Foreign Secretary
In June 1935, Baldwin became prime minister for the third time. He offered Hoare a choice of the job of Viceroy of India or Foreign Secretary. Hoare, who was ambitious to become Prime Minister, chose the latter to enable him to remain active in domestic politics. The position would later make him notorious. Hoare's exhausting time as India Secretary had given him little chance to study foreign affairs, and as Foreign Secretary he tended to follow the advice given to him by Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office who saw Italy as a potential ally against Germany. Vansittart argued to Hoare that Italy could threaten British control of the Mediterranean Sea and hence the sea-lanes running through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, Egypt and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean that linked Britain to its colonies in Asia. Although the bombast of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was not taken very seriously in Britain, Italy, which also controlled Libya, straddled Britain's sea route across the Mediterranean. In particular, Vansittart stressed that deployment of naval forces to deter Japan (the Singapore strategy) depended upon a friendly Italy not challenging Britain in the Mediterranean. Finally, Vansittart argued that Italy was the chief supporter of Austria against German ambitions for an Anschluss (e.g. in 1934 when Italy had deployed troops to the Brenner Pass to deter Germany) and that a friendly Italy would allow France to concentrate its forces on the Rhineland. For all reasons, Vansittart argued that Ethiopia would have to be sacrificed to win the friendship of Italy. The historian John Charmley argued it was no accident that Hoare along with other "appeasers" such as Lord Halifax and Sir John Simon had devoted significant parts of their careers to India, which he stated influenced their conduct of foreign affairs, writing: "In both case, nationalists were to be negotiated with until their lowest demands could be discovered and provided they were low enough granted. Nehru, Gandhi, and Hitler, however much the contemporary mind rejects the equation, had much in common to British ministers between the wars".
Hoare took office against a backdrop of what R.J.Q. Adams described as "much idle talk" of "mutual security". In March 1935, MacDonald's White Paper had committed Britain to limited rearmament. Hoare expressed much distrust of the Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who under the guise of collective security via the League of Nations, had been attempting to build up a bloc against aggression. Hoare believed that Litvinov was engaged in an "intrigue" intended to wreck the possibility of Anglo-German understanding and an arms control pact as he felt that the real aim behind Litvinov's foreign policy was to manipulate the Western nations into going to war with each other to allow the Soviet Union to dominate Europe.
In April 1935, the then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon had signed the Stresa Front on 14 April 1935, an alliance with France and Italy (which had joined the Allies in World War One). However, the Stresa Front did not last. It came to nothing after Britain, without consulting the other members, signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. That dismayed France, which soon signed a Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance. On 19 June 1935, Hoare suggested to the cabinet in a prototype of the Hoare-Laval pact that the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie be offered the port city of Zeila in the colony of British Somaliland (modern northern Somalia) in exchange for him ceding most of his empire to Italy. At this state, Hoare told the cabinet that he wanted a resolution to the crisis that "would not destroy Abyssinian independence but gave Italy some satisfaction". Besides the gathering Abyssinia crisis, Hoare was concerned with pushing through over the opposition of some of his civil servants a loan to China, arguing that building up China's strength was crucial to restraining Japan, which had been aggressive in trying to claim all of Asia as being in the Japanese sphere of influence. Hoare was also well aware that the Soviet Union tended despite the Chinese Civil War to support the Kuomintang government in Nanking against the Japanese claims, and he had been arguing since 1932 that Britain needed to do more to support China in order to prevent China from falling into an alliance with Moscow.
By mid-1935, Mussolini was clearly preparing to attack Abyssinia. For purely self-interested reasons, Baldwin-a prime minister not noted for his interest in foreign affairs-decided to make support for the League of Nations and its policy of collective security the centrepiece of the coming general election. The Labour Party had a platform that somewhat contradictorily called for both disarmament and support for collective security, and Baldwin intended to win the general election by quite ruthlessly exposing that contradiction. Hence as the Abyssinia crisis gathered steam, both Baldwin and Hoare gave speeches stressing that Britain was committed to a policy of collective security via the League of Nations up to and including war. On 12 September 1935 Hoare gave what Adams calls "the greatest speech of his career" to the League of Nations General Assembly at Geneva. He declared: "The League stands and my country stands with it, for the collective maintenance of the Covenant in its entirety and particularly for steady and collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression". His speech was very well received and promoted much cheering from those who heard it. Hoare did not believe in the contents of his speech, saying afterwards in private that the Baldwin government would take a different position on the Abyssinia crisis after the general election was won. In a dispatch to Sir George Clerk, the ambassador in Paris, Hoare stated: "It is essential that we should play out the League hand in September. If it is then found that there is no collective basis for sanctions, that is to say in particular that the French are not prepared to give their full co-operation...the world will have to face the fact that sanctions are impracticable...it must be the League not the British government that declares that sanctions are impracticable and the British government must on no account lay itself open to the charge we have not done our utmost to make them practical". His speech was widely praised in the world press but did not deter the full-scale Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October. The League Council (the executive body of the League that played a role analogous to the United Nations Security Council) ruled that Italy had committed aggression against a fellow member of the League and that sanctions were to be imposed on Italy. Limited sanctions were imposed on Italy but excluded oil. A general election on 14 November 1935 had over 90% of the candidates support the League of Nations, and there was much support for sanctions against Italy although they were not necessarily in Britain's interests.
