Chapter LXXXI: An Indian Affair Part II - Ambitions and Loyalty.
Chamberlain's plan for India came in two stages. The first was to pass a stripped down but clarified version of the original 1935 Government of India Act to sort out the more urgent issues and prepare the ground work for self government, the second to despatch a mission to the sub-continent to thrash out the details for a planned Dominion of India Act once a constitution was agreed. To take advantage of the conductive atmosphere in India the first Act made a big play of officially committing Britain to an Indian Dominion and scrapping 'dyarchy', the practice whereby certain (less important) ministers were responsible to the provincial legislature but key ministries were responsible to the Viceroy appointed provincial governor. The Act made all provincial ministers responsible to the legislature as well as establish direct elections to those bodies, greatly extending the role of Indians in provincial government. The final part of the Act was a selection of territorial re-organisations, formally detaching Aden and Burma from British India and breaking up the larger provinces into more manageable territories. As the mission to India was far from certain to be well received, there had been more than enough commissions and round table talks to leave the Indian groups with a healthy suspicion of the motives of British ministers sent to 'make progress', considerable efforts were expended to make clear that a Dominion was the guaranteed end result and the talks were concerned with the detail of a constitution progress did prove possible. As an added flourish, and to curry royal favour, an Imperial Durbah was arranged for King George VI, the new monarch to have his coronation as Emperor of India celebrated by the 'Court of Dehli'. Though not universally popular most of the post-INC breakup groups were brought off with the promise the King would publicly commit Britain to Indian domestic self government and Dominion status, enough of a compromise to ensure the threatened boycott and disruptions never materialised and the ceremony went off smoothly.
If conditions in India were favourable, those in Westminster were far more challenging. It soon became obvious the most determined resistance would come not from the opposition parties but from the government benches. The biggest single obstacle to progress on the new Government of India Act was in fact the Secretary of State for India, Baron Lloyd, a man hand picked by Churchill precisely because of his opposition to significant change in India. A secondary problem was finding the makeup of the mission to India, naturally it had to be all party and include enough government 'heavy hitters' to ensure it was taken seriously. Finally the Prime Minister also had to pay the political price extracted by Churchill for his grudging abstention over the Act; promotions and preference for his supporters. Taken together the obvious solution to these issues was a cabinet re-shuffle, an option Chamberlain was reluctant to take as it was barely six months since the last one. However circumstances forced his hand so the Parliamentary year began with a hastily arranged reshuffle as Chamberlain tried to balance the competing demands and still end up with a useful cabinet. Before that however he chose to concentrate on the Indian mission as his top priority, judging it was necessary to move quickly to keep the pro-British momentum. It was perhaps this very haste that caused his initial efforts to come so badly unstuck.
The key problem with selecting the head of the mission to India was that it wasn't an especially prized job, but would nevertheless require the candidate to be an experienced senior minister to give it the necessary political weight. Consequently it was expected that anybody approached about the role would have to be induced into going, either with carrots, stick or both. After much deliberation and debate the first choice candidate emerged as Sir John Simon, the National Liberal leader and incumbent Home Secretary. As past chair of the Simons Commission he had the necessary experience of India and it was believed that sending him back with a completely different frame of reference would be a good demonstration of the change in British policy. As a added bonuses, from Chamberlain's perspective at least, it would remove the the unpopular Simons from British politics for several months, reduce the National Liberal's influence and free up a great office of state for promoting his own man. The carrot offered was an additional National Liberal in the cabinet while the stick was the threat to reduce the number if he didn't go. Unsurprisingly Simon didn't see it that way, heading up the mission would be a significant personal demotion and leave him vulnerable to replacement as National Liberal leader while out of the country. Moreover the implication that the party's cabinet representation was little more than a bargaining chip did little to endear the offer to the rest of the National Liberals. Insulted by both the blackmail and the implication behind it Simon refused the position and declared he wished to stay at the Home Office. With his authority threatened, and more than a hint of personal dislike as motivation, Chamberlain dug his heels in and gave Simon an ultimatum; India or nowhere. Simon's response was just as unequivocal, he resigned from the cabinet and announced the National Liberals were pulling out of the Government.
