The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (39 page)

The Commission pressed Churchill: when did he imagine that this would be reversed? When would the Jews become a majority again? ‘The British government is the judge, and should keep the power to be the judge.’

There he was being overoptimistic, if not romantic; and at some level he must have known it. Britain could not conceivably have kept power in Palestine for long enough to ensure that there was lasting fair play between Jew and Arab.

When Churchill became Colonial Secretary in 1921, he was responsible for the greatest empire the world has ever seen, but also one where the financial elastic was already stretched fit to bust. What was his mission, in fulfilling the British mandate in Mesopotamia? Yes, it was partly to secure oil interests—though it is interesting that Middle Eastern oil had not yet acquired its dominance in British strategic thinking. In 1938, 57 per cent of British oil came from America and only 22 per cent from the Middle East.

His main purpose was to cut the costs of patrolling a place that he described—in words that will not endear him to the Iraqi tourist board—as ‘
a score of mud villages sandwiched in between a swampy river and a blistering desert, inhabited by a few hundred half naked families, usually starving’. Why waste infantry on this dump, he said, when they could be in India? So he cut military expenditure, and
decided to rely on the RAF—which could well achieve British objectives by strafing and bombing. This was to lead to some ugly episodes later on, for which he was not directly responsible and which he deplored, when British planes bombed civilians.

He also favoured (that’s right, you guessed it) the use of gas—the very sin for which the world most abominated Saddam Hussein. He was, thankfully, frustrated in this ambition, though he protested: ‘
I can’t understand why it should be thought legitimate to kill people with bullets and barbarism to make them sneeze.’

Whatever Britain did in Mesopotamia, he decided it should be done as cheaply as possible: indeed, he at one stage proposed abandoning Baghdad altogether, and to cut costs to only £8 million a year by restricting the mandate to Basra in the south.

The point is that Britain did not want to hang on to the place out of some misplaced desire for prestige, or colonial swagger. Before he was even Colonial Secretary Churchill suggested in 1919 that the mandates for both Mesopotamia and Palestine should be handed over to Turkey: and after he had some experience of dealing with Iraq he said: ‘
I hate Irak and wish we had never gone there. It is like living on top of an ungrateful volcano’—words that the US-led Coalition forces might have heeded before they invaded in 2003.

The British mission in Iraq and Palestine was to bring as much order to the area as was compatible with the straitened financial circumstances in which they found themselves: to fulfil the mandate, and then to ensure that the successor regime was as friendly to Britain as was possible, given their diminished powers of military projection overseas. The Iraqi mandate continued officially until 1932, though British influence persisted for much longer. By the end of the Second World War it was obvious that the British efforts to hold Palestine were doomed.

Jewish immigration was now morally and physically unstoppable;
and since the Arab reaction was as violent as ever, the British troops found themselves desperately trying to uphold the principles of Balfour, and to be fair to both sides. The British still tried to restrict the pace of Jewish immigration, and there were awful scenes as the victims of Nazi concentration camps were themselves detained, in British-organised camps, rather than being allowed into Palestine.

Jewish terrorists began to turn their guns and bombs on the British themselves—the very people who had created the homeland. They murdered Lord Moyne, the British minister in Palestine, on whose yacht Clementine Churchill had dallied in the South Seas with the suave art dealer Terence Philip. They killed British soldiers who were only doing their job, to the black fury of Ernest Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary.

Even Winston Churchill was shaken in his Zionism. He described the attacks as ‘
an odious act of ingratitude’. His relations with Chaim Weizmann, the Manchester-born father of the Zionist movement, were never the same. In the end the British simply scarpered from Palestine, literally leaving the key under the mat. The flag came down, and a new nation was born.

It was a procedure that took place—with a bit more dignity—in India in the same year; and it happened around the world in the great recessional that marked the last phase of Churchill’s life. Across the planet he saw the Union Jack come down, from Malaya to Malawi, from Singapore to Suez—where the Americans finally pulled the rug in 1956 from under the military pretensions of the tottering old empire.

As he said bitterly towards the end of his life, ‘
I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end’. That is rot, of course (as he surely knew). Consider his achievements in the Middle East alone.

Jordan has been amazingly stable, from that day to this, even if his arm wobbled as he drew it. Iraq was to remain broadly in the British
sphere of influence for forty years after the Cairo conference, and Iraqi oil was to prove invaluable in helping Britain to survive and win the Second World War. As for the birth of Israel, at which he performed the role of midwife, well: your view will depend on the existential question of whether or not you believe in the value of the Jewish state.

