The Betrayal of Ramsay MacDonald
From 1931 it looked as though Britain’s first Labour prime minister would be its last. Is it time to reappraise the political reputation of Ramsay MacDonald?
On November 9th, 1937 a radio message from the Reina del Pacifico sailing in Caribbean waters announced the death, from a heart attack, of Ramsay MacDonald, prime minister of Britain's first Labour government in 1924 and again in 1929-31 and, from 1931-35, leader of the National government. Recently retired, he was on a voyage with his daughter Sheila Lochhead to South America, in his words 'to seek that most elusive of all forms of happiness - rest'. According to a fellow passenger, the Bishop of Nassau, the seventy one-year-old MacDonald was 'obviously a tired man'. His deteriorating health over several years, specifically failing powers of memory, concentration and communication, suggests he was possibly suffering from the onset of dementia.
The liner subsequently put into the port of Bermuda where a crowd of 20,000 witnessed the cortège that carried the former prime minister's coffin to the island cathedral. The next day his body was placed on board the 6,800-ton naval cruiser Apollo to be taken to Britain. Prime minister Neville Chamberlain and two former premiers acted as pallbearers at his funeral service in Westminster Abbey, but his ashes were interred alongside those of his wife, Margaret, his mother Annie and his young son David (who had all died within months of each other in 1910-11) in the family grave in Spynie churchyard in Scotland. This tranquil site was close to MacDonald's birthplace of Lossiemouth, his spiritual home in Morayshire, with which he had remained intimately associated throughout his political life.
The name of Ramsay MacDonald remains irretrievably linked in British political history with the turbulent events of August 1931. The drama of the financial crisis that engulfed Britain – with an international run on the pound and adverse effects on British gold reserves – cut short MacDonald’s second minority Labour administration. He tendered his government’s resignation to George V and then, controversially, formed an emergency National government with Conservative and Liberal opponents. Odium was heaped on MacDonald for breaking with his Labour colleagues of thirty years, and he never lived down the accusations of treachery and betrayal. Six weeks later Labour suffered its greatest-ever electoral defeat. During the 1930s – the so-called ‘Devil’s Decade’ of mass unemployment, the means test and appeasement – Conservative-dominated National governments ruled Britain with huge majorities. In 1945, under Clement Attlee, Labour appeared to be starting totally anew from the taint of ‘MacDonaldism’.
The tributes paid on MacDonald’s death diplomatically avoided references to such bitter controversies; The Times only remarking ‘how intense were the personal feelings roused by the events of 1931’. Instead, his critics joined supporters in proclaiming MacDonald’s rise from his humble origins in the remote Scottish fishing village to the pinnacle of government. A packed Commons set party politics aside as they listened to their leaders’ expressions of sympathy to MacDonald’s bereaved family. Neville Chamberlain lauded MacDonald’s eminence in international politics, displayed in world conferences such as Lausanne (1932) and the World Economic Conference (1933). Clement Attlee concentrated on ‘earlier and happier times’ before 1931. He acclaimed MacDonald’s socialist vision as instrumental in building the Labour party and an inspiration to his efforts for international peace.
In the view of the left-wing Daily Herald, MacDonald had served the Labour party for forty-five years and its opponents for six. The Marxist intellectual Harold Laski – a fervent admirer until 1931 – was perplexed by the riddle of his final six reactionary years, contradicting as they did the many years when MacDonald’s natural gifts of an imposing presence, handsome features and a persuasive oratory delivered with an arresting Highlands accent made him the iconic Labour leader.
However, the formal obsequies apart, after a lifetime in politics – MP for nearly thirty years, official leader of the opposition for six years, and prime minister for a total of seven years – MacDonald’s political reputation was in shreds. Lachlan MacNeill Weir, MacDonald’s former parliamentary private secretary, published The Tragedy of Ramsay MacDonald in 1938, which demonized his former chief in terms of careerism, class betrayal and treachery. Two years later, Howard Spring’s popular novel Fame Is the Spur, the story of a working-class Labour politician seduced by power into betraying his class, was, for all intents and purposes, the life and times of Ramsay MacDonald set to fiction. In between these publications, the first volume of Lord Eldon’s sympathetic biography of MacDonald carried the story only as far as 1919. For many years 1931 was the litmus test Labour politicians used to demonstrate their party loyalty and to avoid being seen as ‘another Ramsay MacDonald’. During the IMF crisis in 1976, Tony Benn circulated the Cabinet minutes of August 1931 to remind his colleagues of the historical precedent of savage expenditure cuts. Even today MacDonald is likely to finish near the bottom of any poll assessing past Labour leaders.
