One’s Rather Obvious Duty

Paul Smith

• Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values by Philip Williamson
  Cambridge, 378 pp, £25.00, September 1999, ISBN 0 521 43227 8

How bogus was Baldwin? When he said in 1925, 'I give expression, in some unaccountable way, to what the English people think', the statement was, as Philip Williamson notes in this ambitious new assessment, 'in any literal sense . . . untrue'. Similarly with his claim to be 'voicing what is in the minds of the dumb millions of this country', though there the assertion was so framed as to make falsification more difficult. His continued appearances as 'just a plain man of the common people' strained plausibility even more than the occasional gaitered gaddings as a country squire, which at length (though only after his retirement) drove his wife to suggest that he might abandon a 'pose' which 'had never deceived me and by now probably deceived very few others'. A smack of complacency, of relishing his own act, is caught in a Dickensian reference by the journalist Collin Brooks (in the diary recently edited by Nicholas Crowson), made when he read Baldwin's skilful statement to the Commons on the abdication of Edward VIII: 'He is a veritable Bagstock of a fellow – “deep, deep and devilish sly, is tough old Joe, sir.”'