Constituency : Walthamstow 1906-18, Spen Valley 1922-40 ( from 1931 Liberal National )
John took Walthmstow from the Tories. He is one of the great political villains , in Liberal circles for fatally splitting the party to resume his ministerial career and on the wider stage as one of the chief architects of the appeasement policy.
John was the son of a Congregational minister from Manchester. He was educated at Fettes College, Edinburgh and Oxford. He became a barrister. He only had a few years experience before being chosen to fight Walthamstow over a more richer man.
John became part of Asquith's social set. Asquith referred to him as "the Impeccable".
John was a strong advocate of the People's Budget.
In 1910 John succeeded Rufus Isaacs as Solicitor-General and was knighted. Isaacs had moved to Attorney-General and John succeeded him in that post too after the Marconi Scandal. Unusually this gave him a seat in the Cabinet.
John had a cold aura about him which attracted mistrust among his colleagues. Lord Halifax said of him, "he is constantly trying to secure the friendship of other people on terms more favourable to himself than to them".
John had pacifist leanings - arguably the only consistent principle of his career - and led the Cabinet opposition to Churchill's naval estimates in 1914. He contemplated resigning on the outbreak of the war but ultimately decided to remain in the government.
When Asquith formed his coalition government in 1915 John was offered but declined the Lord Chancellorship. Instead he became Home Secretary. He resigned the following year over conscription. To avoid becoming too identified with the hardcore pacifists he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps and was mentioned in dispatches.
John remained loyal to Asquith and was defeated in 1918 by a couponed Conservative in Walthamstow East.
In 1919 John decided to contest the Spen Valley by-election which had been held by a Lloyd George supporter. Haig praised his war service during the campaign. Lloyd George put his own candidate up for the government but the consequent split in the Liberal vote let Labour in and John pushed the Coalition Liberal into third place. It was seen as a major rebuff to the Prime Minister.
John concentrated on his legal work until returning to the Commons for Spen Valley in 1922 coming out top in a contest with Labour and the Tories. He became deputy leader of the party. He increased his majority in 1923 and benefited from the Tories withdrawing in 1924.
With Asquith losing his seat, John resigned as deputy leader in 1924.
In 1926 John gave a public legal opinion that the General Strike was illegal and that trade union members might be personally liable if they came out. This was a big help to Baldwin's government.
Shortly after that John retired from legal practice and was appointed chair of a commmission on India's constitution.
John was publicly sceptical about the Liberals' radical unemployment policy in 1929. Baldwin intervened to persuade the local Tories not to run a candidate against him in the election that year.
John was opposed to Lloyd George's policy of co-operation with Macdonald's Labour government and the possibility of electoral reform. In 1930 he warned Lloyd George that he wouldn't support the government in a vote of confidence. In March 1931 he hinted that he might be ready to abandon Free Trade.
In June 1931 John declared his resignation from the Liberal whip over Lloyd George's support for Snowden's land taxes. Lloyd George described him as having left "the slime of hypocrisy" behind him. He gathered together a group of like-minded Liberal MPs as the "Liberal Nationals" who would support the National Government of Baldwin even if it abandoned Free Trade. In return, the Conservatives would not oppose them in their constituencies. This split effectively ruined the Liberal party as a parliamentary force.
John became Foreign Secretary in the National Government and was fiercely criticised for a speech in Geneva in 1932 in which he failed to condemn the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and seriously undermined the League of Nations. John felt that the criticism was mainly from countries who, unlike Britain, would not have been called on to do anything about it. He was also criticised as indecisive, a dep thinker rather than a practical politician.
John's Liberal Nationals served as a political figleaf to maintain the "National" character of the government after Samuel's Liberal rump departed and the ex-Labour figures dropped out of the picture. This sustained John's ministerial career.
John became Home Secretary under Baldwin and passed the Public Order Act which constrained the activities of Mosley's Blackshirts. Baldwin also made him Deputy Leader of the Commons. Neville Chamberlain was a close political ally and made John Chancellor of the Exchequer when he took over in 1937. However even Chamberlain said, "I am always trying to like him and believing I shall succeed when something crops up to put me off". Harold Nicholson described him as "a toad and a worm".
When Chamberlain fell in 1940 Churchill was faced with the problem of what to do with the arch-Appeaser. John had been fingered as second only to Chamberlai himself in the tract Guilty Men . Churchill raised him to the peerage as Viscount Simon and made him Lord Chancellor but excluded him from the War Cabinet. He gave up the leadership of the Liberal Nationals.
After the war, Attlee excluded John from the British delegation to the Nuremberg War trials explicitly citing his pre-war position as the reason. John felt the Liberal Nationals had served their purpose and offered to join the Conservatives but Churchill put him off. He did not offer John a return to the Woolsack in 1951.
John published his memoirs Retrospect in 1952. These were regarded as dull and unrevelatory.
John was an accomplished chess player.
He died of a stroke in 1954 aged 80.
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