Balfour

By Ewen Green

Prime Minister known for announcing "that Britain favoured a homeland for the Jewish People in Palestine."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781912208371

Book preview

Introduction by Francis Beckett

Arthur Balfour has been treated less than kindly by historians, so I am pleased that the distinguished scholar Ewen Green has done something in this book to restore his reputation. As Green shows, Balfour was a much more substantial politician than he is normally given credit for.

The greatest Prime Ministers are great change-makers – Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher spring to mind. But at the next level down are the great change managers, like Stanley Baldwin and Harold Macmillan. And Balfour can put up a respectable argument for joining this second distinguished group, especially if one counts what he did after being Prime Minister into the balance. For in his career, he saw, embodied, and managed, the most profound changes in British society, no less important because they were invisible to many of his contemporaries.

When Balfour was defeated at the 1906 general election, and his successor H H Asquith went to meet the King and kiss hands, the new Prime Minister travelled by himself on the scheduled train to Biarritz where Edward VII was wintering. There was not even a private secretary, let alone a security guard, to accompany him. That’s as graphic an illustration as you’ll find of the distance we have travelled in those 100 years.

Here’s another. Balfour was the last of the Cecils to hold high office – that great political family whose members had helped to govern the country ever since a Cecil was the key adviser to Elizabeth I. His uncle and immediate Prime Ministerial predecessor, the third Marquis of Salisbury, was the last peer to occupy 10 Downing Street, having been Conservative leader from 1884 to 1902.

The Premiership must have seemed to the Cecils a little like a family business whose proprietors were England’s great families. Hilaire Belloc’s lachrymose Lord Lundy was told by his ducal grandfather:

‘We had intended you to be

The next Prime Minister but three:

The stocks were sold; the Press was squared:

The Middle Class was quite prepared.

But as it is! … My language fails!

Go out and govern New South Wales!’

Yet less than a decade after Balfour succeeded his uncle as Prime Minister in 1902, the aristocracy was looking on in impotent rage as its powers were drastically trimmed by the hoi polloi. Balfour, by then the Conservative Leader of the Opposition, found himself unable to save them from the advance of a democracy which they perceived as something akin to the end of civilisation.

During this crisis Lloyd George called the House of Lords ‘Mr Balfour’s Poodle’ but, as Dr Green shows, the peers were in no mood to take orders from a politician they suspected of being willing to compromise on the sacred rights of the landed gentry. As Stephen Bates writes in the Asquith biography which appears in this series, ‘They wanted more vigorous, less scrupulous leadership.’

But as Conservative leader, he was, at least nominally, at the head of a splenetic aristocracy whose mood was summed up, once again, by Hilaire Belloc. As a Liberal MP, elected in 1906, who lost his seat in 1910 in one of the elections which resulted in the Parliament Act, Belloc knew the people he was writing about :

During a late election Lord

Roehampton strained a vocal chord

From shouting very loud and high

To lots and lots of people why

The budget in his own opin-

-Ion should not be allowed to win.

He sought a specialist who said :

‘You have a swelling in the head :

Your larynx is a thought relaxed

And you are greatly over-taxed.’

‘I am indeed! On every side !’

The Earl (for such he was) replied

In hoarse excitement. ‘Oh ! My Lord,

You jeopardize your vocal chord’

Broke in the worthy specialist.

‘Come ! Here’s the treatment ! I insist !

To Bed ! To Bed ! And do not speak

A single word till Wednesday week,

When I will come and set you free

(If you are cured) and take my fee.’

On Wednesday week the doctor hires

A Brand-new Car with Brand-new Tyres

And Brand-new Chauffeur all complete

For visiting South Audley Street.

… A ‘Scutcheon hanging lozenge-wise

And draped in crepe appals his eyes

Upon the mansion’s ample door

To which he wades through heaps of Straw,

And which a Butler, drowned in tears,

On opening but confirms his fears.

‘Oh ! Sir ! Prepare to hear the worst !

Last night my kind old master burst.

And what is more, I doubt if he

Has left enough to pay your fee.

The Budget –’ With a dreadful oath,

The Specialist, denouncing both

The Budget and the House of Lords

Buzzed angrily Bayswaterwards.

