Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1935. On 7 June 1935, MacDonald resigned as British Prime Minister due to ailing health and was replaced by Stanley Baldwin of the Conservative Party; the leadership change did not affect British foreign policy in any meaningful way. On October 3, 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and thus began the Abyssinia Crisis. Under strong pressure from a moralistic British public opinion, which was very much in favor of collective security, the British government took the lead in pressing the League of Nations for sanctions against Italy. The decision of the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to take a strong line in
Stanley Baldwin yesterday". In 1935 Baldwin wrote to J. C. C. Davidson (in a letter now lost) saying of Churchill: "If there is going to be a war – and no one can say that there is not – we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister". Thomas Dugdale also claimed Baldwin said to him: "If we do have a war, Winston must be Prime Minister. If he is in [the Cabinet] now we shan't be able to engage in that war as a united nation". The General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Walter Citrine, recalled a conversation