1924–1931: In and out of Parliament Within weeks, Cooper was selected for the winnable seat of
Oldham, where he was elected at the
general election in October 1924, with a 13,000 majority over the sitting Labour member. He made a very successful maiden speech on Egypt, which was praised by
H. A. L. Fisher, who spoke next. The speech was also praised in several newspaper accounts. He was seen as a "coming man" within the party. Cooper was a stalwart supporter of Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin and a friend of the
Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Winston Churchill. In January 1928, he was appointed
Financial Secretary to the War Office, not a position that he would have chosen. Secretary of State Sir
Laming Worthington-Evans gave him much responsibility. Cooper very likely would have been promoted if the Conservatives had won the
election in 1929, but they were defeated, and he lost his own seat.
John Julius, his only legitimate child, was born in 1929. Out of Parliament, Cooper wrote a biography of the French statesman
Talleyrand,
Napoleon's famous chief diplomat. He wrote slowly but seldom needed to revise his drafts. Ziegler writes that "rarely can subject and author have been more satisfactorily matched" as both men were worldly and disliked cant. The book was eventually published in 1932 by his nephew
Rupert Hart-Davis to critical praise and lasting success.
1931–1935: By-election and junior minister The
March 1931 by-election for the constituency of
Westminster St George's (caused by the death of Cooper's recent boss, Laming Worthington-Evans), saw
Beaverbrook's
Empire Free Trade Crusade party threatening the Conservative position at a time when satisfaction with Baldwin's leadership was at a low. When the original Conservative candidate,
John Moore-Brabazon, stepped down, Duff Cooper agreed to contest the election in what was regarded as a referendum on Baldwin's leadership. He won the seat with a majority of 5,710, thus returning to
Parliament and serving until 1945. In August 1931, on the formation of the National Government, he was appointed
Financial Secretary to the War Office under the elderly
Lord Crewe, who left Cooper to do a great deal of the work. In June 1934 he was appointed
Financial Secretary to the Treasury, a traditional stepping stone to the Cabinet. This brought him close to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, who thought highly of him. He had been to
Nazi Germany and had seen and been appalled by a
Nuremberg Rally. Chamberlain told him to tone down his criticisms of Hitler. Cooper urged
rearmament, which was not then a fashionable view, and briefed
Winston Churchill, who was then on the backbenches, that Hitler seriously wanted war.
Haig biography Cooper, keen to make a literary name for himself, was approached by the executors of
Field Marshal Haig in March 1933 to write his official biography, after a number of military and literary figures had declined. He insisted on full access to Haig's papers and relied heavily on Haig's (as yet unpublished) diaries. Haig's widow then had second thoughts and wrote a book of her own,
The Man I Knew, whose publication
Faber and Faber delayed with legal action until after Duff Cooper had published his two volumes in 1935 and 1936. Stephen Heathorn describes Cooper's biography as "the apogee of the admiring biography [of Haig]", following in the tradition of previous works by Dewar & Boraston (1922), George Arthur (1928) and
John Charteris (1929). He stressed Haig's strong and upright character, as if he were writing about a Victorian hero. He wrote that there was "no room for thoughts of petty malice or of mean revenge in that high and honourable man" (Vol. 2, p. 98) and that "in moral stature Haig was a giant" (pp. 440–1).
David Lloyd George's memoirs were appearing as Cooper was writing and some of his book was devoted to addressing Lloyd George's arguments. Cooper argued that Haig's
offensive on the Somme saved the French at
Verdun, Haig improved
Anglo-French relations and Haig defeated the Germans through inflicting attrition on them on the Somme and
at Ypres. The book received many generous reviews and remained the leading biography of Haig until
John Terraine's
The Educated Soldier in 1963. Historians' view of Haig would be dramatically changed by the 1952 publication of his Private Papers, which revealed his political intrigues, and his privately-uncharitable view of various British officers and politicians and of the French in general. At the time, Cooper admitted to
Robert Blake, the editor of that work, that he had been influenced by the politics of the 1930s and the desire to facilitate Anglo-French rapprochement. Modern views of Cooper's biography are less favourable: George Egerton, writing in
The Journal of Modern History in 1988, detected a conflict between Cooper the writer, who concealed the degree to which Haig, like everybody else, was dwarfed by events, and the historian, who was too honest to pretend that he dominated them. Ziegler wrote that the book was criticised for pro-Haig bias and what Ziegler calls the "lack of consideration".
1935–1938: Cabinet and resignation In November 1935, after the
general election, Cooper was promoted to the Cabinet as
Secretary of State for War and appointed to the Privy Council. During the
Abdication Crisis he was sympathetic to
Edward VIII and to the possibility of a
morganatic marriage, and in vain advised him to wait until after his
coronation (due in 1937) before picking a fight with the government over his plans to marry
Wallis Simpson. He felt out of kilter with the Conservative leadership and was surprised when the new prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, appointed him
First Lord of the Admiralty in May 1937. Ziegler wrote that his tenure of office was "an unequivocal success". Cooper enjoyed high living on board the Admiralty yacht
HMS Enchantress but fought Chamberlain and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir
John Simon for more spending on the
Royal Navy. Chamberlain saw him as indiscreet and as a firebrand. By the time of the
Munich Agreement, Cooper was isolated in the Cabinet as the most public critic of Chamberlain's appeasement policy. On 3 October 1938, a few days after the Munich Agreement, he denounced it and resigned from the Cabinet. On doing, so he said that "war with honour or peace with dishonour" he might have been persuaded to accept, "but war with dishonour—that was too much". The fellow opponent of appeasement and Conservative Party MP
Vyvyan Adams described Cooper's actions as "the first step in the road back to national sanity". As a backbencher, Cooper joined the coterie around
Anthony Eden, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary in February 1938, but Cooper made only muted criticisms of the government. His main source of income was writing articles for the
Evening Standard. He argued for an Anglo-French alliance. ==Second World War==