MARQUESS OF CURZON

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 225, 22 September 1928, Page 9

MARQUESS OF CURZON

Disappointed At Not Becoming Prime Minister. REVEALED IN BIOGRAPHY. (Australian and N.Z. Press Association.) LONDON, September 21. The final volume of the Earl of Eonaldshay's biography of the late Marquess of Curzon, who died in 1925, reveals for the first time the bitterness of Lord Curzon's disappointment because his life's greatest ambition, to become Prime Minister, was not realised when the late Mr. Bonar Law retired in 1923.

Many persons regarded it as being a foregone conclusion that Lord Curzon would succeed Mr. Law, and when he was invited to see Lord Stamfordham, the King's Secretary, at Buckingham Palace,- he thought the greatest moment of his life had arrived. Lord Curzon him-

self refers to his

~ . pleasurable anticipation in going to Buckingham Palace: I found that the almost unanimous opinion of the newspapers was that the choice lay between Mr. Baldwin and myself. There was. no question of the immense superiority of my claims, but it was Lord Stamfordham's unpleasant duty to convey the decision of the Kin*, that since the Labour party, the official Opposition in the House of Commons was not represented in the House of Lords the objections to having the Prime Minister in the Upper House were insuperable." Lord Curzon was filled with disappointment at having missed his life's ambition. He accepted an invitation to continue at the Foreign Office, and a week later he proposed Mr. Baldwin as Leader of the Conservative party.