The holiday in Italy was a much-needed respite. Not only had 1920 been an exhausting year; it was also the year in which he perforce took stock of his life and direction. In May his mother died of cancer; in the same year his sister Dorothy died, aged forty-three. The house in Putney was sold and the last ties with comfortable Victorian life were severed. Attlee, a 37-year-old bachelor, felt alone.

During his year as mayor of Stepney there had been occasions when he needed to be accompanied; being unmarried handicapped him. His sister Mig often went to Stepney to act as mayoress but, living in Putney and needing to spend time with their mother, she could not attend events as frequently as Attlee would have liked.1

Kenneth Harris records an interview with Attlee’s friend Jack Lawder, when Lawder recalled asking Clement why he didn’t marry. In response, ‘Attlee looked into his Adam fireplace, puffed at his pipe and said nothing.’2 Clearly he had considered the problem but, with little time available for ‘stepping out’, had found no solution. In his political life fortuitous timing had greatly aided his progress. Now, in his personal life too, Fate intervened. As the trip to Italy progressed, he spent more and more time alone with Millar’s sister Violet and, by the time they reached Lake Como, he realised that he wanted their friendship to become a permanent attachment. His interest had grown gradually as they travelled through Umbria and Tuscany, taking a detour to Rimini. On the night train from Rimini to Milan, watching Violet asleep, upright in her seat, he realised the extent of his affection – and Violet recognised the symptoms.3

Before that trip to Italy, Attlee’s love life is a mystery. He had proposed marriage once before,4 but specifics remain obscure. Edric Millar, who never married, was astounded at how totally, passionately and enduringly his friend, whom he imagined to be an instinctive bachelor, had fallen in love with his sister. He was delighted to have been the matchmaker.5

The Millars lived comfortably in Hampstead, a close-knit family not unlike the Attlees. Violet and her twin sister Olive were the youngest of eleven children, fifteen years younger than Edric. Attlee was concerned not by the gap in their ages but by the gulf that separated Violet from his life in the East End. The families knew each other well, but, conscious that he was ‘just a street-corner agitator’, he gave Violet the opportunity to observe him orate before he proposed marriage.6

Her baptism into ‘street-corner agitation’ passed off well at a meeting on Hampstead Heath. Throughout their life together she understood Attlee’s social conscience but never quite accepted that he was a socialist; she saw him as a man of essentially conservative values with a burning desire to improve the lot of the less fortunate. She had no doubts about compatibility when she accepted his proposal.

By October they were engaged; they married on 10 January 1922. In a neat symmetry, underscoring similarities of family background, Violet’s brother Basil and Clement’s brother Bernard officiated at the service, while Rob was Clement’s best man. After a brief honeymoon in Dorset they returned to London.

Violet wisely decided not to live in Limehouse; her husband would never quite leave his work behind. Laurence had married Letitia (‘Letty’) Rotton and they were living in Woodford Green. They learned of a house available in Monkhams Avenue, an adjacent street which they thought suitable for Clement and Violet.7 ‘We lost no time,’ Clement wrote, ‘and secured it within three days.’ Woodford was a short train ride from Liverpool Street and the East End; Violet had a home that did not also accommodate the local Labour club.

Attlee continued his involvement with Limehouse and Stepney politics, although, he admitted, ‘with somewhat less intensity’. He continued to teach at the LSE and to work with the Independent Labour Party on a committee set up to define and modernise policy. Most importantly, as the party waited for a rupture between the Conservatives and the Lloyd George faction of Liberals, he tended his political patch in Limehouse.

That rupture was triggered in mid-September as Turkish forces led by Mustafa Kemal, having retaken Izmir from Greece, advanced towards the demilitarised zone south of the Straits. Britain unilaterally threatened Turkey with war on the grounds that she had violated the Treaty of Sèvres, an action that infuriated the French, irritated Commonwealth members who had been included as parties to the British threat, and alarmed the British public with the prospect of another Dardanelles campaign. Lloyd George’s brinkmanship prompted the Conservative party to discuss withdrawal of support from the government.

When, on 10 October, the Cabinet resolved to call an election, the alignment of parties was uncertain. Within the Conservative Party, a movement to dissolve the coalition and fight the election as a single party led to the Carlton Club meeting of 19 October at which Conservative Members voted decisively to renounce Lloyd George. The long-awaited election was to be fought between four parties – Conservative, Labour, Liberal and National Liberal – on 15 November.

Attlee, challenging Sir William Pearce, a Liberal who had held the seat since 1906, entered the campaign well prepared. His election address was a careful blend of radical slogans (‘I stand for life against wealth’ and ‘No more war and no more secret diplomacy’), of condemnation of the coalition (‘The Great Betrayal’) and positive undertakings to improve the quality of life in Limehouse. There must be jobs for all, homes for all: ‘What could be done for the war must be done for the peace.’ Stressing his record of local commitment, he concluded simply, ‘Help the man who has worked for you.’

