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Stanley Baldwin became a Justice of the Peace, the chairman of a board of school managers and a member of the Worcestershire County Council. He made a few political speeches, mainly in his father’s constituency. In 1904, he became candidate for the neighbouring borough of Kidderminster. It was a Conservative-held seat, and the assumption was that the next election would result in two Baldwins sitting for Worcestershire. This did not happen. The 1906 election produced a Liberal landslide, although it was much less strong in the West Midlands than in most other parts of the country. Alfred Baldwin held Bewdley, but Stanley was defeated at Kidderminster. He had not much enjoyed the campaign, and whether because of this or of the result, he had to go immediately on a two-day walk from Kingham to Oxford to purge himself of his ‘humours’.
    Neither the campaign nor the result purged him or his family of a settled if unenthusiastic feeling that he ought to go into the House of Commons. The member for Worcester City was on this occasion one of the dozen or so gentlemen who, after mostlate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century general elections, as a sort of ritual but somewhat haphazard sacrifice to virtue made by an easy-going society, were unseated on petition for allegedly corrupt electoral practices. Joseph Chamberlain, who had held Birmingham and much of the West Midlands firm for Unionism and Tariff Reform, suggested that Baldwin should step into the seat. The Baldwin family were strong for protection, which commended them to Chamberlain. But it was not enough to commend Stanley to the City of Worcester Conservative and Unionist Association. They preferred Edward Goulding, • whom Baldwin described as ‘an Irishman, whom I then thought and think still, to be vastly my inferior. So I was turned down in my own county town in favour of a stranger …’ 4 It was one of the few occasions in his life when he
tried
and failed. For some years to come, his parliamentary prospects seemed blocked. It did not occur to him to look for a seat outside Worcestershire, and even if it had there was little reason why he should have secured one.
    Then, in February 1908, his father died suddenly. Two days after the funeral Stanley Baldwin was selected as candidate for Bewdley. Before the end of the month he was returned unopposed. It remained his seat for a few months short of thirty years. His majorities were not always as big as he would have liked, notably in 1923, his first election as Prime Minister, when he rashly asked for 10,000 and got 6000; but he was never in remote danger of losing the seat.
    He was in his forty-first year when he entered the House of Commons, six months over the watershed which Joseph Chamberlain, thirty years before, had thought was the limit if a fully effective parliamentary career was not to be precluded. He was younger at entry than either his predecessor (Bonar Law) or his successor (Neville Chamberlain) as leader of the Conservative Party, but older, and in most cases significantly so, than any other Prime Minister, of any party, of the past two hundred years.
    The House of Commons accepted him as a quiet, agreeable member of some substance, not the sort of man who would ever dominate in debate, or who would lead a school of thought, but a man who with three or four others might constitute a very effective block within his party to a course or an individual of which or whom they did not approve. Baldwin spoke very little—only five real speeches, interlaced with an occasional stray intervention, between his election in 1908 and the outbreak of war in 1914. Until then he appeared perfectly content with his placid existence. He had two substantial houses (in London he lived at 27 Queen’s Gate until 1913, when he bought 93 Eaton Square, a still larger house with—an uncharacteristic touch for Baldwin—a more fashionable address) and plenty of money with which to run them and do anything else he