"Baldwin did not succeed as "a man of the highest character" until the election of 1924. What his victory then showed was that his function was to tie together the moral, industrial, agrarian, libertarian, Anglican and nonconformist bodies of resistance in a not yet fully demagogic combination of naïveté, decency and understatement... If Baldwin ever wanted to do anything positive with power, December 1923 seems to have cured him. Thereafter at the same time as a rural social order was passing, he invented a mindless rural persona which, through a new image of pipe-smoking simplicity, aimed to lessen the distance from an electorate whose voting practice at last had shown that "at core...the working man [was] sound". He peddled a modest morality which, even if not "the old England of the villages...getting a bit of its own back for once", made a point of distinguishing its own reputation from the reputations attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Rothermere the "lecher", Northcliffe the syphilitic, Derby the pantaloon, Birkenhead the drunk, Beaverbrook the adventurer, Horne the "Scotch cad", commercial traveller and smooth ladies' man, Salvidge the "Tammany boss" with his hand in the till and the moral and political indecency of Lloyd George... There can still be no doubting the intention of the nervous imagination with which the "real pen" in Kipling's family approached the task of governing a nation in which a million men had died and 8½ million women had got the vote since Birkenhead's sword had first been sharpened."