With the election out of the way, the government, with the agreement of the League Council, authorised Hoare to find a solution. The French premier Pierre Laval was not keen on sanctions on Italy while Hoare used the threat of Britain's veto power as a permanent member of the League Council to prevent oil from being added to the sanctions list. Laval's instincts were to stick with the alliance he had struck with Mussolini earlier that year, but General Maurice Gamelin advised him that an alliance with Italy would be "valuable" to France, but the help of Britain would be "essential", as France very badly needed the "continental commitment" (i.e. Britain to send a large expeditionary force to France) to win another war against Germany. As such, Gamelin argued that the Abyssinia crisis should be settled in a manner that did not estrange Britain. Under pressure from Gamelin, Laval attempted to "square the circle" by working out a deal that would allow France to be on good terms with both Britain and Italy. Hoare sent Sir Maurice Peterson, the head of the Foreign Office Abyssinia Department, to Paris to negotiate a compromise offer to Mussolini. An agreement was reached by the end of November: Italy was to gain territory in the north, with the rump of Abyssinia to be an Italian client state and its army under Italian control. Abyssinia had not been consulted. By December 1935, Hoare was still in poor health and suffering from fainting spells since the stressful period of passing the Government of India Act. Suffering from a serious infection, he stopped off in Paris on his way to a skating holiday in Switzerland. On the guise of stopping off for rest, Hoare secretly met with Laval to finish off the talks. His orders from the cabinet written in the third person were that it was hoped that "the Foreign Secretary would take a generous view of the Italian attitude". Hoare recalled that he was enchanted with Laval's "cunning peasant mind", saying that Laval very much lived up to his "horse trader" image, of a "fixer" who knew how to get what he wanted and to drive a hard bargain. Hoare was gratified that Laval was not committed to an all-out anti-German foreign policy, and he wanted an alliance with Italy to improve France's bargaining power in his talks with Adolf Hitler for a Franco-German settlement. The only issue Hoare had with Laval was that he reminded him very much of Lloyd George "with his incessant desire to deal behind everyone's back". The ensuing Hoare–Laval Pact with French Prime Minister Pierre Laval was unanimously approved by the Cabinet on 9–10 December.
It was leaked to the French and then to the British press, causing a public outcry, not least because of memories of Hoare's recent Geneva speech. Hoare, who had been injured in a skating accident, returned to Britain on 16 December. In the House of Commons, Hugh Dalton, the Labour shadow foreign secretary, called the Hoare-Laval Pact an attempt to "reward the declared aggressor at the expense of the victim, destroy collective security and conflict with the expressed will of the country and the Covenant". Faced with massive criticism both outside Parliament and from within as a group of Conservative backbenchers led by Austen Chamberlain denounced the Hoare-Laval Pact, Baldwin decided to sacrifice Hoare. The Cabinet met on the morning of 18 December. Lord Halifax, who was due to make a statement in the Lords that afternoon, insisted that Hoare resign to save the government's position, causing J. H. Thomas, William Ormsby-Gore and Walter Elliott to come out for Hoare's resignation as well. Privately, however, Halifax was puzzled by the moral outrage as the Hoare-Laval Pact was little different from proposals that had been put forward by the League Committee of Five.
Hoare resigned on 18 December. His successor was Anthony Eden. When Eden had his first audience with King George V, the King is said to have remarked humorously, "No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris." The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, wrote to Lady Hoare to assure her that her husband would soon back into the cabinet and "in a short time his reputation will begin to rise again".
In his memoirs, Hoare admitted that his negotiations in Paris with Laval had caught him at a disadvantage. He noted that in the absence of the Hoare–Laval Pact, the Italians seized all of Abyssinia and drew closer to Germany, which eventually led to the destabilisation of Austria and the indefensibility of Czechoslovakia. The British historian David Dutton wrote that Hoare's reputation has never recovered from the Hoare-Laval Pact, which left him to this day with the image of an abject appeaser whose actions belied his noble words in support of collective security. Dutton argued some of the abuse directed against Hoare was unfair as Winston Churchill also supported sacrificing Ethiopia to win an alliance with Italy, and Churchill only criticised Hoare for the pact with Laval because of their prior disputes over the Government of India Act. Dutton noted that the Hoare-Laval Pact is something of a misnomer as the official who pushed it most strongly on the British side was Vansittart, a man generally considered to be an anti-appeaser whose main objective with the pact was to secure Italy as an ally against Germany. Likewise, Dutton noted that Eden as Foreign Secretary was willing to accept the German remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936, which was of far greater importance than the Abyssinia crisis, but because Eden resigned as Foreign Secretary in 1938 and later served as Churchill's Foreign Secretary, he has a largely undeserved reputation as an anti-appeaser. Dutton wrote that much of the anger and abuse directed at Hoare was because of the contrast between a Foreign Secretary who promised to stop aggression in his speech in September 1935 versus the plan he devised with Laval in December 1935.