Before moving on it is worth briefly discussing one of the more prevalent conspiracy theories about the reshuffle. While there were many good reasons for Simon's selection, there were also excellent reasons he shouldn't go, many of them the flip side of his supposed advantages. For instance while he had got to know the main characters of India he had made his usual bad impression with most of them, he was not a natural diplomat nor especially persuasive. Indeed he had mishandled local relations so badly the government had been forced into pre-announcing several conclusions to the commission just to keep order. This did not mean his mission would have failed, his final report had still formed the basis of much of the revised Government of India Act and he could undoubtedly have produced a decent constitution, but it was not ideal. Thus the conspiracy theory goes that Chamberlain had never intended him to go, as he would have been a disaster, and only offered him the job knowing he would refuse and so could be forced from the government along with the rest of the National Liberals. The supposed evidence for this is the lack of Tory reaction to the departure of Simons and his party, the idea the Conservative back benches saw less National Liberals as a way to increase their own personal chances of advancement apparently being insufficient explanation for this. Whether or not one believes this chain of events probably comes down to a personal preference between conspiracy or cock-up, though it is certainly worth repeating that history indicates the latter is far more prevalent than the former.
In any event the departure of the National Liberals, though it shattered the convenient fiction of a 'National' Government, was not Chamberlain's first concern. His pressing requirement was to fill the gaps left by the departed ministers and get the mission out to India to strike while conditions were still favourable. The Indian mission was therefore first to be decided, Chamberlain selecting the President of the Board of Education, Viscount Halifax. As a member of the cabinet Halifax ticked the seniority box while his time as Viceroy of India gave him the necessary contacts and sub-continent experience. While his tenure as Viceroy had been mixed at best, he had left on a high note and was thus viewed as a relatively successful Viceroy. Crucially he was also motivated to go to India, having allied himself with Baldwin and appeasement his career had stagnated following the former leaders fall from grace, indeed he was only still in the cabinet due to his standing with the declining 'dove' wing of the party. The chance to re-start his stalled career by returning to the sub-continent naturally appealed, the deal sweetened by the assurance of a promotion from the relative backwater of Education should be succeed. With the rest of the cross-party mission relatively easily filled out Chamberlain could concentrate on his cabinet reshuffle.
Viscount Halifax, the man sent to India to negotiate the fine detail of the new constitution. His tenure as Viceroy had been one of extremes, at one end he had imprisoned the entire Congress leadership while at the other he had overseen the peaceful end of Congress' Civil Disobedience. Having left shortly after negotiating the latter and setting the ground for the Round Table Talks his stock in India was still good, giving him the necessary credit to ensure attendance at the constitutional conference. An additional advantage was his good relations with King George VI, forged during the crisis over the succession, helping to ensure government and monarchy were in agreement throughout both the Durbah and subsequent talks.
While referred to as a reshuffle it was perhaps more accurately a reconstruction, in trying to balance all the groups within the party Chamberlain would promote, move or replace almost half his cabinet. Beginning at the top the job of Home Secretary went to Duff Cooper, promoted from the War Office on the back of good work managing the post-war review (discussed in detail in later chapters) and the high profile successes of the British Army on the North West Frontier in India. His successor as Secretary of State for War was the high flying Oliver Stanley, following in the footsteps of his father who had also served in the office during the Great War much was expected as he had faced the tricky task of putting Cooper's review into practice. The appointment of Neville Chamberlain to the freshly expanded Ministry for Pensions and Welfare Reform was another early certainty, an attempt to utilise the work he commissioned from the Conservative Research Department to underpin the government's weak domestic agenda. The hot topic of India saw one of the surprises of the reshuffle as Samuel Hoare continued his rehabilitation by returning to the Indian Office as Secretaty of State For India and being given responsibility for passing the new Government of India Act. The displaced Baron Lloyd was moved sideways to the Colonial Office, removing him from Indian affairs and acting as a reassurance to the die-hards that the actions over Rhodesia and India were not going to be hurriedly replicated across the rest of the Empire. Staying on the Indian theme the replacement for the sub-continent bound Lord Halifax at Education was his associate Rab Butler, selected as much for his standing in the Halifax group in the party as anything else.
