1923 - 1929

Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947) was the son of a Midlands industrialist and MP, and entered Parliament himself in 1908 as a Conservative. He served as parliamentary private Secretary to Bonar Law, and was taken into the cabinet by Lloyd George in 1921. However, he strongly disliked Lloyd George's Leadership of the coalition, and supported the Conservative backbench revolt against it of 1922. He became chancellor in the subsequent government of Bonar Law, acting as deputy for him when ill; when Law resigned in 1923 Baldwin succeeded to the premiership. Going to the country later that year in search of a mandate for a protectionist policy, he lost his overall majority, opening the way to the first Labour government, but he recovered it in a second general election a few months later. Pushed off-balance by industrial unrest culminating in the General Strike of 1926, the Conservatives were thrust out of office again in the election of 1929. But when the Labour government collapsed in 1931 in the midst of a financial crisis, Baldwin agreed to enter a national government; Baldwin was its real Leader, and Ramsay MacDonald passed the premiership onto him in 1935. He held it for the following two years, a period overshadowed by the growing likelihood of war with Germany and Edward VIII's abdication. He resigned shortly after he became seventy, in 1937, receiving a peerage.