible only in England: "Having talked with people who read the newspapers on the Sabbath, I am of the opinion. . . ."

Prospects. The sort of government which will emerge from Britain's next general election, expected this year, was what worried the King's subjects last week. In nationwide municipal elections there has been a landslide to Labor, and since the old guard leaders of the Labor Party are now mostly venerable deadwood, their successor looms in pugnacious, able and popular Herbert Morrison, sometimes called "Prime Minister of London" since he and his Labor cohorts captured the London County Council (TIME, March 19, 1934).

No Bolshevik, Mr. Morrison is nevertheless sufficiently Socialist to put the final crimp in Britain's super-taxed leisure class, should he be returned as Prime Minister of a Labor Cabinet with a full working majority in the House of Commons-- something British Labor has never yet had.

To offset a general election swing to Labor, following the national swing in municipal elections, British Conservatives count heavily on:

1) Adolf Hitler and other war boojums who tend to scare the British public which, when scared, always votes Conservative.

2) The King's Jubilee, exploited this year by Conservatives in somewhat frantic efforts to make themselves appear the only true champions of the popular Crown.

3) The good showing of Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, steadily waxing in National popularity, and credited with reducing income and other taxes, balancing the budget, and creating a feeling of "sound finance" while the pound jitters on international exchange and debts are in default.

4) The success of the National [Conservative] Government in throwing nearly every sop to the proletariat--such as the dole, cheap housing, etc.--which a Labor Government could throw, leaving Labor little to promise except a vague "we would give you more."

*Full Cabinet list:

Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury--Stanley Baldwin.

Lord President of the Council--J. Ramsay MacDonald.

Chancellor of the Exchequer--Neville Chamberlain.

Home Affairs--Sir John Simon.

Lord High Chancellor--Viscount Hailsham.

War--Viscount Halifax.

Foreign Affairs--Sir Samuel Hoare.

India--Marquess of Zetland.

Dominions--J. H. Thomas.

Colonies--Malcolm MacDonald.

Air--Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister.

Scotland--Sir Godfrey Collins.

Health--Sir Kingsley Wood.

Trade--Walter Runciman.

First Lord of the Admiralty--Sir Bolton Eyres-Monsell.

Education--Oliver Stanley.

Agriculture & Fisheries--Walter E. Elliot.

Labor--Ernest Brown.

First Commissioner of Works--William Ormsby-Gore.

Lord Privy Seal--Marquess of Londonderry.

Minister Without Portfolio for League of Nations Affairs--Anthony Eden.

Minister Without Portfolio--Lord Eustace Percy.

*Where the Duke and Duchess of Kent honeymooned.

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