One pearl-clutching countess shuddered that they would “cut the throats of every aristocrat and steal all their property”. The septuagenarian Tory MP for the City of London, Sir Frederick Banbury, declared that he would personally lead the Coldstream Guards to Westminister to protect the constitution. An apprehensive George V wrote in his diary: “Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama [Queen Victoria] died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government!” Fear and fury trembled through the traditional ruling classes when Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour prime minister a hundred years ago this month. There was also much disdain. The former Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, sniffily thought them “for the most part a beggarly array”.
There was incredulity at this shock turn of events within the new cabinet, many of them men from humble backgrounds. MacDonald’s deputy, John Clynes, expressed feelings of awe when Labour ministers were sworn in as privy counsellors at Buckingham Palace. “Amid the gold and crimson of the Palace, I could not help marveling at the strange turn of fortune’s wheel, which had brought MacDonald, the starveling clerk, Thomas, the engine driver, Henderson, the foundry labourer, and Clynes, the mill hand, to this pinnacle.” Philip Snowden, the chancellor, wrote: “It had come at last! Few of us who had toiled through the years to achieve this object had expected to see it realised in our lifetime.”
Euphoria was heavily tempered with trepidation. However awful the inheritance the Tories may bequeath to Keir Starmer, it won’t be as grisly as the situation that confronted Labour in 1924. Britain had not fully recuperated from the ravages of the first world war and there was scant fulfilment of David Lloyd George’s promise of “homes fit for heroes”. Unemployment stood at around 10%. Strikes in key industrial sectors were rife. The international climate was fraught. The vast majority of the press was owned by rightwing newspaper barons who were intensely hostile.
Worse, Labour was a minority government in a hung parliament in which it was not even the largest party. The Conservatives, trading at this time as the Unionist party, had thrown away their majority at the December 1923 election thanks to Stanley Baldwin’s misconceived gambit to fight it on the issue of protection. They remained the largest contingent in the Commons, but lacked the moral authority or support from other parties to carry on in government. The Liberals, the third largest grouping, decided to acquiesce to a Labour government on the calculation that its fragile grasp on power meant that it could be removed at the pleasure of its opponents. “If a Labour government is ever to be tried in this country,” Asquith told his fellow Liberals, “it could hardly be tried under safer conditions.”
With just 191 MPs, Labour had less than a third of the seats in the Commons. Many were anxious about finding themselves “in office, but not in power”. MacDonald had previously said that forming a government without a majority would be insanity. With the prospect of power dangled before him, he changed his mind on the grounds that Labour needed to prove its fitness to govern to pursue his strategic ambition to permanently supplant the Liberals as the principal rival to the Tories.
This was the sharpest ever inflection point in the social complexion of Britain’s rulers. Peter Clark’s highly engaging and illuminating account is at its best when describing how vividly the new cabinet differed from all its predecessors. It was a stark rupture with previous Conservative and Liberal governments dominated by the landed aristocracy and the professional middle classes. MacDonald was the illegitimate son of a ploughman and a maidservant. A majority of his cabinet had left full-time education by the time they were 15. One was a foundling, three were of working-class Irish immigrant descent, five of them had started work by the time they were 12 years old, three of those in coal mines. A stunning contrast with the outgoing Baldwin cabinet, six of whom had been to one school, Eton, and a further five who had been to another, Harrow. The break with the past did not extend to including any women in the cabinet, but the junior minister Margaret Bondfield smashed a glass ceiling for her gender by becoming the first female minister in a British government.
Opponents who suspected them to be fellow travellers of the Bolsheviks who had seized power in Russia in 1917 were particularly wrong about MacDonald. The new prime minister had a weakness for the company of aristocrats, while he and the monarch developed a mutually admiring relationship. The king thought it would be dangerous to deny Labour a fair chance at governing, while MacDonald was animated by the idea that his party needed to look “respectable” to secure and sustain the support of middle-ground opinion. That put him at odds with the “Clydesiders” and other radical elements of his party. An early sign of that tension was arguments about the attire to be worn when members of the government were in the presence of the king. George V being a stickler about matters ceremonial, his new ministers were expected to wear court dress. For calling on the palace, the minimum requirement was a frock coat and a silk hat.
The king’s secretary wrote to the Labour chief whip to say that the gear could be bought for £30 at Moss Bros, a lot of money to some of the Labour men. A socialist journal based in Glasgow published a photo of Labour ministers wearing top hats with the mocking caption: “Is this what you voted for?”
Labour’s first taste of power has largely been neglected by historians, much more attention being paid to MacDonald’s second government formed in 1929 and his subsequent decision to go into a “national” coalition with the Conservatives, the act which has for ever cast him as enemy number one in Labour’s rogues gallery of traitors to the cause. The 1924 government receives the attention that its significance deserves with these two engrossing books.
David Torrance’s lucid account tells a lot of the story through a series of well-crafted and elegantly written mini-biographies of the leading players, a good device for navigating a turbulent period of complex events and issues. MacDonald’s personal high point was the summer of 1924. Foreign secretary as well as prime minister, he scored a diplomatic success at the London conference to defuse tensions over German war reparations. Despite their lack of experience, most of the cabinet had performed well enough to earn the respect of their officials and political opponents. While there was no scientific method of measuring a government’s popularity in those days, it had delivered a well-received budget and seemed in good favour with much of the country.
And then, quite suddenly, everything fell apart. Tory and Liberal rivals had grown intolerant of Labour government and seized on opportunities to exploit the “red bogey” to bring it to an end. A loan to the USSR, in part designed to induce Russia to pay compensation to the owners of British assets seized after the revolution, was fiercely attacked. The ultimate blow was the “Campbell Case”. Having embarked on a foolish prosecution for sedition of a communist journalist with a fine war record, the government then messily abandoned it. Crying scandal, the Tories and Liberals combined to turn them out after just nine months in power. At the resulting election, the “red scare” was further amplified by the fraudulent Zinoviev letter, published and sensationalised by the Daily Mail, purportedly from a Soviet leader urging a Bolshevik-style revolution in Britain. The Conservatives returned to power with a colossal majority.
Had it all been a waste of time? The disgruntled Scottish leftwinger James Maxton complained that “every day they were in [office] led us further from socialism”. The habitually snarky Beatrice Webb damned MacDonald for pursuing nothing more than “reformist conservatism”. Those historians who have previously troubled to examine this period have concluded that the achievements of the 1924 government were as slight as its time in office was brief.
Torrance makes a persuasive case that this is much too harsh. Full-fat socialism, such as a wealth tax and nationalisation of the mines and railways, had to be abandoned for the lack of a parliamentary majority. The “wild men” of 1924 did succeed in making Britain a bit more civilised by improving the previously dire wages of farm workers and pointing the way to better schooling for the children of the less affluent. Its most enduring legacy was John Wheatley’s ambitious programme to help working-class families escape the misery of the slums by building homes for rent. This was continued by subsequent governments and established a cross-party consensus that the state had a duty to provide public housing, which lasted for half a century.
The Labour vote increased by more than a million at the 1924 election. The Conservatives got back in because their vote rose by double that. The standout feature of the election was the collapse in support for the Liberals. Whatever else may be said about him, MacDonald fulfilled the strategic goal of turning Labour into the alternative party of government to the Tories, though they’d have to wait more than 20 years for the Attlee government to have the power to radically reform Britain.
The 1924 government was important not just for what it achieved, but even more so as a signpost to the future.
Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
• The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government by Peter Clark is published by Haus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