Moving to the 'Churchill' area of the reshuffle we see the heavy price extracted for his abstention over India, at least two cabinet posts with perhaps considerable influence on a third. The two clearest cut cases were Brendan Bracken at Agriculture and the Marquess of Londonderry as Lord Privy Seal, the former had been a confidant of Churchill for years while the latter was more complex. Formerly the Secretary of State for Air he had publicly toed the government's line while in cabinet had tried to defend the RAF against vicious cuts and disarmament 'gestures' that would cripple it. These actions saw him first forced from the Air Ministry and then from the cabinet as he became a political embarrassment, accused by many of being a 'warmonger'. Subsequent events had proved his warnings correct, not least the RAF being initially out-performed by their Australian cousins in the Abyssinian War, and his return to the Cabinet gave Churchill another pro-RAF vote for defence spending and Chamberlain another hawk on defence and foreign policy. The third post is interesting, after excellent work on aircraft production Lord Beaverbrook's elevation to Lord President of the Council was purportedly so he could extend his efforts beyond aviation to other industries, logical as far as it went but clearly not the full story. While such a job would be easier from a cabinet level position the obvious choice would have been been either a new Ministry for Industry position or President of the Board of Trade, that he instead became Lord President of the Council suggest scheming and compromise not a fully confident decision. The remaining changes are listed mainly for completeness, a selection of junior ministers and rising stars moved in to replace the departed National Liberals.
- Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons - Austen Chamberlain
- Lord Chancellor and Leader of the House of Lords - Viscount Hailsham
- Lord President of the Council - Lord Beaverbrook
- Lord Privy Seal - Marquess of Londonderry
- Chancellor of the Exchequer - Leo Amery
- Home Secretary - Alfred Duff Cooper
- Foreign Secretary - Anthony Eden
- Colonial Secretary - Baron Lloyd
- Dominions Secretary - Lord De La Warr
- Secretary of State for War - Oliver Stanley
- First Lord of the Admiralty - Viscount Monsell
- Secretary of State for Air - Winston Churchill
- Secretary of State for India - Samuel Hoare
- Minister for Co-ordination of Defence - Harold Macmillian
- Secretary of State for Scotland - Walter Elliot
- President of the Board of Trade - Earl Stanhope
- President of the Board of Education - Rab Butler
- Minister for Pensions and Welfare Reform - Neville Chamberlain
- Minister of Agriculture - Brendan Bracken
- Minister of Labour - Ronald Cross
- Minister of Health - William Morrison
- Minister of Transport - John Moore-Brabazon
- First Commissioner of Works - Howard Kingsley Wood
- Attorney General - Thomas Inskip
Notes;
An update! And all for a svelt 2,700 words.
First off, I'm fully aware some will yawn at British politics and be disinterested in who goes to what job, I am however resigned to the fact you can't please everybody all the time and promise boat porn later (after one more politics update, sorry.)
So onto the update, Halifax in India? Why not I say? Gets him out of the way and gives him a chance to restart his career. It stalled in the late 1920s before he became Viceroy so I can see him hoping to do the same trick again.
The Beaver as Lord President probably has to be wrangling, you wouldn't put such a schemer in a high profile job unless you had to. Ideally he'd have been just a Minister without Portfolio and told to get on with poking at British industry, however he's managed to scheme himself a grand title and a position at the heart of government.
Nev at Pensions and Welfare is something of a demotion from Lord President, but the CRD was pretty much his personal toy and so he's one of the few senior Tories to actually have a welfare agenda. As the PM knows the Conservatives are weak domestically (Churchill wasn't interested and Austen's been distracted) Nev is drafted to bolster the new programme, though if it's too little too late is another problem.
Lord Londonderry's promotion, he was indeed an early anti-disarmament campaigner and was called a warmonger by Attlee (Labour at the time being committed to completely abolishing the RAF). However OTL after being thrown out of the cabinet he lost his nerve, over-reacted and ended up heavily pushing Anglo-German friendship and appeasement, thus putting him in a worse position than when he started. TTL he didn't get a chance as the Germany's pull out of the Naval Talks then war with Italy intervened, thus he looked clever and fore-sighted. Churchill didn't think much of him so he didn't make his cabinet, but as a pro-Air man who will bolster the RAF vote I can seem Churchill asking for him as a loyal stooge.
Bracken and Butler come in as minions to their masters, Duff Cooper and Stanley continue rising up the ranks after solid work while at the bottom I couldn't resist Moore-Brabazon, I intend a strong British civil aviation industry and he was mostly right on the ideas even if the implementation wasn't that solid.
After this we look at the fall out from the Nat Libs buggering off and have a tentative poke at domestic politics. Boat-porn after that then some tanks. That at least is the plan.
