All passion spent
Philip Ziegler BALFOUR: THE LAST GRANDEE by R. J. Q. Adams John Murray, £30, pp. 479, ISBN 97807193541247 © £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Sargent's portrait of Balfour, shown below — an elegant figure, languid, etiolated, arrogant — illustrates brilliantly the popular conception of this complex statesman. Like most popular conceptions it tells only part of the story; like most popular conceptions it is substantially correct. To say that Balfour lacked the common touch is an understatement: he lacked the middle-class touch, he lacked even the upper middle-class touch. He would have viewed the Forsytes with mild disdain; the rich industrialists of the Midlands and North, who every year played a more significant role in Conservative affairs, were an alien breed. He was happy to sit in Cabinet with Joseph Chamberlain; he would, if necessary, have been prepared to serve under him, but he never thought of him as a friend, let alone an intimate. Wit, intellectual finesse, aesthetic sensibility, were all of the first importance: he would not have claimed that such qualities were invariably associated with aristocratic lineage, but he must have felt that remarkably often this would prove to be the case.
At first everything was made easy for him He had been endowed by nature with high intelligence, charm, good looks and good health. He was the eldest son of parents of immense wealth and impregnable social standing. 'I had at that time no chosen profession,' he wrote; 'I had, indeed, no dominant occupation, unless I may apply this honourable description to the habit of miscellaneous reading .... or to the meditations intermittently pursued, though never abandoned, on the best way of giving effect to my philosophic ambitions.' But because he was the much loved nephew of the great Marquess of Salisbury, Eton and Cambridge led in the end inevitably to politics. When in 1874 he was offered what was as nearly a rotten borough as could be found in Britain, he accepted it as his due. All that he lacked among those things that are generally felt to conduce to perfect happiness was a wife. This deficiency he felt no inclination to repair. Though he relished the company of clever and beautiful women he was, in Curzon's phrase, 'a tepid though charming lover'. He was, indeed, incapable of any strong passion, whether personal or political. The blood that pulsed behind that everso-distinguished facade was blue enough, but it ran thin and cool.
His early performances in the House of Commons were never less than competent but gave no hint of future greatness. His maiden speech was on bimetallism — as Adams says, 'a highly technical and intrinsically boring subject' which was unlikely to provoke violent reactions on either side. His early promotion was attributed to nepotism; when at the age of 38 he was made Irish Secretary it was felt by many that he had been pushed above his natural level and that his career would quickly founder in the murderous quicksands of Irish politics. In fact, as 'Bloody Balfour', the champion of law and order, he proved far tougher and more resolute than his detractors had expected. He was also an uncommonly constructive and benevolent innovator in the fields of land tenure and education; one elderly Irish priest and keen Home Ruler admitted that, while he knew he ought to hate the Chief Secretary, 'I can't deny that he has done more for Ireland than any of his predecessors, Saxon or otherwise.' By the time Balfour returned to London it was clear that he was no mere appendage of the Cecils but a heavyweight politician in his own right.
When Salisbury eventually resigned, the only credible rival to Balfour as prime minister was Joe Chamberlain, and Chamberlain had made it clear that he did not aspire to Downing Street. It was he, though, who scuppered Balfour's government. A dedicated imperialist, he was determined to fortify the unity of the empire by building a wall of tariffs behind which its members could trade cosily together. Unfortunately the other wing of the Conservative-Liberal Unionist coalition was passionately committed to Free Trade and viewed Chamberlain's proposals as certainly unsound and probably treasonable as well. The resolution that Balfour had shown in Ireland was now singularly lacking. He was by nature disposed to see at least two sides to every question and found it difficult, sometimes impossible, to make his choice between them and stick to his decision. On the whole he agreed with Chamberlain but he was at the best equivocal. 'I have never quite made up my mind as to which of the two are more unreasonable,' he told his cousin, Lord Hugh Cecil, 'or which are the least worth the trouble I take to prevent them cutting each others' throats!' He sought a compromise, found little readiness to be conciliatory on either side and dithered ineffectively. A Liberal, Wilfrid Lawson, summed up his position: It's a terrible business to make up one's mind, And it's always the best in political fray To take up the line of the Vicar of Bray. So, in spite of all comments, reproach and predictions, I firmly adhere to Unsettled Convictions.
Balfour saw the matter rather differently. 'His political bete noire,' Adams tells us, 'was Sir Robert Peel, whose conversion to Free Trade in 1846 had broken the Tory Party over an economic principle he believed more important than party unity.' To use another analogy, he was a Harold Wilson to Chamberlain's Ted Heath: a pragmatist who believed that nothing mattered very much and certainly nothing mattered more than keeping his Party in power as opposed to a man who held passionate convictions and would not hesitate to destroy the Party rather than abandon or even temper them. More often than not pragmatism works; this time it did not. Balfour allowed his government to disintegrate and opened the way for the great reforming Liberal administration of Asquith and Lloyd George.
His career was far from over, though, for he was in and out of office for another 20 years. What he is above all remembered for is the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which he pledged the British Government to support the setting up in Palestine of 'a national home for the Jewish people'. The positive side of this -- a fierce opposition to anti-Semitism and a recognition of the historical and cultural heritage of the Jews — was admirable, but though the Declaration contained a cautious proviso about defending the 'civil and religious rights of exist ing non-Jewish communities in Palestine' Balfour never realised what problems he was creating for future generations. 'It will require tact,' he said in 1922, 'it will require judgment, it will require above all sympathetic goodwill on the part of Jew and Arab.' If Arab Balfours had faced Jewish Balfours the tact, judgment and good will would have been there in plenty, but Balfours were hard to find in the Middle East and would probably have lasted only a few weeks if they had existed.
Adams is one of those disconcerting Americans who know as much about British history as any Briton. He writes with grace, intelligence and concision. Max Egremont's biography of 1980 is unbeatable as providing the insider's picture of Balfour; this excellent book presents the external view. Perhaps Adams might follow it by writing a one-volume study of Lloyd George to complement John Grigg's magnificent but sprawling biography.
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