The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (18 page)

There is a wonderful picture of him appearing before the Washington media in one of these bizarre outfits, with a smirk on his face reminiscent of Hugh Hefner about to attend a slumber party. When he wasn’t wearing his bowler, he would wear an extraordinary variety of headgear. It has been said that Churchill never saw a hat he didn’t like. That wasn’t quite true: he’d put on a Glengarry, the traditional Scots cap, in the trenches, looked at himself in the mirror and said ‘Christ!’ before taking it off again.

But he wore top hats, yachting caps, fireman’s hats, giant white astrakhan hats, kepis, solar topis, builder’s helmets, fedoras, sombreros. He was the Imelda Marcos of hats. In fact we need only find a picture of Churchill in a Native American headdress and he could pose as the entire cast of Village People. All his life he had been a showman, an extrovert, theatrical, comical: there is a photo of him dressed for a fancy-dress ball at Sandhurst—meticulously made up, with carefully applied white face paint, as Pierrot the Clown.

He knew how to project his personality, and the war called for someone who could create an image of himself—decisive, combative, but also cheery and encouraging—in the minds of the people. Churchill alone was able to do that, because to a great extent he really was that character.

There is a sense in which eccentricity and humour helped to express what Britain was fighting for—what it was all about. With his ludicrous hats and rompers and cigars and excess alcohol, he contrived physically to represent the central idea of his own political
philosophy: the inalienable right of British people to live their lives in freedom, to do their own thing.

You only had to look at Churchill, and see the vital difference between his way of life and the ghastly seriousness and uniformity and pomposity of the Nazis. Never forget: Hitler was a teetotaller, a deformity that accounts for much misery.

In his personal individualism and bullish eccentricity, Churchill helped define the fight. It was an idea that was to lead him badly astray in the 1945 election, when he made the mistake of comparing Labour government bureaucrats to the Gestapo. But it was absolutely what was needed for the war.

In late March 1944 you will find him again pictured with a tommy gun, inspecting the D-Day troops with Eisenhower. This time he is actually aiming the gun. He has it up to his shoulder and is pointing towards France. He is wearing the same pinstripe suit, the same bowler hat. I can hardly believe it is a coincidence. It is almost as if he is referring to that photo-opportunity of almost four years previously, and saying, ‘I told you we could do it.’

Churchill’s qualities allowed him to stand for the nation. It was also essential to the Churchill Factor that he was seen, more than any other politician, to be his own man: someone whose protean political identity enabled him to explode out of the straitjacket of party politics.

One of the reasons he was able to appeal both to right and left was that he had begun his career as a social reformer, a politician who could certainly claim to have done great things for working people.

CHAPTER 11

‘THE MOST ADVANCED POLITICIAN OF THE TIME’

A
dolf Hitler was so impressed by photographs of the Midland Hotel, Manchester, that he decided it would be the perfect Nazi headquarters in Britain—once Britain had been brought to her knees, and the ruling classes either shot or led off in chains. It is indeed a very fine establishment: a vast ruddy brick fantasy of Edwardian Gothic, with 312 rooms and en suite bathrooms and Michelin-starred restaurants and health suites and Teasmades. I have stayed there several times myself, and used the excellent room service in the small hours. The full English breakfast will keep you going all day.

The hotel was also, once, the temporary address of Winston Churchill. It was here that he came in 1906, when he was fighting for the constituency of Manchester North-West, and here that he hung his hat. Those were the days, you see, when there was no moral pressure
on MPs to have a ‘home’ in the constituency; and even in those days—perhaps particularly in those days—the Midland Hotel was the
ne plus ultra
of luxury. It was just three years old, and had cost £1 million to build; it had its own auditorium, and it made a hell of a contrast with some of the areas of Manchester that the thirty-one-year-old Churchill proposed to represent.

One cold winter evening he sauntered out in the company of his faithful secretary, Eddie Marsh. They found themselves in a slum, not far from the Midland, and Churchill discharged himself of the following aperçu: ‘
Fancy living in one of these streets,’ he said, looking around him, ‘never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury . . . never saying anything clever!’

