The Wild Men
David Torrance
Bloomsbury, £20

THE main achievement of the first Labour government of 1924 proved to be demonstrating that they were not “wild men” at all.

The Establishment clearly saw the mixture of working-class representatives, elected in 1923, as a potential revolutionary threat to its existence. The British version of the Bolsheviks in Russia. What David Torrance clearly demonstrates is that they were anything but.

There were the initial niceties of dress, certain suits for different occasions. The prime minister had personally to fund the furnishing of Downing Street. The lack of trust of the first Labour administration is amusingly illustrated with the story of four splendid silver candlesticks, which reappeared in the Colonial Office, as Labour minister Jimmy Thomas left.

Central to the book is the figure of Ramsay MacDonald. The first Labour prime minister, he also took on the role of foreign secretary as well. It is the weaknesses of MacDonald that chart, to a large degree, the fate of the government.

Torrance sets the scene in the early chapters before moving on to case studies of the main players. So there is the conservatism of characters like MacDonald and chancellor Philip Snowden balanced against the more radical education secretary Charles Trevelyan, and health and housing minister John Wheatley.

Wheatley’s housing reforms, which led to hundreds of thousands of new homes being built over the following years were one of the big successes of the government.

The government only lasted nine months before largely self-destructing due to MacDonald’s bad decision-making. The mishandling of a case against John Campbell, the editor of the the Workers’ Weekly, effectively saw the government fall. But it didn’t have to happen. Then, the infamous Zinoviev letter helped ensure defeat in the October 1924 election.

But Torrance offers a shrewd assessment of the government’s achievement. It proved that it could govern, without upsetting the monarch, the City or the general populace. That achievement — if it can be called such — set the blueprint for Labour governments of the future, in thrall to the Establishment, ever keen to please. Labour could be trusted.

MacDonald’s preference for the aristocracy and Conservatives began here, and was later consummated by the role he played in forming the national government in 1931.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of the first Labour government was that, in electoral terms, it marked the replacement of the Liberals. The decision of the combined Liberals of Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George to support and, at first, to sustain this Labour administration led in the end to their own demise, and the formation of the two-party system we still have today. 

Torrance provides an excellent, accessible analysis, while also disproving the title.  These were not wild men at all but easily mouldable future pillars of the Establishment — and, as such, they proved their worthiness to govern.