The Primacy of Foreign Policy

Politics and the conduct of foreign affairs, having been brought together to influence the timing and tone of the 1935 general election, remained connected thereafter. This was contrary to what many politicians would have wished, but external events and domestic developments contrived to make foreign policy central to political debate and calculation in the new Parliament. That its first set-piece crisis concerned the policy-making activities of the foreign secretary was in a way portentous. The occasion was the pre-Christmas furore over the so-called Hoare-Laval pact, which revealed that the League of Nations was not, after all, the keystone of Britain’s foreign policy and resulted in Hoare resigning the foreign secretaryship on 18 December. It was a crisis of short duration and, whatever its longer term consequences, was, as the re-elected Dalton recorded, ‘[v]ery exciting while it lasted’.1