Thirty years ago, in the age of Keynesianism, David Marquand published a major revisionist biography in which he comprehensively defended MacDonald’s decision to place national interests before that of party in 1931. Marquand also stressed MacDonald’s lasting intellectual contribution to socialism and his pivotal role in changing Labour from a protest group to a party of government. Every age re-writes its history. The seventieth anniversary of Ramsay MacDonald’s death seems an appropriate time to reappraise again his political reputation as both saint and sinner in Labour history – especially now that another Scot (and an historian who is the biographer of Clydesider James Maxton, MacDonald’s left-wing contemporary in the ILP) is the Labour occupant of 10 Downing Street.
The facts of Ramsay MacDonald’s birth – born in 1866, he was the illegitimate son of a feisty Scottish seamstress Annie Ramsay and a ploughman John MacDonald, whom she probably refused to marry – and his upbringing in the remote fishing village undoubtedly helped to shape his complex character and early political ideas. He left Lossiemouth, which offered few opportunities beyond farm work or fishing, at eighteen to seek his fortune. By the 1890s he had began to make a name for himself in the Liberal and socialist circles of late Victorian London.
MacDonald's election in 1900 as secretary of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), the forerunner of the Labour party, at its foundation conference of trade unionists and socialists in the Memorial Hall, London, was clear recognition of his political talents. With Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson he can be considered one of the three founders of the British Labour Party. In 1903, while in hospital in Leicester, MacDonald finalized a secret pact with Herbert Gladstone, son of the former prime minister and the Liberal Chief Whip. It gave Labour an unopposed run without Liberal opponents in 31 seats at the 1906 general election, thereby largely producing the basis of the new Parliamentary Labour Party of 29 members and the Lib-Lab progressive alliance of Edwardian politics.
His marriage in 1896 to the upper-middle-class feminist Margaret Ethel Gladstone had brought unusual financial security for an aspirant Labour leader, a happy London family life and shared common interests in socialist politics. Margaret MacDonald campaigned tirelessly in the women’s industrial movement. She was a stalwart of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the National Union of Women Workers, and, in particular, the Women’s Labour League, presiding over its first conference in 1906. Staunch anti-imperialists, the MacDonalds were also active internationalists. Foreign travel provided them with the opportunity to study at first hand political and social conditions in South Africa, India, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
In London, Margaret and Ramsay MacDonald’s home at 3 Lincoln’s Inn Field gave easy access to Parliament, the London County Council and other centres of metropolitan politics. Not only was it the MacDonald family home, the top floor flat doubled as the fledgling Labour party’s first central office. Visitors beat a path to its door during Labour’s formative years. Margaret’s untimely death in 1911 at the age of 41 left MacDonald a lonely and bereft widower for the rest of his life.
That same year MacDonald was elected chairman of the parliamentary Labour party, but resigned in 1914 in protest against British participation in the First World War. He was cruelly ousted from the membership of his local much-loved Moray golf club in Lossiemouth for his seemingly pacifist and unpatriotic stand, and considered taking legal action – even recourse to the House of Lords – though with the mounting carnage on the Western Front, the incident at the time broadly worked in his favour. As Labour leader he could be aloof and distant, but his moral reputation and standing within his party had been enhanced.
However, MacDonald’s critics often accused him of class disloyalty for his willingness to succumb to ‘the aristocratic embrace’ – evident in the his fondness for high society and weekending in the country homes of aristocrats such as the Londonderrys. After Margaret’s death, he had a number of close women friends, including Cecily Gordon-Cumming, Princess Bibesco, Lady Londonderry and, as we know now, Lady Margaret Sackville, the poet and society beauty with whom he conducted a hidden relationship for fifteen years. He was criticized for selling 4 Howitt Road, Belsize Park, the house he had moved into with his family during the war, in 1925 for £1,200 to purchase a twenty-room mansion in Hampstead, Upper Frognal Lodge, for £6,500 – albeit that the house had a leaky roof and was riddled with dry rot. But his relatively modest house in Scotland, and the part it held in his life and politics, receives only occasional mention. Many of the significant landmarks of his life and politics can be seen against the backdrop of Lossiemouth.
