Ramsay MacDonald

"[In 1931] MacDonald havered and hesitated and prevaricated; but he did not consciously set out to betray... Rather, he was utterly crushed by the choice he had desperately made... 1931 was a collective failure, not a personal failure... The scapegoat theory was an indecency as well as a falsehood... But neither he nor the other leaders had a right to run away in their different directions, and thereby open the gates wide to the enemy. No theory, evolutionary or revolutionary, or moderate, could justify that."

"I thank you for your kind message sent as you crossed the frontier from the United States to Canada. I only express the feeling of the people of this country when I say that we were all grateful for the opportunity of manifesting our sincere appreciation of the spirit in which you came to us. The welcome you have received is an earnest of the gratification felt in this country that the peoples of Great Britain and the United States have been brought even closer together by your visit. Mrs. Hoover also joins me in thanking you and we both send you our best wishes for a pleasant visit in Canada and a good voyage home."

"In the study there are photographs of Ll[oyd] G[eorge], Ramsay, and S[tanley] B[aldwin]. S. B. had learnt indirectly from one of the maids at Chequers in Ramsay's time that on entering the study for the weekend he always put the Ll[oyd] G[eorge] photograph in the table drawer, "because it makes me see red"."

"I never thought Ramsay would willingly cooperate with the Liberals. He hates them. He is a compound of vanity and vindictiveness. His snobbish instincts incline him to association with Tories."

"He had sufficient conscience to bother him, but not sufficient to keep him straight."

"He was a much more considerable man than it is now the fashion to admit. He was one of the creators, if not the chief architect, of the Labour Party. He brought it from a small membership in the House of Commons to a position in which it was able to hold office, not without credit...on two separate occasions... His actions in 1931, by which he destroyed his own creation and doomed the Labour Party to a long eclipse, naturally caused intense bitterness among his old colleagues. But the formation of the National Government resulted from real devotion to what he sincerely believed to be the interests of the State... He cannot be blamed for accepting what was the unequivocal view of almost all the leading experts as to what had to be done... The only difference between MacDonald and those who deserted him is that he had the courage to follow the advice which he believed to be sound, while they shrank from the unpopularity of policies which they themselves admitted to be necessary... If in his last years MacDonald sank into a woolly confusion of mind and language, the achievements of his life, taken as a whole, are by no means negligible."

"In the House of Commons once he was not in very good form. He tended to hesitate and repeat himself. I'd never heard him quite so bad ever before. And Jimmy Maxton stood up and said: "Sit down, man, you're a bloody tragedy." You could have heard a pin drop; you could have heard a feather move."

"I was surprised when it was conveyed to me that he expected me to call on him... I was shown into the Cabinet room, where I found the Prime Minister alone. Queen Victoria complained that Mr. Gladstone addressed her as if she were a public meeting. I know what she meant. Mr. MacDonald stood up and delivered a long discourse in his beautiful voice and with the phrasing of a practised orator. He began: "I am a layman from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, but I realise to the full the importance and value of religion in the community. It should be a force making for unity and a bulwark against the forces of disruption, which are more powerful to-day than is generally supposed." ... I listened attentively to this speech, storing up questions and points of disagreement for the time when my turn to speak should come. They were wasted; that time never came, for as soon as the Prime Minister had ceased his oration, Mr. Baldwin was shown in and I was shown out, having uttered perhaps two sentences during the whole interview."

"Ramsay MacDonald has a front-bench mind. Years ago I tried to get him taken into the Ministry, but others thought otherwise."

"On [5 August 1924] Hankey lunched with MacDonald and "took him to task about his unconcealed hatred of Lloyd George whom he always belittles". He stressed that the present conference "was simplicity itself compared with the Paris [Peace] Conference", that Lloyd George "had never allowed anyone to run him [MacDonald] down...when he was the underdog", but had described him as "a very considerable fellow fighting a lonely battle very pluckily". Hankey attributed MacDonald's attitude "to jealously of a much bigger man than he"."

"MacDonald then burst out into a general denunciation of the whole crew of French politicians—underhand, grasping, dishonourable. I was entertained the other day, he said, at Versailles... There were present about 70 ex-premiers and would be premiers—everybody, he added, in France wants to be a premier, if it is only for four days. I was seated in the middle of the long side of the table so had a good view of all the men opposite. There wasn't a good face among them. Mme Herriot, a very nice person, was seated next to me. I said to her "can you tell me if there is an honest man here, besides your husband". "Yes", she replied, "I think there are two"."

"He reverted again and again to this dislike and distrust of the Liberals. He could get on with the Tories. They differed at times openly then forgot all about it and shook hands. They were gentlemen, but the Liberals were cads."

"What a fine speech MacDonald made at Geneva—wise, far-seeing and courageous. I wish we had a man in our party who could have done the like."