He was confident of the result. Both Liberal parties suffered significant setbacks nationally, collectively winning 113 seats with 29 per cent of the popular vote. Unsurprisingly, the Conservative Party won an overall majority, but the results were significant for Labour. Major Attlee was one of 142 Labour Members of the new House; the Labour Party for the first time won more votes than the two Liberal parties combined – over 4 million votes, almost 30 per cent. His own majority of 1,899 was hardly overwhelming, but in unseating the Liberal candidate he joined a parliamentary party that had every reason for optimism.

A significant result of the election was the ascendancy of Labour Members with middle-class origins. Attlee, the first Oxford graduate to be elected a Labour MP, continued to use his army rank and was known around Limehouse as ‘the Major’. The image of the Labour members as trade union men in cloth caps, merrily marching through the divisions singing ‘The Red Flag’, was no longer representative of the party. Socialism, absent revolution, was now acceptable, and respectable Major Attlee was the very image of reasoned socialism. When J. R. Clynes, who had led Labour into the election, was replaced by Ramsay MacDonald, Attlee fitted perfectly with the style of the team that MacDonald wanted to create. Once more, with impeccable timing, he found himself contemporary.

Roy Jenkins, describing MacDonald’s election as Labour leader, maintains that the differences between Attlee and the new leader ultimately contributed to Attlee’s rise. Contrasting MacDonald, a ‘physically impressive Scotsman with his dithyrambic style and his biological similes’, with Attlee, ‘the precise and pragmatic Englishman, whose qualities showed so little above the surface’, he treats the alliance as one that could only increase Attlee’s stature.8 Thus, when Attlee was chosen by MacDonald as one of his two Parliamentary Private Secretaries, he gained visibility; when MacDonald broke with the Labour Party and Attlee willingly toed the party line, his preparedness to go into the wilderness added more to his credit balance. His accession to the leadership in 1935 was substantially aided by his appointment as PPS to MacDonald in 1922. It is a persuasive argument that once more highlights how Attlee, who ‘could act with circumspection and muffle his cunning with a diffident personality,’9 enjoyed good luck to support his instinctive timing.

The first two years of Attlee’s long career in the House of Commons were a period when the three leading parties strove to establish ownership of issues and redefine their policies in a changed world. Among Conservatives there was a new awareness of the possibility of a Labour government in the near future, which could only temper their approach to social issues. For the Liberals, with Asquith again in the ascendant, it was vitally important to re-establish their status as the natural opposition to the Tories. For the Labour Party, now fewer than a million votes away from power, perception was crucial. If it were to capture the middle-class electorate, sober statesmanship was as important as a radical social programme. This called for greater tact and party unity than ever before.

Attlee, after a competent but unremarkable maiden speech on 23 November 1922,10 maintained a discreet profile in the House, as ‘the competition from our Benches was intense and a Parliamentary Private Secretary is not expected to speak often’.11 In that position, however, he kept himself well informed on the widely variant trends among his colleagues. Parliamentary work, together with his new role as a father, necessitated his giving up teaching at the LSE. His first daughter Janet was born on 25 February 1923 and Violet suffered a bad bout of postnatal depression. His presence was now much needed at home during a critical period in his career.

During 1923 he began to speak out on disarmament. In the House on 15 March he made a provocative speech, stating clearly the socialist position that there should be no armies and no wars. While Britain had an army, however, it should not be a stupid, class-based organisation, but should promote younger officers and be run economically and efficiently.12 Ideology and practical politics were not always in step, as he discovered at the party conference in June, when he clashed with former party leader Arthur Henderson over disarmament. The Conservatives, observing signs of discord in the party, believed that a short and unsuccessful period in office might damage Labour terminally. Stanley Baldwin, who had succeeded Bonar Law as Prime Minister in May, unexpectedly called an election for 6 December, ostensibly on the issue of tariffs.

In his second election in two years, Attlee had as his opponent Miller Jones, a local manufacturer, ‘a pleasant man [with] not much platform ability’.13 At a joint meeting Jones opened his remarks by saying, ‘I know nothing of politics or economics,’14 a remark greeted with derision by his largely unemployed audience. Attlee increased his majority to 6,185 in the two-sided contest. The national result was inconclusive: the Tories remained the largest party with 258 seats, but vulnerable in any vote that united Labour (191 seats) and the Liberals (158 seats).

Baldwin, faced with the option of resigning or carrying on until a defeat in the House forced resignation, chose to carry on. When a defeat occurred on 21 January 1924, the Liberals having joined the Labour Opposition on an amendment to the Address, Baldwin promptly resigned and the King requested MacDonald to form a government. Without a majority and constrained on all sides, Labour took office for the first time.

MacDonald described the first Labour government as ‘an insane miracle’.15 Attlee believed that he had not expected to take office and, as a result, ‘the party programme, except on foreign affairs, was very much a minority document’.16 The Labour Party in office resembled a coalition of minorities, riven as they were with differences on a host of issues. MacDonald set the scene for dispute when, in contravention of party principles, he put together his own Cabinet without reference to the National Executive. Equally fundamental was his taking office at all, as many within the party, including Ernest Bevin of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&GWU), opposed forming a minority government. Attlee defended MacDonald on both issues, arguing that if Labour wished to be seen as a credible party, it must accept the responsibility of government.