In the winter of 1908–09 MacDonald had employed local craftsmen to construct a house on the edge of Lossiemouth for his mother and family. ‘Hillocks’, built at a cost of nearly £500 and at first without telephone or electricity, became the birthplace of two of the MacDonald children and the home to which MacDonald and his family constantly returned. Though the MacDonalds also had a weekend cottage at Chesham Bois in the Chilterns, Lossiemouth provided a haven from the hurly-burly of metropolitan politics. In his memoir of Margaret, MacDonald wrote evocatively of Lossiemouth. ‘Times of sad reflections and gloomy thoughts’ of Margaret also dominated his diary as he tussled with the problems of forming his first Labour administration at Lossiemouth in 1924, by the light of a green-shaded oil-lamp.
His diaries, packed with entries on meetings, appointments and the minutiae of politics, demonstrate how hard he drove himself, often to the point of exhaustion. It was little wonder that MacDonald sought sanctuary in his native village. In 1924 he wrote with joy: ‘Went to Lossie for Whitsun holidays. Happy times amongst my own folk. No visitors, but Lossie as I love it.’ And it was again to Lossiemouth that he retreated when forming his government in 1929. The house must often have been overcrowded, with a Dutch housekeeper and a policeman also in residence when MacDonald was prime minister. An early flying enthusiast and a close friend and golfing partner of the Air Minister, Lord Thomson, he often flew between Lossiemouth and London.
When the journalist W.T. Stead asked the Labour and Lib-Lab MPs elected in 1906 to name the books that had influenced them, Ramsay MacDonald identified only Hugh Miller’s Schools and Schoolmasters and Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels. However, MacDonald, self-educated, accumulated thousands of volumes on politics, economics, biography, history and literature on his shelves in London and Scotland. ‘Whether in the country or in London, at home or abroad, there is always a book in his pocket,’ his biographer and friend, Molly Hamilton, remarked after visiting the Labour leader in Lossiemouth.
Between 1903 and 1921 MacDonald published thirteen books on social and political theory which sketched an evolutionary and non-Marxist path to British socialism and made a significant contribution to the development of socialist thought and political theory. In an illuminating portrait of the Labour party in 1929, Egon Weirtheimer, London correspondent of the German newspaper Vorwarts, considered MacDonald as the outstanding figure in European socialism at the time.
In 1932 George Lansbury, who had succeeded MacDonald as Labour party leader, travelled to Lossiemouth with a trade union deputation to seek MacDonald’s assistance in releasing the imprisoned hunger strikers’ leaders, Tom Mann, the veteran Communist activist, and Emrhys Hughes, without success. Afterwards Lansbury recorded his fury with MacDonald and his betrayal of socialism: ‘I came away terribly distressed that a man with his mentality should have led us all for so many years.’ However, recently opened Home Office files reveal that MacDonald was ‘broken-hearted’ over his powerlessness – he considered he was ‘a prisoner of the Tories’ – to influence an intransigent Home Secretary.
Though Anthony Eden later commented favourably on MacDonald’s Cabinet contributions to foreign affairs, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 utterly changed the international order he was used to dealing with. By 1935, the apparent decline in Macdonald’s health – for Conservatives he was ‘old Ramshackle’ – made it obvious that he had to relinquish the premiership.
Seventy years ago, the Daily Herald noted ‘the triumph and tragedy’ in the life of Ramsay MacDonald, the supreme propagandist who inspired countless thousands with his socialist oratory and journalism, yet in 1931, while his converts held fast to the vision of a Jerusalem in Britain’s green and pleasant land, had been unable ‘to stay true to that which he preached’ – a charge that stuck. But in a compelling entry on the Labour leader for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, David Marquand updated his opinion of the 1970s: from our viewpoint of the post-Keynesian world of global capitalism and powerful foreign currency markets, MacDonald’s action in 1931, and his advocacy of gradualist politics in the 1920s, no longer seem mistaken and outdated, but surprisingly modern. Moreover, fundamental developments in British Labour party politics in the 1980s and 1990s also suggest possible historical parallels with the realignment in the party political system in MacDonald’s day. According to David Marquand, from these perspectives, MacDonald in 1931 was not the perfidious premier who ditched party loyalties, nor a worthy Labour leader mistakenly shackled to an outmoded set of beliefs. Instead, he should be seen as ‘the unacknowledged precursor of the Blairs, the Schroeders and the Clintons of the 1990s and 2000s’. In retrospect, Ramsay MacDonald might now appear a man more sinned against than sinning.
