Foreign News: Ludicrous

The pay of Great Britain’s Prime Minister (£5,000: $24,300 a year) is “ludicrously inadequate, gentlemen, ludicrously inadequate!”

Thus testified fiery little David Lloyd George (Liberal) last week and was stoutly backed up by Stanley Baldwin (Conservative). Soon James Ramsay MacDonald (Laborite) made this judgment of two former Prime Ministers unanimous. “Living as I must at No. 10 Downing St.,” he said, “I have tokeep four servants more than if I lived in my own home at Hampstead.”

One member of the Royal Commission now examining this phase of the budget proved unsympathetic. “If what you say is so, Sir,” he shot back, “may I ask if you could not resume your residence at Hampstead?” Scot MacDonald replied unruffled: “The pressure of affairs of state compels the Prime Minister to live at No. 10.* I am up at 6:30 and rarely go to bed before 10. At 9 in the morning I work with the secretaries’ boxes [impressive red morocco affairs: the British statesman’s equivalent for a briefcase] and despatches. Then there are all sorts of other reasons. For one thing you must have changes of clothes by you.”

The Royal Commission as a whole acknowledged that a Prime Minister cannot possibly be expected to motor some five miles out to Hampstead every time he must change his clothes, asked Mr. MacDonald to state frankly what he thought his salary ought to be. Cogitating, he replied, “At least seven thousand pounds [$34,020]. . . . On five thousand [$24,300] any Prime Minister without private income and dependent on his salary would be living on charity in two years after he left the office, unless he were an extremely careful person or unless he were supported by friends.”

Presumably friends support the honest Scot. A “lifelong friend” (Sir Alexander Grant) gave him during his first Prime Ministry a $13,122 Daimler limousine (similar to the King’s) plus 30,000 shares of McVitie & Price (biscuits) stock then worth $150,000, “the income to pay for upkeep of the car” (TIME, Sept. 22,1924). Scot MacDonald no longer has Daimler or its endowment, now uses a Vauxhall.

Of “Chequers,” the endowed official country seat of the Prime Minister, Mr. MacDonald concluded ruefully: “You get $75 per week-end for Chequers. I had every delegate down there during the Naval Conference. For six weeks running I had 14 or 15 to luncheon both Saturdays and Sundays, but it is not going to come very much out of my pocket when taking the allowance over a period.”

Among recent Prime Ministers rich Stanley Baldwin has been best able to stand the expense, spent nearly double what was left of his $24,300 salary after $7,290 had been snipped off by the income tax. Mr. Lloyd George protests (perhaps too often) that he never personally touched a penny of the millions of pounds he allegedly got as Prime Minister by selling peerages to war profiteers. This money, now amounting through wise investment to some $15,000,000, is officially the campaign fund of the Liberal Party. Because he controls this money, Mr. Lloyd George, whom many a Liberal mistrusts and dislikes, remains leader of the party with a stranglehold that nothing can break.

*Nearly all the Government offices face on Whitehall, the broad street extending from Trafalgar Square nearly to the Houses of Parliament. Downing is a short, narrow “dead end” street off Whitehall, containing the official residences of the Prime Minister No. 10 and Chancellor of the Exchequer No. 11.