Having served as MacDonald’s PPS, Attlee was certain of a ministerial post and, ironically after his position on disarmament the previous year, he went to the War Office as Under-Secretary with particular responsibility for the Territorial Army. On his first day at the War Office, the Permanent Secretary introduced him to the Director of the Territorials – none other than General Jeudwine, formerly of the 55th Division, who had commended Attlee for his leadership in the closing months of the war. The former major was much amused to find himself the civilian ‘master’ of his wartime chief.

It was clear that no measures of radical reform could be implemented by a minority government. Nonetheless, Attlee and several of his colleagues feared that MacDonald was more interested in remaining in power than in honouring election pledges. These were disillusioning times for Attlee, who, despite gaining wide understanding of the functioning of an important department, was not privy to the workings of the Cabinet. He later described those months, saying, ‘We had little to do in the House except vote and answer a few questions.’17 It was scarcely the uplifting experience he must have hoped for in his first term as a minister.

He credited MacDonald with success in achieving a step forward with the Geneva Protocol, as the League of Nations had previously received too little attention. Important measures were passed with John Wheatley’s housing policy and Philip Snowden’s budget; otherwise, the glorious experiment of the first Labour government achieved little. Even its demise was unremarkable.

In September, Attlee returned from a holiday in Southwold as the government was embroiled in a manufactured crisis. Workers Weekly, a publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain, published a provocative article in the form of ‘An Open Letter to the Fighting Forces’. The letter contained one sentence that was seized on by the government as seditious:

The editor, J. R. Campbell, was accused of sedition and incitement to mutiny, a charge withdrawn after protests from left-wing Labour backbenchers. In a debate in the Commons on 30 September, MacDonald denied having been consulted on the matter, an implausible position that led to a Tory demand for a Vote of Censure. When the Liberals joined the attack, demanding a committee of inquiry, MacDonald requested a dissolution of Parliament, and an election was called for 29 October. During the ensuing campaign, four days before the election, a letter purporting to originate from Grigory Zinoviev of the Comintern, addressed to the CPGB and calling for extension and development of Leninism in Britain, was published in the Daily Mail. The letter, subsequently demonstrated to be a forgery,19 fanned fears of socialist revolution and, coming on the heels of the Campbell case, drove enough voters into the Tory camp to ensure the defeat of the government.

The effect – as well as the origin – of the Zinoviev letter has been exhaustively discussed, for it apparently caused slight damage to the Labour vote but far greater damage to the Liberals. The Conservatives gained 154 seats, largely at the expense of the Liberal Party, and emerged with an overall majority of 221 seats. The Labour Party, having captured over 5 million votes, was relatively undamaged, now armed with a convenient excuse for its loss of the election. The Zinoviev affair distracted attention from the election result as a verdict on Labour’s performance in power and became a symbol of supposed ‘dirty politics’. The short-term effect, therefore, was the return of the Conservatives, but the long-term effect of Labour’s defeat was minimal; with the collapse of the Liberal Party, Labour’s position was consolidated.

Despite having to trade the post of a junior minister for a seat on the Opposition’s front bench, Attlee could be reasonably satisfied with his position in the autumn of 1924. His seat at Limehouse seemed secure, as he increased his vote to 11,713 and had a majority of 6,021 in a three-cornered fight. He had acquired valuable experience at the War Office in a position that was of great interest to him. Without close association with MacDonald, he bore no stigma for Labour’s defeat. In two years he had established himself as a likely future Cabinet minister without giving out political markers to any faction. His single complaint was that ‘three elections in successive years had been rather a strain on my finances’.20

On the larger issue of Labour’s experience in its first government, Attlee had mixed views. He had come to doubt MacDonald’s political dexterity, although his belief in the leader’s ideals remained intact. He had mounting concerns about relations between a Labour government and the trade unions, believing that Bevin’s support of union members’ interests amounted to disloyalty when those interests clashed with a socialist government’s policy. This ambivalent attitude to trade unions and their growing power continued to bother him throughout his career.

One advantage of being in opposition was the ability to spend more time at home. Violet had suffered a bad bout of depression after Janet’s birth and been advised not to have more children. Despite this, Felicity had been born in the following year, fortunately without post-natal difficulties. Weekends were blissful escapes from politics, principally periods that he could spend alone with Vi. During the day, he would follow her command – digging the garden, mending furniture, French polishing, handling the ‘grunt’ work around the house. In the evenings he would read aloud to her. They were a remarkably self-contained couple, loving but not doting parents, happy to be alone as a family. Entertaining belonged to the week’s official business; friendships outside the immediate family could be honoured by a weekday lunch at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Once Attlee went home on Friday night, only the family had claims. The similarities with his early life in Putney became marked.

For two years he enjoyed a reasonably ‘normal’ life. It was a brief period of calm, with regular holidays by the seaside in Suffolk, Devon or the Isle of Wight, often spent with other members of the extended family – a way of life not to be enjoyed again for three decades. They continued to live at Woodford but, when Martin was born in 1927, made much-needed additions to the house.

