Ramsay MacDonald died at sea. By the end of his life, the man who had become the Labour Party’s first prime minister had faded into almost total obscurity. In November 1937, six years after he was exiled by his party, he set off on a voyage from London to South America with his youngest daughter, Sheila. The trip was intended to improve MacDonald’s health. At 71 years old he was fading, perhaps owing to his very public ostracisation, although he had been unwell for large parts of his life.
MacDonald never returned. He died of heart failure at quarter to eight in the evening on the fourth day of his journey after retiring early from a game of cards. He was miles away from his country, and the party he had spent much of his life trying to serve. But the reality was that he had been cast out long before. The Labour Party cut ties with MacDonald after he took charge of a National Government which included members of the Conservative Party and the Liberals in 1931.
Almost 89 years since his death, MacDonald’s legacy has hardly improved. The mention of his name invites only indignant dismissal or unbothered ignorance from modern Labour members. Tony Benn, the godfather of the Labour left, whose father served in MacDonald’s second cabinet, said in 2001 that his dad’s old boss had “sold out”. In 2022, Patrick Maguire – previously of these pages – was told by a former Labour cabinet minister that MacDonald’s time in government was the period of history they knew the “least about”.
To the historian Walter Reid, MacDonald’s descent into infamy and irrelevance makes him a mournful figure. In his new biography, The Cancelled Prime Minister: The Extraordinary Rise and Tragic Fall of Ramsay MacDonald, Reid uses his final closing chapter to chide the modern Labour Party. “When we think of Ramsay MacDonald and wonder what he should be remembered for, we should look at the great achievements of his party between 1940 and 1950. They would not have happened but for him.”
Is that true? Was Clement Attlee standing on MacDonald’s shoulders? Or was MacDonald truly Labour’s first mutineer, the founder of a tradition that, for the left of the party, also includes Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and now Keir Starmer? These questions about MacDonald are also questions about the lineage and historical mission of the Labour party itself – all prompted by the decisive question over how “Labour” the party’s first prime minister truly was.
James Ramsay MacDonald was born in Lossiemouth, Scotland in 1866. MacDonald’s assumed first name – Ramsay – was his mother’s surname. Annie Ramsay had her son out of wedlock while working as a farm servant. (MacDonald had little to do with his father, John.) Young MacDonald spent much of his early life surrounded by women and as a result would always feel more comfortable in female company. The death of his wife Margaret Gladstone from blood poisoning in 1911 dealt him a profound blow. The couple had married in 1896, and Margaret MacDonald was her husband’s best friend. Reid writes that he “never recovered from her death” for it was “only during the brief years of their marriage that he truly lived”.
MacDonald’s first job after leaving school was on a farm, like his mother. But an opportunity to teach arose when a vacancy became available at the local school in Lossiemouth. MacDonald was driven by his curiosity and what Reid calls a need for “conscious self-improvement”. From the outside he was never held back by his illegitimacy. “He effected a change in his personal circumstances of a sort which no other British politician has achieved,” Reid writes. MacDonald’s journey into politics initially took him from Scotland to Bristol. After four years working as a pupil teacher in Lossiemouth between 1881-1885, he moved to Bristol to help establish a Boys’ and Young Men’s Guild. It was there – in the south west – that the roots of his political career were laid. He first joined the Social Democratic Federation, a British socialist party, before joining the British Socialist Society.
He moved to London in 1886, continuing his exploration of Edwardian radicalism. By 1888, he was working for Thomas Lough, a radical politician who became the Liberal MP for West Islington four years later. It was during this time that MacDonald became a member of the Fabian Society and quickly fell in with the set that would go on to lay the foundations of the modern Labour party: Keir Hardie and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the couple who helped found the New Statesman, were among them. He was first elected to Parliament as the Labour Party MP for Leicester in 1906.
This unapologetic striving for social mobility and its accompanying attraction to the glamour of aristocratic life seems to have irritated his contemporaries in the early Labour Party, especially when, at the height of his powers, MacDonald could regularly be found entertaining the upper classes (as prime minister, he became particularly close to King George V). “He had no time for the idea of class war and class interests”, Reid writes.