No wonder then, as the spokesman and leader of men like that, that Balfour’s image today is that of a grumpy aristocrat, rather as though he were one of Bertie Wooster’s uncles. And no wonder, since for all their fulminating, the Lords lost, that Balfour as their leader is seen as a rather louche public schoolboy. Add to that his dislike of detail and his interest in philosophy, and you have the very model of an English dilettante, as out of place in the driven Downing Street of Lloyd George as he would have been in Harold Wilson’s technological white heat.

In his Defence of Philosophic Doubt, published in 1879, Dr Green tells us that Balfour ‘sought to offer a defence of scepticism against what he saw as the prevailing philosophical trend of scientific naturalism’. And what, the professional politician might ask, does this have to do with the price of fish, or the balance of trade or the growth of the German army? Not a thing, Balfour might have replied, and that is one of the best things about it. Add to this his dreadful, foolish snobbery; the facts that he led his party into three general elections and lost the lot ; and that he is the only sitting Prime Minister in the 20th century to lose his own parliamentary seat (a feat he achieved in the Liberal landslide of 1906). Perhaps it is no wonder that we think of Balfour as a languid amateur.

But we are wrong. He was a substantial politician, an accomplished parliamentarian, an interesting and original economic thinker, and he had real achievements to show for a life in the trade of politics. These achievements began earlier. Eric Midwinter, in the book on Lord Salisbury in this series, notes : ‘Balfour won his spurs as Ireland’s Chief Secretary, dealing out a mix of coercion and concession with imperturbable flair, despite being branded Bloody Balfour by his angry opponents.’ He did not settle the Irish question – no one did at the time, and no one has since – but he did, more or less, keep the lid on it during his watch, and he understood better than most Conservatives that Britain could not hold down Ireland forever.

As Prime Minister, Balfour was responsible for the Entente Cordiale with France, bringing to an end the long distrust between the two countries and providing the basis for a formal alliance. The Education Act of 1902 was a real landmark which ensures that historians of the British education system rank the name of Balfour alongside that of R A (‘Rab’) Butler as creators of landmark legislation. Ewen Green calls this ‘the introduction of the first truly national education system in Britain’. And his impact on British society was increased in 1905 when he piloted through Parliament both the Unemployed Workmans Act and the Aliens Act. Quite a record of achievement for one of our shortest-serving Prime Ministers. And it ignores the fact that he held the Conservative Party together when the free trade issue threatened to split it.

During the First World War, though no longer Conservative leader, he took vital decisions as First Lord of the Admiralty on Britain’s naval policy and was a key player in the plot to remove Asquith as Prime Minister and replace him with Lloyd George. And the great Balfour Declaration of 1917 is a real and visionary landmark, and one for which Balfour – by then Foreign Secretary – can claim the credit. Of course – as is the way with great events – one cannot claim it was done entirely from the loftiest of motives, nor that its long term results have been entirely what its author envisaged, but it was done, and it said: ‘His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ but ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’

Arthur Balfour was the last representative of aristocratic government. It had had its day, and we are much better off without it, but before we get too carried away with how much better things are today, it’s worth remembering this. Balfour was born a rich man, and died a much poorer one. In his seventies and eighties he had money troubles for the first time in his life, and was never thereafter free of debt. It is exactly the opposite trajectory from the one we are used to in recent years. I think I might prefer to be ruled by people who were born rich, rather than people who are in the process of making themselves

Reviews for Balfour

[macdad-236140 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Though usually not ranked among the greatest prime ministers in British history, Arthur Balfour was nonetheless a very significant figure in many respects. The nephew of his predecessor as premier, the Marquess of Salisbury, Balfour was the last person to become prime minister largely as a result of his family connections. And while he led the Conservative Party to three successive electoral defeats, he nonetheless guided it through a key period in ts ideological development, one that addressed issues that had long been deferred by Salisbury and other Conservative leaders of the previous generation.

All of this illustrates the need for a book that gives Balfour his due as a political leader, and this is what Ewen Green has done in this concise yet informative work. As a longtime student of British politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Green supplies insights gained from his long study of the ideology of the Conservative Party in that era. In the process he credits Balfour for his many accomplishments over the course of his career, which continued up to nearly the end of his long life. As a result, while limited in the coverage of Balfour's time as prime minister, this is an excellent short survey of his life and career, one that is necessary reading for anyone interested in Balfour, his ideas, and his achievements within the context of a momentous period in the history of the British Isles.