During the first three years in Opposition, three principal activities occupied Attlee’s working days. He was appointed a temporary chairman of committees, an undemanding post but one that offered great insight into parliamentary procedure, as he was required from time to time to chair committees whose membership was drawn from all parties. In 1925 he led for the Opposition on the Rating and Valuation Bill, a subject on which he was well informed after his experience as mayor of Stepney.

His third and most important area of activity was in the vexed issue of electricity supply. The government introduced a Bill, ‘the purpose of which was to co-ordinate main-line transmission and generation and to make possible joint action by smaller authorities’.21 In effect, this was a first step towards nationalisation and Attlee, appointed to the committee examining the Bill, consistently promoted its stated aims: to facilitate co-ordination between local authorities and resist involvement of private enterprise. He was chairman of the Electricity Committee of the Stepney Borough Council and when the Bill created the London and Home Counties Joint Electricity Authority, he was its vice-chairman. As a result, his understanding of the issue of co-ordination of supply was considerable and greatly respected in committee. Indeed, Attlee recalled, ‘This was so marked that when we came to the report stage a Conservative objected to the undue deference shown to my views.’22

For Attlee, there was greatly more than the issue of nationalisation involved in the question of supply. It was possible in 1926 to offer economically a utility that had previously been a luxury. He believed that local authorities, in concert with a centralised supply system, would be in the interests of users large and small. The accusation that this amounted to municipal socialism cut no ice with him; compared with the potential abuses by private companies, this was a minor issue.

When the general strike was called on 3 May, Labour boroughs such as Stepney were faced with a conflict of interests. As owners of the means to supply electricity to users in the borough, the councils had contractual obligations to keep plants operating. As representatives of a working-class constituency, many of whom would be on strike themselves, they could scarcely employ ‘blackleg’ labour to break the strike and keep all the lights on. Attlee arranged an emergency meeting between the Electrical Committee and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) general council at which a compromise was reached. Electrical workers, all members of the Electrical Trades Union, would continue to supply light for the borough but would supply power only for hospitals. Because it was impossible to separate the means of supply of light and power, it was agreed that if any consumer was found to be using power in defiance of the agreement, then its light and power would be shut off.

The arrangement – an early example of Attlee’s ability to find a compromise that mutually hostile groups could accept – ultimately depended on an ‘honour system’. When Scammell and Nephew, lorry and van manufacturers in Spitalfields, defied the restrictions, all their electricity was shut off. The company, run by Colonel Alfred George Scammell, the great-nephew of the founder, had its own generating plant and could have operated independently of any electrical supply from the council. The company’s decision to defy the council, therefore, was certainly taken for political motives, a conclusion supported by Scammell’s subsequent action: the company issued writs for damages against Attlee and the Labour members of the Stepney Electricity Committee, alleging conspiracy and malice. When, after a long delay, the case came to court, the court found for Scammell, and Attlee was ordered to pay £300 in damages. While this was not an enormous sum, he envisaged the precedent encouraging other firms to follow suit, in which case ‘I should have gone bankrupt and my political career would have been interrupted, if not terminated’.23

Attlee and his fellow Labour councillors decided to appeal, briefing Malcolm Macnaghten KC, Attlee’s colleague from chambers twenty years before. Eighteen months after the general strike, the appeal was successful. Attlee, by then in India with the Simon Commission, wrote to Tom from Lucknow, thanking him for his congratulations on the outcome and adding, ‘The result of the appeal was a great load off my mind.’24 Two weeks later he confessed to Tom that he had been pessimistic about the outcome: ‘Great news winning the case,’ he wrote. ‘I never anticipate success in cases like this for fear of disappointment, so the pleasure is all the keener.’25

In September, Clement, together with Bernard and Laurence, made a sentimental trip to Gallipoli. It was a moving experience for Clement, who described it to Tom on his return. The three brothers, together with ‘some 200 of all ages and conditions’, sailed from Marseille aboard the Stella d’Italia, cruised through the Straits of Messina, rounded the Peloponnese and sailed up to Salonika, the Dardanelles, and Constantinople, where ‘Santa Sophia fully came up to its reputation’. At Gallipoli, Bernard ‘had the joy of presiding at the community service’; Clement visited the battlefield and gave an explanatory talk to the group, mostly survivors of the campaign and relatives of those killed.26 When he returned, Violet and the children were already on holiday at Weymouth, where he joined them for a week before returning to London.

In the following year MacDonald informed Attlee of the government’s decision to send a statutory commission to India to review the position and propose constitutional reforms. He had decided that Attlee should be one of the two Labour members of the commission. Why MacDonald chose Attlee, no expert on Indian affairs, is unclear. The most plausible explanation is that he was unlikely to take an extremist position and commit the party to an unpopular policy on a controversial issue. He was prominent, but not so prominent that his opinions would become a mandate for Labour action.

