Baldwin examines every investment a minister might innocently hold, finds each one a scandal-in-waiting, and concludes the only safe course is lending your money to the Soviet Government.

July 1926, two months after the General Strike, with the miners still locked out and the political temperature high. The attack on ministerial directorships was a proxy skirmish — Labour probing the money culture of a Cabinet rich in company directors — and Baldwin meets it not with indignation but with the studied reasonableness that made him the most effective parliamentary manager of his age. The self-portrait as a plain back-bencher accidentally translated to Downing Street was, as always with Baldwin, both genuine and artful: the Baldwins were ironmasters, and he had famously given a fifth of his own fortune anonymously to the Treasury after the war. The deadpan Soviet-loan solution and the foundling advertisement did what Baldwin's humour always did — made the Opposition's earnestness look faintly ridiculous without a hard word being spoken. The underlying question never went away: the Campbell-Bannerman rule evolved into the modern Ministerial Code, and the House was still refining the answer — through Poulson, cash-for-questions, Nolan and beyond — a century later.

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