KING AND PREMIER

Taranaki Daily News, 23 December 1932, Page 13

KING AND PREMIER

A REMARKABLE FRIENDSHIP

ALL CALCULATIONS UPSET.

GEORGE V & RAMSAY MacDONALD.

(By

P. W. Wilson,

in the New York

Times.)

If we were privileged to pay a surprise visit, let us say, to Balmoral in Scotland, where the Royal Family of Great Britain usually resorts for the shooting, we might happen to see two elderly men, one of them with a grey beard and the other with horn-rimmed spectacles, sitting at ease in some quiet comer and. evidently enjoying each other’s company. It would be King George chatting familiarly with his Prime Minister, James Ramsay MacDonald. So placid a scene would not appear, at first sight, to be surprising. Why should not King George enjoy a chat with Prime Minister MacDonald? It would be only after a moment of reflection that the/ significance of the occasion would be realised. Who is King George? And who is Prime! Minister MacDonald? Answer those questions and at once it is manifest that the two elderly men in their comfortable armchairs are perpetrating a defiance of precedent which, even in a world turned topsy-turvy, upsets all the recognised calculations. , SOVEREIGN AND SOCIALIST. On the one hand, the great titular sovereign, the direct descendant of Alfred the Great and Charlemagne, in whose veins runs the blood or Plantagenets, Stuarts, Bourbons, Hapsburgs and Hohefizollems, to say nothing of Gothas, Guelphs and Schleswig-Holstein-Sonder-burg-Glucksburgs. He reigns over onequarter of mankind and is salued everywhere with anthem, gun and curtsey. He presides over a Windsor Castle that was founded by William the Conqueror, rind he rides in a state-coach, every gilded gargoyle of which survived the terrors of the French Revolution. That is King George, the quiet and unassuming man with the grey beard. On the other hand we see the most conspicuous Socialist and radical in the country,' denounced for thirty years as MacDonald, the pro-Boer; MacDonald the pacifist; MacDonald, who hobnobbed with Bebel, the German, the Jaures, the Frenchman, in the Second International; MacDonald, who wants to overthrow capitalism and confiscate’ the rights of property; MacDonald, the friend of every country but his own; the accomplice of Swarajists in India arid Sinn Fein in Ireland; MacDonald, who has recognised the independence of Egypt and condoned the communism of Russia. That, is the man with horn-rimmed spectacles, the stoop of whose. broad shoulders proclaims the scholar. TURN IN THEIR GRAVES. There are illustrious. ancestors of the King Emperor who, if they hear of these carryings on, will turn in their graves. King George 111. was so. particular in his tastes that he used to regard Charles James Fox, the greatest orator' of his generation, and, incidentally, descended from King Charles 11., whose name he bore, as so perverse an upholder of rebels in America and so traitorous a defender of revolutionary France that, with his own hand, he struck the fellow’s name from. his privy council. So irate was King George IV. over Canning’s advocacy of Catholic emancipation in Ireland and republics in Latin America that he was hard put to admit the man to an audience. In order to get rid of a reformer called Brougham, King William IV. broke up Melbourne’s government, and as for Queen Victoria, her sufferings over Gladstone and Home Rule were unspeakable. But what wore the political peccadilloes of Fox and Canning, of Brougham and Gladstone, compared with the anarchic infamies of James Ramsay MacDonald? . .. THE KING’S PREFERENCE. It is not merely that MacDonald’s audiences with His Majesty are prolonged an<T intimate. It is not merely that the King, hearing that MacDonald has trouble with his eyes, visits him in hospital, It is not merely that society in London has to be polite to MacDonald as a persona grata at court. It is not merely that Miss Ishbel MacDonald is mothered, from time to time, by a kindly and gracious Queen Mary. On MacDonald, the Socialist, King George as the sovereign, has evidently placed unusual reliance in recent months. It is true, of course, that, according to the customary procedure under the British Constitution, it is by the vote of the people that Prime Min-, isters are appointed to advise His Majesty. But when the economic emergency arose, the King could have had—for the moment, at any rate —any Prime Minister that he -Wanted. Stanley Baldwin, a true blue Conservative, was available, and while Lloyd George, the Liberal superman, was hors de combat, there were several statesmen in that camp—Lord Reading, for one—who might have been drafted. It was in preference to all these distinguished possibilities that Mr. MacDonald was selected, and it was as the King’s choice that, subsequently, he received the endorsement of the electors.

King George was born in a court among courts when monarchy, as an institution, was at the zenith of its splendour. His Prime Minister was reared in a Highland cottage. King George wte trained in a navy that had no rival on the seven seas; his Prime Minister struggled unknown through school to the free lance of a journalist. Surrounded by nobility and” wealth and the aristocracy of success, the King surveyed the world from above. Devoting 30 year’s to organising Britain’s untouchables into a cohesive Labour Party, the Prime Minister surveyed life from below. Yet when the man on the summit of society and the man at the base came to close quarters they managed somehow to understand, to respect and even to enjoy each other. , ' ' • THE POLES MEET. In 1923 the Labour party was the official Opposition, and something had to be donexby Their Majesties to thaw the Socialist ice. On a historic evening, Lady Astor, by request, invited the leaders to meet the King and Queen at dinner. Among colleagues as little accustomed as he to the presence of majesty, Ramsay MacDonald displayed an ease of manner, charm of conversation and range of culture that proclaimed the pre-eminence Which he had no need to assert. He was invited to State banquets at Buckingham Palace, and it was not long before the Labour party, winning its way to pbwer, provided the King with the handsomest Prime Minister in Europe. So developed an association as delightful to the two men as it was unusual to both of them. Restrained by etiquette, the King was happy to talk with a Minister inspired by ideas. Surfeited with ideas—and especially with the ideas which, too thoroughly, he had inculcated into the minds of his followers, the Prime Minister was no less happy in ffie relief afforded by etiquette. Both

men had travelled the wide world over. Both men had made it an object in life to meet celebrities and converse with them. Both men ..read the newspapers and had’ thus plenty to talk about. It is from opposite points of the compass that the King arid his Prime Minister arrive at internationalism, but when they, get there, they stand on common ground. Once only has there been evidence of strain. Over the regicide envoys from Moscow the King, as first cousin of the Czar, was. sensitive. It was a ceremony that he left to the Prince of Wales. A CURIOUS AGREEMENT. Over MacDonald there is thus a curious agreement between King George in Buckingham Palace and, Comrade Stalin the Kremlin. Neither in Moscow nor at Windsor is the Prime Minister regarded any longer as a peril to.society. Indeed, he seems to-day to be in a position of isolation.' The free traders in the National Government—Samuel and the rest—have resigned. Even in the House of Lords the soul of Snowden goes marching on. MacDonald is as convinced a- free trader as any person living, but he remains at his post. He is now so heartily detested by Labour that a trade union official who invites the Prime Minister to his home to drinlc a cup of tea loses caste. In his heart MacDonald detests Liberals. He can never be a typical Conservative. If, then, he remains in public life it is no longer as a leader of a party, no longer’ as a prophet of a movement. Charged with betraying a great cause, MacDonald craves not for mercy. Indeed, he can expect none. His appeal is for bare justice. He had to handle a great emergency and to-day he hopes—party or no party—to achieve a great emancipation. If he is able to promote disarmament, if he can influence the World Economic Conference, he will have deserved well even of the comrades who inevitably are among his critics. The Sovereign also will have been justified of his Socialist.