The suggestion was not welcomed. Martin Attlee had been born on 10 August 1927 and promptly to leave Violet and three children for three months was inconvenient. The appointment could scarcely advance and might easily damage Attlee’s career; moreover, he was concerned that his absence from the political centre at an important stage in Labour’s evolution would be tactically unsound. He therefore sought and received an assurance from MacDonald that his membership of the commission ‘would not in any way militate against [his] inclusion in the next Labour government should the next general election result in Labour’s taking office’.27

Thus reassured, Attlee joined the commission which was to make two visits to India, the first an exploratory trip lasting three months, to be followed by a more extended trip between October 1928 and February 1929. In the company of Vernon Hartshorn, the second Labour member, a selection of diehard Tories, and the commission’s chairman, Sir John Simon, an increasingly right-leaning Liberal, he sailed for Bombay on 19 January, arriving to a mixed reception on 3 February.

In 1919 the Government of India Act had introduced dyarchic government and undertaken to appoint a commission to recommend constitutional reform within ten years. Conservative opinion was that India was far from being able to govern itself. Concern that if a Labour government came to power in 1929 it would advocate withdrawal prompted Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India, to appoint the commission while the Tories were still in power. The timing suggested to Indian politicians that the exercise was a mere placebo, that the British would maintain their grip on the Raj. There were some optimists who believed in the government’s sincerity, and their welcome at Bombay leavened the ominous message of protesters brandishing placards and banners urging, ‘Simon Go Home’.

The purpose of the trip was to gain a general impression of conditions and to make a detailed study of the Punjab and Madras provinces. Attlee felt that the inspection visit was useful but that British high-handedness in not including a single Indian on the commission was arrogant folly. Neither the Congress Party nor the Muslim League co-operated. Attlee, who had regarded the issue as ‘particularly intractable and nearly insoluble’,28 learned a great deal about the country and the issues at stake. By the time the commission returned for a more extensive tour in October, visiting every province, he was better qualified to assess the task. He was also shrewd enough to recognise the value of investing time in an issue that would sooner or later demand deft handling.

On the second visit the commissioners were accompanied by their wives. Violet, believing this to be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to visit the subcontinent, arranged for the three children to be looked after by friends and sailed with Clement in October. She enjoyed the elegance of the Raj, the balls, the leisured life with plenty of golf and tennis, the reassuring meetings with Old Haileyburians or Oxford men serving in India.29 She also recognised that they were being shown the glamour rather than the reality of British India. When the commission moved on to Burma in January 1929, she sailed home from Calcutta.

Attlee’s impressions of India ranged from the romantic (‘the streets redolent of the Arabian Nights’) to wonder at the way of life in the Raj (‘like a dream populated by people from Oxford. Tennis played everywhere’) to cold realism about the nature of the problems faced. He had, he wrote to Tom, become ‘very sick of hearing the same old story’. He had been rereading Morley’s life of Oliver Cromwell and compared the Montford scheme for a ten-year probationary period in India with Cromwellian experiments. ‘A provisional government working within the limits of a fixed period inevitably works at a heavy disadvantage’, Morley had written. People expected everything from it, but its authority was impaired. Corruption was rife as unscrupulous operators sought ‘to make hay while the sun shines’. With shifting political parties and a restless populace, no governing body could be popular.

Cromwell himself, Attlee added, had believed that: ‘It is not the manner of settling these constitutional things or the manner of your or another’s doing it. There remains the grand question after that. The grand question lies in the acceptance of it by those who are concerned to yield obedience to it and accept it.’

Was this not exactly the problem that Britain faced in India, he asked Tom. People at home would not accept that in India they were ‘not dealing with tabula rasa but a paper that has been much scribbled over … The risk is that people will try to fit a ready-made garment on India after some model used elsewhere without trying to see how far it will fit.’30

The differences between Hindu and Muslim he regarded as trivial and annoying. He wrote to Tom that ‘The Hindu professes a belief in free and open competition because he is good at exams. The Muslim believes in adult suffrage because his is the poorer community.’ By the time he arrived in Burma in February, it was ‘rather a relief to be away from Hindu and Muslim squabbles and to discuss raising the question of the separation of India and Burma.’ Overall he favoured decisive action – ‘l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace’ – but he recognised that it was not simple, adding, ‘I don’t think one can devise effective safeguards. The real trouble is that India’s disabilities are social and economic; we have to deal with political change.’

By the time the commission returned to England from Bombay on 13 April, Baldwin had called a general election. The Labour manifesto charged the Tory government with inaction on unemployment and disarmament, of hampering the work of the League of Nations. It was an uninspiring document, predictably partisan and largely concerned to reassure electors that it was not a Bolshevik or revolutionary party. This was the first election at which all women over the age of twenty-one could vote, and a section of the manifesto reaffirmed Labour’s commitment to the fight for women’s emancipation.