A lot of people have taken exception to this remark. They say it shows condescension to the poor. He seems to reveal himself as a man so out of touch with the real world that he can’t imagine people on low incomes ever saying anything worth hearing; and so ignorant of their lives that he can’t believe they have anything worth eating.

We don’t know whether these were his exact words, though Marsh is unlikely to have made it up; but there is no doubt that this quotation has helped build the case that Churchill was always a bit of a reactionary old elitist.

This is the man, after all, who believed in eugenics; a social Darwinist who at various times wanted penal colonies for vagrants and sterilisation of the unfit. He certainly spoke of humanity being divided into qualitatively different ‘races’—in a way that we find intellectually very dodgy today—and used vocabulary to describe foreigners that was standard for the time, but these days is taboo.

He wrote to Clementine boasting that the children were working ‘
like blacks’ to get Chartwell ready for her return; he ignored the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s, saying he had ‘
no interest in the quarrels of the yellow peoples’.

He wanted to ‘
bomb or machine-gun’ Sinn Fein, whose representatives are now feted at banquets at Windsor Castle. He said the Bolsheviks were ‘
baboons’, and that communism was a ‘
horrible form of mental and moral disease’. Indeed, he once said that ‘
one might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks’; an observation that looks a bit topsy-turvy today.

No one would appoint Churchill to any public office in modern Britain, not unless he toned it down a good deal. He said that making concessions to Mahatma Gandhi—now venerated as the father of modern India—was like ‘
feeding cat’s meat to a tiger’ (especially inapposite, given that Gandhi-ji was a devout veggie).

How much more right-wing can you get? Well, try this: as Home Secretary in 1910 he was alleged by the Labour Party to have sent armed troops against striking miners at Tonypandy in Wales; and in 1911 he certainly did authorise the troops to fire on striking dockers in Liverpool. During the General Strike of 1926 he used a scab battalion of printers and journalists to produce a work of stirring government propaganda called
The British Gazette
; he proposed that the BBC be closed down for the duration, said that ‘
a bit of bloodshed would not go amiss’ and that he wanted to get the transport workers ‘by the throat’. His ‘whiff of grapeshot’ approach was condemned by Labour and the unions, and by his fellow Liberals.

Now take all this together and ask yourself—does this man sound like a lefty-liberal milquetoast? Banning the BBC? Shooting at striking dockers, just for rioting and smashing things? There are aspects of Churchill that make him sound like a chap who has had a few too many at a golf club bar. And yet this is the same Churchill who was the begetter of some of the most progressive legislation for the last 200 years. Together with Lloyd George, he deserves the title of Founder of the Welfare State.

His achievements in the Second World War are so famous that
they have all but eclipsed his record as a social reformer: a record that deserves to be burnished and celebrated today. Churchill was heavily influenced by Lloyd George—indeed, the Welsh solicitor was one of the very few human beings to whom he deferred—but the measures he produced were his own, and driven by his own frantic energy.

He began in 1908 with a Trades Board Bill, designed to help low-paid workers—mainly female—who were engaged in ‘sweated labour’. They were working making garments in the East End of London, in Leeds, and in Manchester. Their wages were being undercut by immigrants, notably from eastern Europe (
plus ça change
); and the Trades Boards were there to set legally enforceable minimum wages for certain jobs. It was a concept that was alien to the theories of the classical Liberals—the Gladstonians who were still to be found in the cabinet. But Churchill and Lloyd George were New Liberals—or Radicals.

Explaining why the measure was necessary, Churchill said:

It is a national evil that any class of her Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions. Where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad and the bad by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes up the trade as a second string . . . where these conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.

Those are some of the arguments still made for the living wage today. To help combat unemployment (then running at about 8 per cent—and with virtually no benefits to support the victims), he was
instrumental in setting up the first Labour Exchanges; and by early 1910 he and Clementine were able to tour seventeen of them. Just think, next time you look at a Jobcentre Plus: Winston Churchill started those.

He was the man who first hired William Beveridge—who was to go on and build the post-war welfare state in the 1940s; and Beveridge paid tribute to the force with which Churchill drove things through in that early epoch of reform. Writing of the first Labour Exchanges, Beveridge said they were ‘
a striking illustration of how much the personality of the minister in a few critical months may change the course of social legislation’.

