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Driving back to Downing Street, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin found the outgoing Cabinet at No. 10, proceeded to reorganize it as his new Cabinet on the spot. The sinecure he had held, Lord President of the Council, he bestowed on Scot MacDonald, who is thus assured of £2,000 ($10,000) per year for the further loan of his prestige. To the nation Lord President of the Council MacDonald soon declared: "I hope the confidence and support given the National combination I headed will be renewed to the same combination under its new Prime Minister."
Time has so mellowed British Labor's bitterness at "Ramsay's Betrayal" that Labor Party Leader "Old George" Lansbury commented with gentlest irony: "I am very glad that all pretense has been swept away and that we have now a good true-blue Tory Prime Minister and an excellent Cabinet to represent the Tory Party. Anyhow, there has never been a National Government except in words."
National Combination. The new Cabinet announced by Prime Minister Baldwin was of interest chiefly in terms of the same old National Government personalities reshuffled to meet their personal idiosyncrasies, political expedience and the public temper.
The big plum—The Foreign Secretaryship—had to go to the man who has put through Parliament this year a measure which has necessitated Parliamentary reports and documents amounting to 20 times the length of Holy Bible: the India Bill of tall, dapper, aquiline, baldish Sir Samuel Hoare. So dubious are the merits of this measure that it has been dubbed "the Hoarefrost," but as Secretary of State for India since 1931 Sam Hoare put it through, and no other British statesman has recently done anything so big. Why Sir Sam should not now be made Prime Minister, on the theory that he is India's Emancipator, the Abraham Lincoln of 350,000,000 souls, Sir Sam cannot quite see. Therefore he absolutely demanded and got the Foreign Office as a minimum reward, ousting Sir John Simon, who was made Home Secretary last week, thus ousting into limbo Sir John Gilmour. one of the hardest-working, least appreciated Home Secretaries in many a year.
In the Foreign Office permanent officials viewed Sir Sam with alarm. The new Foreign Secretary, so far as they know, has no views on foreign affairs, many on dancing at swank night clubs, tennis playing, and fancy figure skating, a pastime which he pursues in skin-tight black professional figure-skater costume not only at St. Moritz in winter but in London at all seasons on socialite Grosvenor House's rink.
What unexpected twists or diplomatic figure eights Sir Sam may impart to Empire foreign policy Whitehall preferred not to guess. At the India Office he was noted for bullheadedness, for closing his eyes to new facts once his decisions were made, and for slogging through. Last week Sir Sam slogged his India Bill helper, the slim, grey-mustached Marquess of Zetland, into the Secretaryship of State for India he himself had just vacated. Lord Zetland wears 1910 collars, teems with anecdotes commencing "Now when I was Governor of Bengal . . .", and has a mannerism which Englishmen describe as "perpetually washing his hands with invisible soap."