Austen Chamberlain

• 1. Introduction

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  Austen Chamberlain won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, yet never became prime minister. He served in Parliament for 45 years, led his party, and shaped European diplomacy in its most dangerous decade since Napoleon. And still, history has largely passed him over, preferring the men who shadowed him on either side: a father who remade British politics, and a half-brother whose name became a byword for catastrophic misjudgement.

  Born on the 16th of October 1863 in Birmingham, Austen was the eldest son of Joseph Chamberlain, one of the most formidable political figures of the Victorian age. From the moment he could read a newspaper, his future was decided for him. The question the rest of his story must answer is whether a man who always played by the rules, who stepped aside when principle demanded it, who backed down when honour required it, could ever truly win.

• 2. A Father's Shadow

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  Harriet Kenrick died giving birth to Austen in 1863, and the shock left his father Joseph so shaken that for almost 25 years he kept a emotional distance from his first-born son. It was an inauspicious beginning for a relationship that would define Austen's entire career.

  Joseph's plan for his son was explicit. After Rugby School, and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where Austen became vice-president of the Cambridge Union, the young man was sent to France. At the Paris Institute of Political Studies, he spent nine months absorbing the culture of the Third Republic, dining with men like Georges Clemenceau and Alexandre Ribot. He developed a lasting love for France that never left him.

  From Paris, he was dispatched to Berlin for twelve months, to understand Germany's political character at its source. He dined with Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, and attended lectures by the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke. Treitschke opened his eyes to what he called "a narrow-minded, proud, intolerant Prussian chauvinism". That early encounter planted a seed of suspicion about German nationalism that he carried into the First World War and the crises of the 1930s.

  When Austen returned to England in 1888, he came back not as a young man finding his way but as a political heir already cast. His father walked him up the floor of the House of Commons on his first day as a newly elected MP, flanked on the other side by his uncle Richard. The symbolism was unmistakable.

• 3. The Man Who Stepped Aside

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  William Ewart Gladstone, the four-time prime minister, praised Austen's maiden speech in April 1893 as "one of the best speeches which has been made". That Austen had been arguing against Gladstone's own Second Home Rule Bill made the compliment all the more striking. And it drew a public response praising both Austen and his father Joseph, despite the bitter history between Joseph Chamberlain and his former Liberal leader.

  By 1903, Austen was Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed as a compromise between his father's Imperial Tariff campaign and Arthur Balfour's more cautious protectionism. His influence shrank the moment his father left the Cabinet to campaign on the backbenches. In the Liberal landslide of 1906, Austen was one of the few surviving Liberal Unionists in the Commons.

  The moment that defined Austen's character came in late 1911. Arthur Balfour had been forced from the Conservative leadership, and Austen was a serious candidate to succeed him. The early canvassing of MPs showed that Walter Long would win by a slender margin. Rather than risk splitting an already fragile coalition, Austen withdrew. He then persuaded Long to withdraw with him. The party chose Bonar Law by unanimous vote as a compromise. The party stayed together. Austen did not become leader.

  Historians later pointed out that this decision likely cost him the premiership as well. He had prioritised the party's unity over his own ambition, and the party never fully rewarded him for it. He remained the only Conservative overall leader in the twentieth century, until William Hague in 1997-2001, not to become prime minister.

• 4. War and Conscience

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  Chamberlain joined H. H. Asquith's wartime coalition government in 1915 as Secretary of State for India. Like Arthur Balfour and George Curzon, he supported the invasion of Mesopotamia to boost British prestige in the region and discourage what was seen as a possible German-inspired Muslim revolt in India.

  The campaign ended in catastrophe. The British garrison at Kut was besieged and lost. An inquiry into the failure was launched. The Indian Army, separately administered, bore the immediate operational responsibility. But Chamberlain was the minister in charge. In July 1917, he resigned. He was widely praised for what observers called a principled act in a political culture not famous for taking blame.