This is to slightly simplify MacDonald’s levelling worldview. One anecdotal example of this is a family ritual; while on holiday in Lossiemouth, MacDonald would take his children onto the property of the local landowner, the laird, to cut the barbed wire that divided up his land. Reid sees this as a “deliberate” incursion, symbolic of MacDonald’s wilful disregard for class boundaries, something which did not sit well with his contemporaries. In Reid’s account, MacDonald’s ease among the nobility and his love of court dress were not because he was – underneath it all – desperate to be a toff, but rather because he paid little heed to the trappings and conventions of Edwardian society. The cutting of the barbed wire is a physical example of this: to MacDonald, such constraints bore little meaning.
As the illegitimate son of a farm servant, MacDonald was exactly the kind of person some members of the early Labour Party – particularly its intellectual strand – was supposed to be for. Yet, his preference for the company of the upper-classes (particularly upper-class women like MacDonald’s close friend Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the Marchioness of Londonderry) tarred him with the accusation of “class traitor”. MacDonald seems to have taken no notice. Beatrice and Sidney Webb – prominent members of Labour’s early intelligentsia – were, as Reid points out, particularly disdainful of MacDonald. The couple were the intellectual heart of the early Labour Party and had particularly lofty ideals of the qualities and the opinions that should befit a Labour MP: loyalty to the unions, a disdain for the trappings of wealth and the aristocracy, and a rigorous intellectual socialism. (In the years to come, after MacDonald’s break with his party, Beatrice Webb became one of his main detractors.)
Reid uses the biography as an opportunity to take the Webbs down a peg. He describes Beatrice as the “earnest and humourless Beatrice Webb”. He says she was both “snobbish and imperceptive” in her characterisation of MacDonald’s thoughts and was “concentrated on relations with the men and women – especially the women – of the enemy’s camp”. Sidney Webb, meanwhile, was an ineffectual and timid politician – the most eminent of the Fabians – who “spoke too quietly in the house to be heard”. According to this biography, the Webbs’ arrogant dismissal of MacDonald – who got closer to the centre of power than they ever did – seems wrapped up in jealousy, rather than a genuine critique of MacDonald’s neglect of class politics. Even so, MacDonald didn’t seem to care: Reid writes that throughout his career, and particularly following the formation of the National Government, MacDonald “criticised Labour politicians not because they were Labour, but because he didn’t think much of most of them”.
Reid’s analysis is perceptive. But MacDonald was certainly not a conventional Labour politician. He did not have the same emotional attachment to the party that some of his colleagues did. While he played an important role in the creation of his party, Reid writes, “emotionally he was never at its heart”. This sets him apart from his successors: “he didn’t see it… like Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson did, as a family or a crusade”.
MacDonald’s first stint as party leader came in 1911 – the same year he lost his wife. He was elected Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, holding the post until 1914 when – at odds with his party – MacDonald was one of the leading voices of the anti-war stance. Unlike most of his party, he opposed the First World War, staunchly advocating for British neutrality (something that would contribute to him losing his seat in 1918). This was also a moment in which MacDonald’s lack of interest in the nitty gritty of trade union politics and the “class war” came to the fore: he was often wary and antagonistic towards strike action – a trait which perturbed his trade union colleagues.
He was elected to parliament once again in 1922 to the seat of Aberavon in Wales, in a historic vote which saw Labour overtake the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tory Party. When Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives lost their majority at the end of 1923, MacDonald – then once again, the party’s leader – was called on by George V to form a government. And so, the first Labour administration was born. It did not last long. The Zinoviev affair – a scandal involving a bogus letter purporting to be from the President of the Communist International – seriously damaged the first Labour government’s credibility, and Stanley Baldwin won the October 1924 election by a landslide.
Labour and MacDonald were out of power until 1929, when amid economic depression, they narrowly won the election. But MacDonald’s most fateful decision came at the start of the next decade. The events leading up to MacDonald’s great betrayal are this: in 1931, faced with the longest, deepest and most severe financial crisis the world had yet seen, MacDonald and his Chancellor, Phillip Snowden, proposed a raft of spending cuts. A civil war within the Parliamentary Labour Party ensued. MacDonald found himself staring down the barrel of a mutiny both on the backbenches and from members of his own cabinet (one notable agitator was the foreign secretary, Arthur Henderson, who would go on to be MacDonald’s successor as party leader).