"Ramsay MacDonald, who came to power in 1924; and thereafter, whether in or out of office, set his mark on British foreign policy for the next fifteen years. The MacDonald policy seemed to end in catastrophic failure with the outbreak of the second World war in 1939. His name is now despised; his very existence ignored. Yet MacDonald should be the patron-saint of every contemporary Western politician who favours cooperation with Germany. More than any other British statesman, MacDonald faced "the German problem" and attempted to solve it. Coercion was futile, as the occupation of the Ruhr had just shown... Only conciliation of Germany remained; and if conciliation were to be practised at all, it should be practised wholeheartedly."

"As one of the founders of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he was chiefly responsible for winning a place for Labour in the great world of politics and public opinion. If he had not possessed remarkable qualities, he would have irrevocably lost any influence that he ever possessed by his pacifist opposition first to the South African War, and subsequently to the War of 1914. Yet, within a short time of each of them, he was back again in public life, a leading figure and a politician of growing importance... Having become Prime Minister, he showed both tact and judgment. In particular, he succeeded in lowering the international temperature. The détente that followed the end of the Curzon–Poincaré wrangles gave him the chance of improving Anglo-French relations, whilst his love of tradition was a valuable antidote against the irresponsible anarchism of some of his followers."

"[H]e was...the romanticist. As sensitive as Fergus McIvor in Waverley, his vivid imagination made him see all the difficulties that beset any course of action. If it sometimes confused his arguments, it none the less kept him responsive to the needs of the time, and gave him an engaging touch in all his dealings with his Ministerial colleagues."

"It is to MacDonald's credit that he came out strongly against this one-sided attitude, and in an article of April 27 [1935] in the News Letter, the weekly paper of the National Labour Party, severely criticised the Germans for their intransigent militarism, and the Germanophiles in this country for their blindness in swallowing the German case."

"Ramsay was a simpler character than Baldwin, though he did not look it. He too was complicated, but not by S. B.'s desire to seem plain. A 'blend of cosmopolitan distinction and Scottish sense', Harold Nicolson called him, and no greater contrast with his predecessor could have been penned... [T]he key to him was the commonest in human nature—illusion, our stick and carrot. He had an overdose of incentive and I wished him joy of it, though joy he never got... Ramsay really was persuaded with H. G. Wells that 'our true nationality is mankind'... He really did believe that men were naturally good, that they could be brought into line though they looked like horses at a starting-gate for ever facing opposite ways and savaging each other. He had faith in every panacea... He really did hope that politics were a glittering but not endless adventure, especially in foreign affairs where he trusted to magic solutions round green baize... He really did believe that the grumpy wurrld found felicity by its firesides—he overdid firesides—and that he could make it happier still by catching it there. He really did persuade himself, especially on his feet, that we have some appointment with a star, and would rise to it by better ways than class-war, which he called 'pre-socialist and pre-scientific'... In short and in his own words he held that we were eternally moving in a surge toward righteousness... [He was] nearer to the Liberals than of his extremists. He was less absorbed in Socialism than in international events."

"[I]n the slums of the manufacturing towns and in the hovels of the countryside he has become a legendary being—the personification of all that thousands of downtrodden men and women hope and dream and desire. Like Lenin...he is the focus of the mute hopes of a whole class."

"[T]he Labour Party was always receptive...to rebels against the whole outlook of a leadership which they always accused of lacking determination or vigour or Socialist principles. These systematic critics...[included] the fervent and impatient idealists... Their outlook reflected the old radical, provincial, Nonconformist tendency to see Westminster politicians as willing victims of the aristocratic, or the parliamentary, or the Whitehall embrace. All those suspicions were so stimulated by the trauma of 1931 that even a generation later the most influential figure in the Labour Movement was said to be the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald."

"We commemorate a man, a leader, who in the years of creation and achievement towered above his contemporaries in figure and manner, in voice and power, who worked and fought, and who suffered—as they all suffered who dared to preach socialism in an unreceptive and hostile age. He was a man who had vision, and dared all in those years to make that vision a reality; a man who inspired affection in his associates as in his own domestic circle, and who, daring all, created a lasting and durable political instrument which today 60 years after its first political success, provides the Government of this country and in so providing owes more than many are prepared to admit to the young Ramsay MacDonald."

"Malcolm MacDonald, son of the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, invited Ralph and me to meet his father and spend the night at Chequers. We met the Prime Minister along the road as he was taking his constitutional walk in his plus-fours, his scarf, his cap, his pipe and walking stick, a typical country squire, the last person to look like a leader of the Labour Party. My first impression was of a gentleman of great dignity, extremely conscious of the burden of premiership, with a noble countenance which was not without humour. The first part of the evening was somewhat restrained. But after dinner we went to the famous historical Long Room for coffee, and after viewing the original Cromwellian death mask and other historical objects we got down to a cosy chat. I told him that since my first visit there was a great deal of chance for the better. In 1921 I had seen much poverty in London, grey-haired old ladies sleeping on the Thames Embankment, but now those old lades were gone; no more were derelicts sleeping there. The shops looked well stocked and the children well shod, and that, surely, must be to the credit of the Labour Government."