Word: chamberlaine
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Amazingly last week the British Delegation were sniped at in a manner definitely "not cricket" by hawk-nosed Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain. He suddenly took it on himself to say that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister had no authority from Britain's Cabinet to make fresh commitments at Stresa last week or at Geneva this week when the League Council meets. Mr. Chamberlain hinted that Mr. MacDonald and Sir John could not be trusted not to exceed their authority and that he was therefore obliged to expose their real position. Next day they hotly retorted...
...idealistically on & on. Mussolini & Flandin urged the British to join them in direct demands that the League Council take punitive steps against Adolf Hitler's raising of a conscript army of 550,000 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. MacDonald & Simon, though they had in effect told Chamberlain that he could go to the devil, were actually intimidated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the point of pleading with France not so much as to mention Germany by name but merely to fulminate at Geneva against treaty-breaking in general...
Such a power in British politics is stern, hawk-featured Neville Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer, that the House of Commons received him and his 1935-36 budget with cheers this week after his un-English hamstringing of the Prime Minister and Sir John Simon while they were away at Stresa...
Ramsay MacDonald, arriving home by airplane, was in time to be ignored by the house while every eager eye followed the tall Chancellor's stork-like dipping into his notes, the swift gestures of his right hand in which he held his eyeglasses and the Chamberlain mannerism of emphasizing a point by tapping smartly with the twinkling glasses...
From a purely literary standpoint the treatment of Osborne's death ranks high enough so that we regret that the same inspiration is not evident throughout the volume--just as we regret that Chamberlain did not start his story in the middle...