Arthur
Balfour was born
on the family's Scottish estate in East Lothian in 1848. Educated
at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge,
he entered the House of Commons in 1874
as the Conservative MP for Hertford.
In 1878 Balfour became private secretary to his uncle, the Marquess
of Salisbury, who was Foreign Secretary in the Conservative
government headed by Benjamin Disraeli.
In the 1885 General Election Balfour was
elected to represent the East Manchester
constituency. The Marquess of Salisbury,
who was now Prime Minister, appointed him as his Secretary for Scotland.
Other posts during the next few years included Chief Secretary of
Ireland (1887), First Lord of the Treasury (1892) and leader of the
House of Commons (1892).
Balfour replaced his uncle as Prime Minister in 1902. The most important
events during his premiership included the 1902
Education Act and the ending of the Boer
War. The topic of Tariff Reform split Balfour's government and
when he resigned in 1905, Edward VII
invited Henry Campbell-Bannerman to
form a government. Campbell-Bannerman accepted and in the 1906
General Election that followed the Liberal
Party had a landslide victory.
Balfour remained leader of the Conservative
Party until he was replaced by Andrew Bonar
Law in 1911. He returned to government when in 1915 Herbert
Asquith offered him the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in
Britain's First World War coalition government.
The following year, David Lloyd George,
the new Prime Minister, appointed him as Foreign Secretary, and consequently
was responsible for the Balfour Declaration in 1917 which promised
Zionists a national home in Palestine.
Balfour left Lloyd George's government in 1919 but returned to office
when he served as Lord President of the Council (1925-29) in theConservative
government headed by Stanley Baldwin.
Arthur Balfour
died in 1930.
(1)
Henry Hamilton Fyfe was a reporter on The
Times when he first met Arthur Balfour.
I saw that Balfour was not a great man. He had charm and wit; he could
be energetic when he chose, but he chose very seldom; he had a marvellously
acute mind, but he feared the logic of its conclusions. He was truly
bored by almost everything, and he was born lazy. I recall one of
his official secretaries telling me furiously how Balfour was primed
for a critical debate, given sheaves of notes, told what his line
of argument must be. "And then," spluttered Robert Morant,
"he stuffed all the papers in his pocket without looking at them,
and made a speech that missed all the essential points." After
such episodes he would be more than usually charming, and would ask
with a smile and a slight lift of his shoulders, "What does it
matter?"
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