  Lloyd George brought him back into government in April 1918 as Minister without Portfolio in the War Cabinet, replacing Lord Milner. After the coalition's victory in the 1918 election, Chamberlain was reappointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in January 1919, facing the immense task of rebuilding British finances after four years of wartime spending.

  When Bonar Law retired through ill health in 1921, Chamberlain stepped up again, becoming Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Privy Seal. He seemed, finally, to be in position. But the coalition he was now serving had grown deeply unpopular with Conservative backbenchers. At the Carlton Club meeting on the 19th of October 1922, a motion was passed to fight the coming election as an independent Conservative party. Chamberlain resigned the leadership rather than defy what he believed to be his democratic duty to the party members. Law formed the next government, and Chamberlain received no post.

• 5. Locarno and the Nobel Prize

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  Stanley Baldwin formed his second ministry after the October 1924 election and gave Chamberlain a free hand as Foreign Secretary. It was in this role that his place in history was settled.

  German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann approached Britain for a guarantee of Germany's western borders. Chamberlain responded positively. His reasoning was strategic and, in retrospect, double-edged. He believed that if Franco-German relations improved, France would gradually let go of its alliance system in Eastern Europe, which was known as the cordon sanitaire. Once France withdrew its protection from Poland and Czechoslovakia, those countries would face German territorial demands alone. Chamberlain calculated they would peacefully yield territories Germany claimed, including the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor, and the Free City of Danzig.

  In October 1925, Chamberlain, Aristide Briand of France, and Stresemann met in the Swiss town of Locarno. Together with representatives from Belgium and Italy, they signed a mutual agreement to settle all future differences by arbitration rather than war. Chamberlain was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role. He was also made a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter, the 871st person to hold that honour, and the first ordinary Knight Companion since Sir Henry Lee in Elizabethan times to die without being made a peer.

  He also brought Britain into the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which formally outlawed war as an instrument of policy. And in a remark that sat uneasily with later events, he described the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as "a man with whom business could be done".

• 6. The Last Victorian

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  After the Conservatives lost the 1929 election, Chamberlain stepped back from front-line politics. A brief return came in 1931 as First Lord of the Admiralty in Ramsay MacDonald's National Government. It ended badly. The Invergordon Mutiny, a protest by Royal Navy sailors against pay cuts that the Admiralty had accepted without proper consultation, reflected poorly on Chamberlain's leadership. The First Sea Lord Frederick Field was ill during the incident, and Chamberlain had proceeded without his advice. He resigned.

  From 1934 to 1937, Chamberlain was a prominent voice alongside Winston Churchill, Roger Keyes, and Leo Amery calling for rearmament against the growing threat from Nazi Germany. When Baldwin's government produced a modest rearmament White Paper in 1935, and Clement Attlee spoke against it, Chamberlain replied in words that carried the fury of someone who had watched German nationalism close-up in Berlin as a young man. He told Attlee that if war came and London was bombed, Attlee would be "strung up by an angry and justifiably angry populace to the nearest lamp post".

  In late 1936, Chamberlain chaired two Conservative parliamentary delegations that met with Baldwin personally to press him on the pace of rearmament. He was by then regarded by young Conservatives as a survivor from another era, dressed still in monocle and frock coat, one of the last MPs to wear a top hat inside the Commons Chamber. The historian Robert Blake wrote that Austen lacked "that ultimate hardness without which men seldom reach supreme political power", and quoted Churchill's remark that "he always played the game, and he always lost it".

  Austen Chamberlain died on the 16th of March 1937 at his London home, 24 Egerton Terrace, at the age of 73. His estate was valued at £45,044 at probate, a relatively modest sum for a man of his public standing. His half-brother Neville became prime minister just ten weeks later, the first and only member of the Chamberlain family to reach that office. Austen is buried in East Finchley Cemetery in London, and his personal and political papers are held at the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham.