‘The Cancelled Prime Minister’ by Walter Reid review

In August 1931 Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, faced the greatest calamity of his political career. He survived it – and remained in 10 Downing Street for nearly four more years – but at a heavy cost. Expelled from the Labour Party, he now headed a so-called ‘National Government’ dominated by the Conservatives (and which also included Liberal ministers). In purely electoral terms, MacDonald was highly successful, securing a crushing victory over his former Labour colleagues. To the political establishment, he had rescued the nation from the threat of socialist profligacy and economic collapse. To the Labour movement he had once led, he was a traitor, whose gradualist approach to social and economic reform had been tested, and found desperately wanting. In this brisk and readable biography, Walter Reid offers a modest attempt at rehabilitation, placing the financial crisis that precipitated MacDonald’s fateful choice within the broader context of this remarkable political pathbreaker’s earlier career.

MacDonald was born in Lossiemouth, in northeast Scotland, in 1866. His parents were farm workers and unmarried, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. He did not learn the full truth of his illegitimacy until it was publicly exposed by political enemies during the First World War. As a young man, he read voraciously: the classic working-class autodidact. He moved south, where he found modest employment and became active in the burgeoning socialist movement. Initially an advocate of cooperation with the Liberals, he turned to the newly founded Independent Labour Party when his attempts to be adopted as a parliamentary candidate were cold-shouldered. He quickly rose to prominence and, when the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was founded in 1900, he became its first secretary. The LRC was the forerunner of the modern Labour Party, and in 1906 MacDonald was elected to Parliament as part of its new contingent of 29 MPs. Five years later he was chosen as chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Though the chances of Labour replacing the Liberals as the main progressive force seemed slim, the road seemed open to steadily mounting success.

MacDonald, however, was struck by two personal tragedies in quick succession: first the death of his five-year-old son David, and then that of his wife. As Reid describes, Margaret MacDonald was a real live wire; her political commitment was accompanied by humour, but she was never merely frivolous. Her death left MacDonald with a lifetime burden: he was deprived of the one person who might have alleviated his tendency to self-pity. Then came the Great War. His principled opposition to it, accompanied by his commitment to a new form of open public diplomacy, threw him into the political wilderness, making him for a time one of the most hated men in Britain. But by 1924 he had bounced back. He took Labour into office, although without a parliamentary majority. The government lasted only ten months, but MacDonald demonstrated his party’s competence to govern and simultaneously dealt a serious blow to its Liberal rivals. As Reid notes, foreign policy was one of his strongest suits, and he was adept at international negotiations.

His return to power in 1929, again at the head of a minority government, was a less happy experience. When the Wall Street Crash hit, his ministers had few ideas about how to deal with mounting unemployment. When the financial crisis finally broke in the summer of 1931, they all agreed on the broad remedy – cut public spending – but they split on the specific issue of whether this should include a 10 per cent cut in unemployment benefit. The majority said yes. MacDonald concluded that the government was too divided to continue in office and tendered his resignation to George V. The king, however, was one of his greatest admirers and pressed him to work with the Conservative and Liberal leaders. Hence the creation of the National Government – and the ensuing accusations of treachery.

MacDonald’s final years as prime minister were sad ones. Though he never regretted his decision to form the National Government, he was uncomfortable working with his new Tory allies. He remained in his own mind a sincere believer in socialism, which he saw less in economic terms than as a qualitative change in human relationships. He appears to have suffered from a form of dementia, though it seems to have affected his speaking more than his writing. After leaving Number 10 in 1935 he continued as a minister for another two years, again at the insistence of the king. He died on a sea voyage soon after finally stepping down.

Reid’s description of MacDonald as ‘the cancelled prime minister’ is worth taking seriously; however, it requires more rigorous exploration than it receives here. Certainly, MacDonald was a hate-figure for the Labour Party into the 1970s and beyond. Yet, by the same token, he was never truly erased from its history: he lived on as both a warning and a reminder of the perceived failures of reformism, and for that very reason his memory needed to be periodically invoked. Moreover, for at least 50 years MacDonald has benefited from historians’ – admittedly cautious – rehabilitation of his reputation. David Marquand’s 1977 biography still stands as the work against which all others must compete. Reid offers conciseness and is able to place his subject within a longer-term context; however, he deploys no significant new information and the style is at times repetitive.

The book succeeds at points in making us sympathise with MacDonald but it does not make us warm to him. This is appropriate for a politician who, in his suffering self-isolation, so often seemed to relish being misunderstood. The justification behind the cut in the dole was the principle of ‘equality of sacrifice’. As far as MacDonald was concerned, in saving the country, the sacrifice he made was of himself. Only through being despised – on account of his adherence to a noble cause – could he become a true Romantic hero.

• The Cancelled Prime Minister: The Extraordinary Rise and Tragic Fall of Ramsay MacDonald
  Walter Reid
  Hurst, 368pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link

Richard Toye is Professor of History at the University of Exeter.