A J Cook of the Miners Federation was described as “low caste… an inspired idiot” by the useful idiot Beatrice Webb. As was usual throughout most of the 20th century, manual workers enjoyed sentimental middle-class sympathy while trade-union officials were reckoned irresponsible and ridiculous. Baldwin was not so gung-ho, merely declaring that the strike was “the road to anarchy and ruin”. The “return to gold” was widely held responsible for the rise in unemployment and the 1926 General Strike – which Churchill wanted to suppress with armed troops. JM Keynes published a pamphlet, The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, describing the Chancellor’s advisors as “feather-brained”. But the immediate reaction to Chuchill’s first budget, and Britain’s 1925 return to the gold standard, was hostile. Heffer, not given to wild surmises, wonders whether Churchill’s appointment to the Treasury was a ruse by the “monochromatic” Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to end his colleague’s colourful career. Appointed Chancellor, he rang the changes and spoke instead to his stepmother, and with rash candour, told her: “I don’t mind saying that I am very frightened at the financial part and that my knees knock together when I think of addressing ‘City men’!” His successor, Philip Snowden, had a straitened understanding of the position: “The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues.” When the post went to Churchill, the latter told his PPS, Robert Boothby, that if “economists were soldiers or generals, I should understand what they are talking about. Neville Chamberlain is presented as forever confiding in his apparently limitless supply of sisters. On second thoughts, the innumerate ideologue and the ambitious placeman will always prevail over the fiscal pragmatist, “the expert”. One might have reckoned that a knowledge of this endeavour was the sine qua non of that great office of state. After the Great War, Heffer writes, Chancellors of the Exchequer “had to master a practice largely unknown to their predecessors: economic management”. The first major shock in Simon Heffer’s history of inter-war Britain – a vast album of unheeded alarms – can only be met with a double-take.
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