Abstract
Lloyd George said of Balfour that he was ‘not a man but a mannerism’. Other contemporaries, like F. E. Smith and Winston Churchill, said of him that his was the finest intellect which had devoted itself to politics in their time; but Balfour’s career suggests that of all the qualities necessary for success in politics, intellect is one of the less important ones. Despite F. E.’s verdict, Balfour’s intellect was not quite as penetrating as he liked to pretend, and he possessed in reality the sort of cleverness which impresses dons (and thus, by extension, later historians). It was once said that Franklin D. Roosevelt possessed a ‘second class intellect with a first class temperament’; we might modify this in Balfour’s case and conclude that he possessed Cambridge cleverness with a second-class temperament. It is usual, when considering his career, to contrast the initial verdicts that he was a lightweight figure — known to some as ‘Pretty Fanny’ — with the sternness he showed as Secretary for Ireland, where he earned the sobriquet ‘Bloody Balfour’, but taking his career as a whole, it is by no means clear that the first opinions were wrong.
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Notes and References
Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, vol. II (London, 1921), p. 3.
Julian Amery, Life of Joseph Chamberlain, vol. IV (London, 1951), p. 478.
John Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London, 1987), p. 10.
Richard A. Rempel, Unionists Divided (London, 1972), p. 9.
E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism 1880–1914 (London, 1995 ), p. 67.
Sir C. Petrie, The Life and Letters of Sir Austen Chamberlain, vol. I (London, 1939 ), p. 142.
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D. Dutton, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (Liverpool, 1992), pp. 10–11.
Julian Amery, Joseph Chamberlain, vol. VI (London, 1969), p. 784.
Randolph S. Churchill, Lord Derby: King of Lancashire (London, 1959) pp. 89–90.
John Ramsden (ed.), Real Old Tory Politics (London, 1984), p. 27.
John Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin 1902–1940 (London, 1979), p. 23.
John Campbell, F.E. Smith (London, 1983) pp. 127–31
for Liverpool politics see P. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool 1868–1939 (Liverpool, 1981 ).
For a convenient and up-to-date summary of an often confusing debate see K. Laybourn, ‘The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The state of the debate’ in History, June 1995, pp. 207–26.
See also G. R. Searle, The Liberal Party–Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929 (London, 1992 ), pp. 107–20.
See G. Phillips, The Diehards (Princeton, 1979), especially Chapter 1.
Sir Austen Chamberlain, Politics from Inside (London, 1936), pp. 298–311.
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© 1998 John Charmley
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Charmley, J. (1998). Balfourian Dog Days. In: A History of Conservative Politics, 1900–1996. British Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14691-8_2
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