David Marquand’s Biography of Ramsay MacDonald

Summary

• David Marquand’s official biography of Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, was pioneering.
• The book is also an historical document in itself, illustrating how Marquand approached and played a role in the Labour Party’s political divisions of the 1960s-1970s.
• While sympathetic to the limitations it posed, Marquand may have underestimated the role of social class in MacDonald’s life.
• Many consider that MacDonald betrayed the Labour Party in forming a national government, and betrayed labour values during a recession by agreeing to the savage terms of the American loan. Marquand takes a more sympathetic view.
• Overall, Marquand contributes to the myth making surrounding MacDonald by not directly confronting the legitimate arguments against him.

David Marquand’s biography of Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, was pioneering, invaluably researched and beautifully written. It set out to explore the ‘myths’ about MacDonald’s perceived ‘betrayal’ of the Labour Party, reaching back into the formations of Labour values and politics in one extraordinary leader. Yet, while an enduring piece of work, it is also an historical document in itself, illustrating how Marquand approached and played a role in the political divisions of the 1960s and 1970s in the Labour Party. So, what does it tell us about MacDonald and the Labour Party in 1924, but also about Marquand and the Labour Party in his time?

Ramsay MacDonald’s official biographer

When he began, Marquand was a young, ambitious academic looking for an opportunity. His father, Hilary, who had been a minister in Atlee’s government, had perhaps suggested writing about MacDonald to him, in the end it became the official biography, a complex relationship with obligations and potential restrictions.

‘Ramsay MacDonald’, Marquand’s book begins, ‘died a lonely and disappointed old man worn out in body and mind’, seen as ‘one of the most diminutive’ of a generation of politicians who failed the British and led to economic depression. ‘For generations, Labour men and women were to take it for granted, not only that MacDonald betrayed the Labour Party in forming a national government, but that he had been indecently eager to betray it.’ It is a myth attached to nearly all subsequent Labour leaders, with Hugh Gaitskell and John Smith saved by death and Jeremy Corbyn saved by failure.

Ramsey MacDonald’s early life and path to power

MacDonald was remarkable. Marquand’s account is a model biography and explains the inner workings of a clever and, in many ways, effective leader. Born illegitimate in 1866 and raised in poverty, MacDonald, it could be argued, was always on the way from somewhere to somewhere else. He left Lossiemouth for Bristol, set up a boys’ club, then, as another economic depression hit in 1886, after a period unemployed and nearly destitute in London, he became an invoice clerk. Later, MacDonald joined the Independent Labour Party and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. Marquand was securely middle class with progressive roots in Wimbledon, despite his sympathy perhaps at times under-estimating the lurching abyss that the class position represented as a drumbeat in MacDonald’s life.

MacDonald became leader of the Labour Party in 1911, then prime minister thirteen years later. Marquand’s version of MacDonald’s Labour Party is a stable, growing place, with ‘the essential values of reason and compromise, which had always been central to MacDonald’s political philosophy’, being worked out in practice. But a great deal of what Marquand concentrates on is parliamentary (by the time he finished the biography he had been an MP for 11 years); in this, he was perhaps mistaken. In the 1920s, the trade unions ran the Labour Party—not the MPs. He is looking in the wrong place for power.

Did Ramsay MacDonald betray the labour movement?

Politically MacDonald has been seen as betraying the Labour movement during the economic calamity of the Slump by agreeing to the savage terms of the American loan during a run on the pound. This went against everything people had voted Labour for by cutting unemployment benefit and leading to sudden, mass un-employment, immiseration, and Labour’s total electoral collapse in 1931. Keynes’s alternative (of borrowing and public spending) was available, but Keynes despaired as he could not persuade MacDonald to take it. Yet Marquand makes a convincing argument about the impossibility of understanding Keynes’s ideas against available political and Treasury advice because it required a total revolution in worldview. ‘As much as Copernicus or Darwin, Keynes transformed the way men look at the world: so completely that is hard to remember that they looked at it differently.’

The idea that MacDonald ‘betrayed’ labour values had a social aspect that Labour leaders ‘betray’ Labour by social climbing. Again, these accusations have enduring resonance. MacDonald had affairs with a series of aristocratic women. Marquand explains them by saying that MacDonald was intensely lonely after his wife Margaret’s death, but that does not explain why people objected to them. Marquand must have been aware that his own hero, Roy Jenkins, had long-lasting affairs, mostly with his best friends’ wives. It was revealing of Marquand that he turned away from this as he wrote the book.

Marquand himself

David Marquand doggedly triangulated the politics around him in pursuit of a more ideal politics and had a large conscience. Politicians often seek to move political reality by the magic of charm, deploying themselves and their relationships, minds and organisational capacity to win people. Marquand had all these qualities, but he was perhaps dismayed by what he saw as bad-faith bending of principle involved in being political. What was the origin of Marquand’s personal engine, the fastidiousness? Perhaps an odd anxiety about being caught out in agreement?

In Political Quarterly meetings, Marquand responded thoughtfully, though always oddly anxious to lay down lines of difference—for example, between himself and Tony Wright. Marquand actively hunted down the space between their positions, not seeking accommodation. It was a kind of thinking on his feet and often creative.

David Marquand’s opinion of Ramsay MacDonald

While MacDonald saw off plots, Marquand often planned them. Marquand conspired against Wilson, wanting more action against the unions, arguing that he and the other ‘young eagles’ might as well plot against Wilson as Wilson was paranoid. Of course, Wilson may well have been paranoid precisely because people were plotting against him.

Marquand’s view of Wilson had consequences. It provided an intellectual undertow to what became the routine dismissal of Wilson. Marquand said that ‘Wilson personally exemplified all that had become wrong with Labour politics, Labour values and Labour policies.’ This was a dismissal of the winner of more elections than any previous Labour prime minister.

Overall, Marquand, whose strategy was to explain MacDonald, oddly contributes to the myth making by not directly confronting the legitimate arguments against him. After all as Ross McGibbon observed, Marquand mistook MacDonald for an early Jenkisite! MacDonald never apologised or took any responsibility for catastrophes that had practical consequences: Labour was out of power and had no opportunity to govern for eleven years, and no impact on any of the issues it cared about – from the Spanish Civil War, to the dreadful social conditions and the economic misery of the 1930s. Marquand did not seek to confront this irrelevance or its consequences, nor did (or do) mythmakers. Governing and doing politics is arduous, imperfect work; ‘betrayal’ is so much more comfortable to live with.

Digested read created by Sean Hannigan and Anya Pearson.