If the Labour manifesto was bland, it was exceeded in this quality by Baldwin’s election address, which urged the electorate to return the Tories with a clear majority in order to avoid ‘a state of political chaos and uncertainty’. ‘I make no spectacular promises for a sudden transformation of our social or industrial conditions,’ Baldwin declared, ‘but I am resolved to maintain and consolidate the advance already made, to bring to fruition the schemes on which we are engaged, and to carry still further the solid work of reconstruction on which depend the unity of the Empire and the peace and well-being of its people.’31

The slogan of ‘Safety First’ that Baldwin adopted failed to stimulate, and the second Labour government was elected, once more without an absolute majority. With 287 seats, the new government benefited from a swing of 8.7 per cent against the Tories but garnered only 37 per cent of the popular vote. It was not the mandate that MacDonald sought.

In Limehouse Attlee faced three other candidates and, despite an increased Liberal vote in line with the national trend, he increased his total vote and was elected with a majority of 7,288 over Evan Morgan, the Tory candidate. Morgan complimented Attlee after the election, saying that ‘No one could have had a more sporting fight than myself, or a more courteous opponent as was to be found in Major Attlee’.32

When MacDonald announced his ministerial appointments, both Attlee and Hartshorn found themselves excluded, despite assurances given to them when they agreed to serve on the Simon Commission. Of particular annoyance to Attlee was MacDonald’s failure to notify them before announcing his appointments to the press. This, he wrote, was ‘characteristic of MacDonald’.33 In fairness, there is only Attlee’s word that MacDonald promised him a post and such a promise may well have been couched in the vaguest terms.

The party’s failure once more to secure a convincing mandate renewed internal dispute over the wisdom of taking office as a minority. The Labour Party was faced by the conundrum that it would depend on Liberal support for any divisive measures, but in its attitude to radical reform the Liberal Party was closer to the Tories than to Labour. Inevitably, the government’s programme would have to be diluted. During the debate on the Address, MacDonald openly reflected on the absence of a majority, speculating that, while retaining party principles, the government might be considered more a Council of State than as ‘arrayed regiments facing each other in battle’.34

MacDonald’s critics point to this speech as early evidence of determination to cling to power, to surrender as many items of party principle as necessary in order to stay in Downing Street.35 That judgement, dismissed as malicious and ex post facto by Roy Jenkins,36 was substantially the opinion that Attlee developed later. For the moment, however, he was content to have saved his seat and preoccupied with the business of preparing the report of the Simon Commission.

Between May 1929 and June 1930, the commission members wrestled with the question of India. Attlee made several contributions, principally on the question of central and local government, which he addressed in a practical manner. No overall philosophy unites his thinking. As he wrote to Tom when the report was eventually published, it had defects. ‘The real difference in dealing with the central government is that there is no feasible transitional stage between [the Raj] and a government sympathetic to the Indian people.’37

From the comments and recommendations that Attlee made to the Simon Commission one can extract certain threads of his thinking, most of which were reflected in the commission’s report, published in June 1930. Underpinning them all is the view that dominion status was ‘an impossibility’; dyarchy, however, should be abandoned and a federal union to embrace all India should be the long-term goal. As he expressed to Tom, the stages of such transfer of power, with particular attention to law and order and the interests of minorities, were unclear. The establishment of such stages was delicate, and the relations between central government and a British Governor-General could not reflect the systems in other dominions.

By the end of the process Attlee had confirmed the truth of his original premise, that the issue was ‘intractable’ and his practical contribution to the report was slight. The report offered no uniform plan, no timetable, no solid proposals beyond accepting that movement towards federal union would evolve naturally. The entire exercise was anyway rendered peripheral by the recommendation already made by Lord Irwin, the Viceroy, in October 1929: that dominion status should be the goal. Once that principle was accepted by MacDonald and, more reluctantly, by Baldwin, the report could be conveniently shelved and the problems it purported to address, for the moment at least, ignored.

During the preparation of the report the principal problem addressed in the 1929 manifesto – unemployment – had become acute, exacerbated by the Wall Street crash that saw the market lose $14 billion on ‘Black Tuesday’, 29 October. In a steadily widening gyre over the next eighteen months, the interconnectedness of world economies became clear as not only the United States but the industrialised world was plunged into the Great Depression and unemployment rose to three million in Britain. MacDonald appointed a committee of four ministers under J. H. Thomas, Lord Privy Seal, to propose a new employment policy.

Thomas proposed a set of mild measures, palliatives described as ‘trivial absurdities’ by Oswald Mosley, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.38 Mosley proposed instead a massive injection of public funds to create a comprehensive public works programme, strict import controls – a vigorous, albeit risky, approach to replace the government’s inertia. When his proposals were rejected by the Cabinet, Mosley resigned. In May 1930, tardily fulfilling his promise of 1927, MacDonald appointed Attlee to replace Mosley at the Duchy of Lancaster, a post without portfolio outside the Cabinet.

That lack of portfolio grated with Attlee, who felt that MacDonald had done no more than grant him a token appointment. He was impatient to have the responsibility for a department and demonstrate his ability as a minister. That opportunity came in March 1931, when Hastings Lees-Smith was moved from the Post Office to the Board of Education and Attlee succeeded him. In what was to be his one experience of running a department in a Labour government, he applied himself with characteristic objectivity and zeal.

Because the office of Postmaster General was regarded as little more than a foothold for an ambitious politician, there had been little attempt on the part of his predecessors to put their stamp on the department. As a result, an efficient and profitable business had become conservative in outlook, run by its civil servants, and a ‘milch cow’ for the Treasury, who appropriated its revenues as part of its annual Budget. Attlee discovered the Post Office to be ‘a collection of varied business enterprises’ and decided that its first priority was to ‘gain the utmost goodwill of the users of the service and to get proper publicity’.39

His approach to running the Post Office was novel and typical of the man: identify short-term aims and long-term goals, decide on the best method of implementing them and create effective committees to report to one executive responsible for overall policy. In this way he broke down the centralised autocratic control of Sir Evelyn Murray, the Secretary at the Post Office since 1914. Having been told by Baldwin that ‘your real difficulty will be Murray’40 and having discovered this to be the case, he neatly outmanoeuvred opposition and improved efficiency by a commercial rather than a bureaucratic approach.

Attlee immediately saw that the Post Office could contribute significantly to solving the unemployment problem by maximising revenue from the revolutionary new product over which it enjoyed a monopoly – the telephone. To be effective, particularly during a depression, it would need to operate as an efficient business, concentrating on increasing revenue by driving up sales, for which an extensive advertising campaign would be required. In other words, unlike other government departments, the Post Office should be run along commercial, capitalist lines. Completely ignorant of commercial management techniques, Attlee arranged for ‘tutorials’ from Harold Whitehead, a successful business consultant.

Using newspapers for extensive advertising, confident that careful use of a small investment could produce dramatic increases in sales, he studied business methods of the private sector and prepared a set of recommendations that were implemented wholesale by his successor, Sir Kingsley Wood. Attlee wrote with some pride to Tom that the Bridgman Committee, a 1932 inquiry into the status and organisation of the Post Office, had closely followed the proposals that he made to it.41

Attlee thoroughly enjoyed his time at the Post Office, which came to an end abruptly in August. One of the last letters that Attlee wrote on the letterhead of the Postmaster General was written to Tom during the family’s summer holiday in Frinton, deploring the state of the government. ‘The political scene is full of alarums and excursions’, he wrote, ‘and what will be the upshot God knows. I have been summoned to see the PM tomorrow but whether on certain GPO matters or the general situation I know not.’42

The summons to Downing Street was the prelude to the final breakdown of relations between MacDonald and Attlee. The Economy Committee, chaired by Sir George May of the Prudential Insurance Company, proposed orthodox Tory solutions to the economic crisis, remedies that would ‘cut down the purchasing power of the masses’. Unsurprisingly, these proposals were unacceptable to the party; MacDonald’s response was to abandon the Labour Party and accept the King’s commission to form a ‘national’ government, a solution that he had hinted at for some months. Arriving at Downing Street, with other ministers outside the Cabinet, Attlee was requested to offer his resignation.

In Attlee’s later account of his eighteen months in MacDonald’s second government, it is easy to trace the disillusion that led to the irreparable break between them. For a Labour Prime Minister to be insensitive to unemployment on the scale that followed the Wall Street crash was reprehensible. The leader who had appeared dynamic and inspiring had become supine. When Attlee submitted a paper on the re-equipment and redeployment of industry, a paper that he considered ‘within the terms of reference … useful and constructive’, it was never discussed, ‘as was not uncommon in the MacDonald government’.43 When Attlee and Hartshorn, who had joined the government as Lord Privy Seal, were asked to wind up debates, they ‘both replied that until [they] saw signs of a more vigorous policy [they] would not speak’.44

MacDonald had apparently decided to throw his lot in with the Tories and his inertia over unemployment was incipient ‘Tory creep’; it was certainly divisive. Mosley’s resignation and the revolt of the ILP damaged the party; the conversion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, to orthodox Tory economic policy further alienated his Labour colleagues. Gradually, Attlee realised that he was witnessing not mere inertia but an irreparable breach between MacDonald and socialism. He later admitted that until MacDonald took office a second time, he had been blind to his defects. Even when he recognised his vanity and snobbery and his habitual indiscretion,45 he did not ‘expect that he would perpetrate the biggest betrayal in British political history’.46

That permissible hyperbole, prompted by MacDonald’s abandonment of the Labour Party and his formation of a ‘national’ government without consultation with his colleagues, belonged to the following year, but there were doubts in Attlee’s mind early in 1930. He and G. D. H. (Douglas) Cole47 planned to reanimate the Fabian Society and its original goal, the ‘reconstruction of society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities’. This led to the foundation of the New Fabian Research Bureau (NFRB) with Attlee as its first chairman. The presence of Attlee, a government minister, as a doctrinal watchdog underscored growing doubts about the Prime Minister’s commitment to socialist principles.

