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Thus Stanley Baldwin, himself a perfect John Bull in physical and mental makeup, announced as his program the Pax Britannica. In another fling at dictators, careless of enraging Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, the Prime Minister declared: "Dictators cannot gauge the currents of public opinion because public opinion and a dictatorship are self-contradictory. . . . You saw how quickly a dictatorship could move in the development of the German air force and in the swiftness with which the Ethiopian situation has arisen [see p. 16]. . . . Things like these make it more necessary that there should be stability. . . . Our stability is necessary to the world! . . . Let that be a reason for seeing that the National Government is returned to power [at the coming election], perhaps with a reduced majority but sufficiently strong to show that the British people are behind it."
As a program speech, logically considered, this was sheer bumbling and burbling, but such purely emotional talk from an Englishman like Stanley Baldwin goes straight to English hearts. Voters feel that he cares more for his bucolic pleasures, his famed pigs and still more famed pipe, than for the pig iron that made his late father a multi-millionaire and got him into Parliament.
Once in, Stanley Baldwin made Parliament his gentleman's club, developed a knack for maneuvering among the other members which eventually left them gasping and amazed. In 1923, on the death of Prime Minister Bonar Law, he maneuvered the great Lord Curzon, heavy with prestige and scintillant with dazzling intellect, completely out of the picture, becoming himself Prime Minister for the first time. Lord Curzon, heartbroken but even more amazed, ejaculated before bursting into the tears of a slight nervous breakdown: "Stanley Baldwin? A man of no consequence whatever!"
Mr. Baldwin is a first cousin of Rudyard Kipling. At the poet's house he met his invaluable Wife Lucy. Together they fear God to the point of never reading Sunday papers. From the Prime Minister's lips once fell the priceless phrase, possible only in England: "Having talked with people who read the newspapers on the Sabbath, I am of the opinion. . . ."
Prospects. The sort of government which will emerge from Britain's next general election, expected this year, was what worried the King's subjects last week. In nationwide municipal elections there has been a landslide to Labor, and since the old guard leaders of the Labor Party are now mostly venerable deadwood, their successor looms in pugnacious, able and popular Herbert Morrison, sometimes called "Prime Minister of London" since he and his Labor cohorts captured the London County Council (TIME, March 19, 1934).
No Bolshevik, Mr. Morrison is nevertheless sufficiently Socialist to put the final crimp in Britain's super-taxed leisure class, should he be returned as Prime Minister of a Labor Cabinet with a full working majority in the House of Commons— something British Labor has never yet had.
To offset a general election swing to Labor, following the national swing in municipal elections, British Conservatives count heavily on:
1) Adolf Hitler and other war boojums who tend to scare the British public which, when scared, always votes Conservative.