On 24 August 1931 the beleaguered Prime Minister submitted his resignation to King George V. Unconventionally, the King persuaded MacDonald to stay on and form a National Government with support from the Conservative Party and the Liberals. MacDonald duly did so – a decision a punchy New Statesman editorial from the time described as a “mistake”. MacDonald – along with Snowden and the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, JH Thomas – was subsequently expelled from Labour (unsurprisingly, by Henderson). His multi-decade relationship with the party was crushed. MacDonald won the election in October 1931 by a landslide – but leading the parties of the centre and right.
MacDonald led the National Government for four years. In 1932, his last Labour ally in government – Philip Snowden – resigned owing to the tariffs that were introduced as part of the Ottawa agreement. As the years went on, MacDonald’s health grew increasingly worse rendering him more and more ineffectual in the midst of a consequential international moment. By 1935, well-aware that the power he once held had dissipated, MacDonald agreed a timetable with Stanley Baldwin to step down as Prime Minister following George V’s silver jubilee. He remained in Cabinet as Lord President, but lost his seat later that year to his former Labour colleague, Manny Shinwell. He was once again elected to the Combined Scottish Universities seat in 1936; this was to be his last post in politics. After the death of the King later that year, MacDonald’s mental and physical health nosedived. He never recovered, dying a year later in 1937.
The consequence of MacDonald’s defection was a complete breakdown of relations between MacDonald and Labour, one from which, more than 90 years on, has still not been reversed. As the late David Marquand, himself a former Labour MP, writes in his 1997 biography of MacDonald – which made a valiant attempt to give his party’s first prime minister credit for his work, it took some time for Labour to move past its “complex” about what many in the party saw as the “great betrayal” of 1931.
Disparaging comparisons to this late Edwardian Labour leader have even been used to critique his successors. As Maguire reports during the Brexit negotiations, Diane Abbott warned of the “the Ramsay MacCorbyn plan” when the former Labour leader and his team were considering making a deal with Theresa May; Downing Street’s current occupant has been warned against becoming Ramsay MacStarmer. In 2006, when forced to rely on Conservative votes to pass through his education reforms, Tony Blair laughed off critics’ descriptions of him as “Ramsay MacBlair”.
If we accept Reid’s account, then the Labour Party has treated MacDonald ungraciously. Were it not for his decision to “accept personal and not party responsibility” for the measures of 1931, the Labour Party might have faded into political obscurity (though arguably obscurity is where it ended up until it joined coalition with the Conservatives again during the Second World War). MacDonald – with his electoral victories in 1924 and 1929 – helped, as Reid puts it, to establish Labour as the “progressive alternative to the capitalist Conservative party”, thereby displacing the Liberals as the second party of government. If it were not for this beautifully spoken Scot from Lossiemouth, then the Labour Party as we know it today would not exist.
Still, one new biography is not going to overturn a century of animosity. Reid’s analysis certainly offers a nuanced and affecting perspective on MacDonald. Clement Attlee, MacDonald’s successor as Labour Prime Minister, is more readily held up as architect of his party’s modern success. Spiritually, he might as well be the Labour Party’s first prime minister. It doesn’t seem to matter that MacDonald came first. It also provides a clear explanation of why he was so readily exiled by his comrades in Labour. MacDonald, who died almost 90 years ago, is no longer around to defend himself; even if he were, his defence would likely be unsatisfactory. As Reid writes, the most “difficult part” of concocting this new take on Labour’s first Prime Minister was discerning his reasons for his great betrayal.
MacDonald – with his dismissal of the class war, love of the aristocracy and insatiable need to self-improve – can seem anomalous inside the early Labour Party. But in many ways MacDonald provided its most durable archetype: trapped in a bind between pragmatism (forming the National Government) and principle (refusing to collaborate with the Tories). It is a division which echoes into the modern Labour Party. MacDonald’s contemporary successor, Keir Starmer has repeatedly been forced to choose between the two – over winter fuel, welfare reforms and immigration. MacDonald’s five heirs as Labour prime minister – Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan, Blair, Brown – have all found themselves with a version of the same dilemma. MacDonald may not have been Labour enough for the Webbs. But, to judge from the direction of the party after him, he actually personifies the Labour party as well as anyone else.
[Further reading: When Trotsky took on Keir Starmer]
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Subscribe here to commentIt’s disappointing to find the name of Clem Attlee consistently mis-spelt in an NS piece.