Through the NFRB, Attlee came into contact with two young economists with backgrounds similar to his own middle-class origins. Hugh Gaitskell and Evan Durbin had met as freshmen at New College in 1924. Gaitskell’s parents were ‘greatly shocked by his conversion to socialism’, while Durbin’s mother, married to a Baptist minister, ‘never really recovered from her sorrow that her beloved son had renounced his belief in the Lord Jesus’. Close friends, they were nicknamed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by Lady Longford.48 Both were rising stars, and by them and their friend Douglas Jay, Attlee was introduced to Keynsian economic theory. They were to rise together in the party until Durbin drowned, rescuing his daughter from a dangerous undertow on a Cornish beach in 1948.

Meanwhile, Attlee had a job to do and he added to his experience, working with MacDonald on the Imperial Conference, sitting on the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Committee, and working with Christopher Addison, the Minister of Agriculture, preparing a number of Bills and sitting on the committees that considered them. Addison, a medical doctor thirteen years older than Attlee, had come to politics through the belief that only government action could effect improvements in public health, a position identical with Attlee’s beliefs. The congruence of their attitudes to the role of government launched a close friendship and an intellectual partnership in which Addison played a mentor’s role until his death in 1951.

Unelected, the ‘national’ government illustrated how radically MacDonald’s position had shifted. He and Snowden were expelled from the party amid violent mutual recrimination. The government, ‘formed to maintain that gold standard which it declared in panic-stricken accents to be the indispensable condition of national safety, within less than three weeks … abandoned that standard with the insolent explanation that industry would benefit by its change’.49 For six weeks there was an air of unreality in the Commons as Labour Members vehemently attacked their former leaders now on the government front bench. ‘Things are pretty damnable,’ Attlee wrote to Tom. ‘I fear we are in for a regime of false economy and a general attack on the workers’ standard of life.’ Snowden, he believed, had failed to face the financial situation, while MacDonald had been ‘far too prone to take his views from business – big business’.50

In such an atmosphere, an election could not be long postponed and in October Parliament was dissolved. After its triumph of 1929, the Labour Party faced the reality that a socialist Prime Minister had abandoned socialist principles in favour of bankers’ orthodoxy. It was very possible that the electorate would interpret this as an admission that Labour could not govern, that the great socialist experiment was over.

ENDNOTES

1 As It Happened, p. 75.

2 Harris, Attlee, p. 50.

3 Ibid., p. 52.

4 Beckett, Clem Attlee, p. 67. From a conversation with Attlee’s daughter Felicity.

5 Remarks at the dinner table by Edric Millar, June 1960.

6 As It Happened, p. 77.

7 CAC: ATLE 1/12.

8 Roy Jenkins, Mr Attlee, p. 102.

9 W. Golant, ‘The Early Political Thought of C. R. Attlee’, Politics Quarterly 40.3, July–September 1969.

10 Hansard, HC Deb, 23 November 1923, cols. 92–6.

11 As It Happened, p. 81.

12 Hansard, HC Deb, 15 March 1923, cols. 1870–1900.

13 As It Happened, p. 87.

14 Ibid.

15 J. T. Murphy, Labour’s Big Three, p. 109.

16 As It Happened, p. 88.

17 Cited by Jenkins, Mr Attlee, p. 106.

18 Workers Weekly, 25 July 1924.

19 For the Cabinet’s assessment in 1924, TNA: CAB 27/254.

20 As It Happened, p. 91.

21 As It Happened, p. 83.

22 As It Happened, p. 84.

23 As It Happened, p. 86.

24 Letter to Tom Attlee, 9 November 1928.

25 Letter to Tom Attlee, 23 November 1928.

26 Letter to Tom Attlee, 19 September 1926; CAC: ATLE 1/18.

27 As It Happened, p. 95; CAC: ATLE 1/13.

28 Jenkins, Mr Attlee, p. 118.

29 Letters to Tom Attlee, 7 December 1928 and 4 February 1929, for example.

30 This and the surrounding comments on India and Burma are included in letters to Tom Attlee on 14 November 1928, 23 November 1928, 7 December 1928, 4 February 1929 and 20 March 1929.

31 1929 Conservative election manifesto, para. 1.

32 East London Advertiser, 8 June 1929.

33 As It Happened, p. 96.

34 Granada Historical Records, Clem Attlee, p. 9.

35 For example, MacNeill Weir, The Tragedy of Ramsay MacDonald.

36 Jenkins, Mr Attlee, p. 128.

37 Letter to Tom Attlee, 27 June 1930.

38 Oswald Mosley, My Life, p. 232.

39 As It Happened, p. 101.

40 Ibid.

41 Letter to Tom Attlee, 1 September 1932.

42 Letter to Tom Attlee, 23 August 1931.

43 As It Happened, p. 99.

44 As It Happened, p. 100.

45 Granada Historical Records, Clem Attlee, p. 9.

46 As It Happened, p. 107.

47 Cole, a protégé of Sidney Webb, was a leading light in the Fabians. Attlee respected his socialist principles, but found him impractical, calling him ‘a permanent undergraduate’. Durbin, New Jerusalems, p. 81.

48 Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems, pp. 2–4.

49 Labour Party general election manifesto of 1931, section 2, para 2.

50 Letter to Tom Attlee, 2 September 1931.