The formulation of a Conservative policy towards Russia

While MacDonald was throwing all his resources into a last attempt to recover his damaged reputation as well as to soothe the strained Anglo-Soviet relations, Stanley Baldwin was engaged in the difficult task of forming a Cabinet. He was ‘surprised and excited’ at the result of the elections and the preceding campaign centred on the ‘Red menace’. On 4 November he told Thomas Jones, the deputy secretary of the Cabinet, that he was satisfied with the new composition of the House of Commons in which there were to be only two major political parties, one on the left and one on the right. The disappearance of the Liberals as a major party was the first step in this direction, which would be followed by the ‘elimination of the Communists by Labour’.

Baldwin entrusted the direction of the Foreign Office to Sir Austen Chamberlain, an experienced politician and former leader of the Conservative Party and of the House. Chamberlain, a capable administrator though with a somewhat narrow and conventional outlook on diplomacy, and ‘rather wooden in his outlook on domestic problems’, was to run the Office with little interference from Baldwin, who willingly admitted that he knew ‘less than nothing’ about foreign affairs. At the time, however, Chamberlain's sharp criticism of Baldwin's inclusion of Churchill in the Cabinet and the refusal of Cabinet posts to Sir Robert Home and G. T. Locker-Lampson cast a momentary doubt in Baldwin's mind about the wisdom of appointing Chamberlain as Foreign Secretary.