Next, Churchill was the progenitor of unemployment
insurance—the precursor of the dole. It was a contributory scheme, whereby the worker put in 2.5p a week, the employer put in 2.5p a week and the taxpayer put in 3p a week. It meant that if you were unemployed, or you fell ill, and provided you had made your contribution—then you were entitled to a payment that in today’s money would be about £20 a week—not much, but a start. ‘Insurance brings the miracle of averages to the rescue of the masses,’ he said.

In the long run, of course, these averages provided no such miracle. The taxpayer now coughs up for the dole. The contributory principle has been more or less forgotten; but today’s Jobseeker’s Allowance is the direct descendant of Churchill’s scheme.

All this was controversial stuff, and got the Tories hot under the collar—but it was nothing compared to his role in the Great Budget War of 1909 and 1910. The People’s Budget of David Lloyd George was one of the decisive events of modern British history. It was a naked attempt at redistribution of wealth. It was an attack on inequality; and it was seen, inevitably, as an attack on the dukes and the very landed class from which Churchill emerged. Lloyd George wanted to pay for the various Liberal social protection schemes by
whacking up taxes on the very rich, and above all by taxing land. He wanted a 20 per cent tax on the gain in value when land was sold.

The Tories were deeply hostile; the Tory peers threatened to block the budget. Churchill was all for it—and he and Lloyd George teamed up, criss-crossing the country like a vaudeville double act.

We find Churchill in 1909 lamenting the unfairness of the division of land in Britain. Of course there should be land taxes, he says. He has recently been to Germany (to see the German army on manoeuvres and to meet the Kaiser). It strikes him that class inequalities are nothing like as pronounced as they are in Britain: he sees countless small German farms—and no walls around the estates of the nobs. He contrasts it with Britain. ‘
All this picture makes one feel what a dreadful blight and burden our poor people have to put up with—with parks and palaces of country families almost touching one another and smothering the villages and the industry . . .’

Huge parks, crushing the villages of the poor! Huge palaces! Isn’t this all a bit rich from the scion of Blenheim? A lot of people thought so, and when Churchill warned that inequalities would lead to class warfare, the King caused his Private Secretary to write to
The Times
to protest. Churchill bashed on. When the Lords tried to throw out the budget, he directed his fire at an institution that contained a fair few of his relatives. By January 1910 the budget crisis was still not over—and he described the Lords as a ‘
survival of a feudal arrangement utterly passed out of its original meaning, a force long since passed away, which only now requires a smashing blow from the electors to finish it off forever’.

It is now more than a century since Churchill denounced this infamy—of men sitting in Parliament by right of heredity—and there still are hereditary peers in the House of Lords. That shows he was either monstrously radical or far ahead of his time.

In the end the budget passed, after a gripping constitutional
showdown. The King agreed that he would if necessary create enough Liberal peers to ram the benches of the House of Lords and outvote the Tory reactionaries; the landowning peers backed down. Lloyd George and Churchill got their way. Britain embarked on a century of redistribution of wealth.

He was no less of a lefty—at least in Tory eyes—when he got to the Home Office. He shortened prison sentences, when most holders of that office find themselves trying to lengthen them. He reduced the use of solitary confinement. He created a distinction, in British jails, between political prisoners and ordinary criminals—a distinction that still sticks in the craw of many right-wingers today. He may have been rhetorically tough on both Bolshevism and sodomy, but when it came to the application of the law itself, he was mercy personified. Throughout his life Churchill showed a benign indifference to people’s sexual preferences (indeed, Eddie Marsh was himself gay, as Churchill surely knew), and he tried to limit sentences for acts that were then criminalised. On being told that a man had been sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude for sodomy, he wrote to his officials: ‘
The prisoner has already received two frightful sentences of seven years’ penal servitude, one for stealing lime juice and one for stealing apples. It is not impossible that he contracted his unnatural habits in prison.’ That minute shows his natural instinct for clemency—and the barbaric nature of justice in Edwardian England.