Stanley Baldwin made this famous remark during a public address in the run–up to a crucial by–election in March 1931. He was in opposition at the time, between his second and third terms as Prime Minister. But he was under fire from the press, specifically the Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere – both of whom regarded him as incapable of improving the country's faltering economy, and wanted him replaced as leader of the Conservative Party.
Baldwin was actually quoting his equally famous cousin, Rudyard Kipling, but from a private conversation that had not previously been known to the public at large.
In 1971, in an address to members of the Kipling Society, Baldwin's son Oliver (himself a member of parliament, but a socialist) recounted the story of how Kipling had become friends with Max Aitken – later Lord Beaverbrook – and Kipling made the remark that Stanley Baldwin later appropriated, in response to Aitken's assertion that "What I want is power. Kiss 'em one day and kick 'em the next."
You can read more about it here.
Rudyard Kipling's mother and Stanley Baldwin's mother were sisters. Their father, the Reverend George Browne Macdonald (a Methodist minister, 1805–68), had seven daughters and four sons, and four of the daughters married famous or influential men. The sisters were introduced to the Birmingham Set, a group of students at Oxford University who played a significant role in the Arts & Crafts Movement, by their brother Harry. Alice (1837–1910) married John Lockwood Kipling, an art teacher and museum curator; Georgiana (1840–1920) married the painter Edward Burne–Jones; Agnes (1843–1906) married the painter Edward Poynter; and Louisa (1845–1925) married the industrialist and MP Alfred Baldwin.
© Macclesfield Quiz League 2017