If you are among those who hold that the Balfour declaration was the biggest single error of British foreign policy, then you will obviously think that Churchill was wrong to give it practical effect. There again, if you think that on the whole it was right after 2,000 years of persecution to give the Jews a homeland in a place they had once occupied and that was now relatively sparsely populated; if you think it was a visionary idea to hope that their talents would let the desert bloom; if you think that it is not a bad idea to have at least one democracy—no matter how imperfect—in that part of the world, then you will perhaps think Churchill a bit of a hero.

He could not have known in the 1920s that his vision of a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ would be so betrayed by the short-sightedness and selfishness of both sides. He can’t be blamed for the shameful way Israelis have treated Palestinians, nor for Palestinian terrorism, nor for the generally woeful quality of Palestinian leadership. Nor can he really be blamed for the apparent disintegration of Iraq, if that is indeed what is now happening.

It was as good an idea as any to amalgamate the three vilayets, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was what the Arab leaders said they wanted—and it was what they had been promised: a strong unitary Arab state. It was hardly Churchill’s fault that no Iraqi leader has arisen with the greatness and generosity to unite the country.

Churchill certainly understood and denounced the perils of Islamic extremism, but he can’t be blamed for the failure of Arab
leadership. Perhaps the only way to end intercommunal and schismatic conflict in the patchwork of the Middle East would be to install a new Roman Empire, complete with ruthless proconsular violence and a system of compulsory loyalty to the central power. That would be unacceptable for many reasons—and it didn’t work that well for the Romans, either (they had a hell of a drubbing near Baghdad).

Far from achieving nothing, Churchill’s ideals actually helped not to perpetuate the British Empire, but to ensure that it was unbundled in a relatively dignified and effective way. It was one of the paradoxes of his life that Churchillian goals, of freedom and democracy, were espoused by the very children of the empire as they campaigned for their own independence.

As Richard Toye has pointed out, the Atlantic Charter of 1941 may not have cut much ice in Washington. But it was heard by Nelson Mandela and other African leaders.

When he stood on that yacht in 1961, there was certainly a case for saying that Churchill and his country had been diminished. He was old and frail; Britain had been bankrupted by the war, and greatly reduced in financial and military muscle—an outcome that had surely been anticipated and connived at by the Americans.

His own country was now so short of millionaires that he had to rely on the hospitality of the gangsterish social climber Aristotle Onassis. He stood beneath the long shadow of New York’s Empire State Building, a tower that dwarfs Big Ben in London as the American defence budget dwarfs that of the whole of western Europe, Britain included.

He knew that the fate of the world now lay in America’s hands—and he was right. In our own time it has fallen to the Americans to try to hold the ring in Palestine, to reason with the Israelis, to try to cope with the ungrateful volcano of Iraq. As a British imperialist, he was inevitably a failure. As an idealist, he was a success.

That handy conceptual elision of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ has helped to carry Churchillian ideas around the world. The English-speaking peoples are now far more numerous than the peoples of the old British Empire—perhaps 2 billion, and they are growing in number every day. There are more Chinese English-speakers than there are in England; even the EU Commission, in the last ten years, has unofficially adopted English.

There are more democracies around the world, and there are fewer wars. Whatever you may think about the American-led imperium of free markets and free trade, they are lifting billions of people out of poverty. Those are all ideals for which Churchill fought, and which he identified as common to Britain and America.

Those nights on the
Christina
were the last time he saw the land of his mother. The next day he went to Idlewild airport and boarded a flight home that had been equipped with two bottles of cognac, seven bottles of wine, one bottle of brandy and two pounds of Stilton. That should have seen him through.

The yacht
Christina
, incidentally, has lately been put up for sale. She can be found in a dockyard in East London.

So, too, can people from countries around the world, with 300 languages spoken in the city. Churchill not only transformed much of the world; by the time he left office he had begun the process—not altogether intentionally, perhaps—of creating the modern multicultural Britain.

CHAPTER 22

THE MEANING OF HIS NAME TODAY

I
f you were ever tempted to doubt the strength of the love between Winston and Clementine Churchill, you should look at the countless notes and billets-doux they sent each other all their married life. On the day of her seventy-eighth birthday in 1963, he wrote as follows:

My darling one,

This is only to give you

my fondest love and kisses

a hundred times repeated

——————————-

I am a pretty dull and

paltry scribbler; but my

stick as it writes carries my

heart along with it.

Your ever & always

W

He was now eighty-eight, and in other letters he lamented the passing of that old facility of expression—and recorded his amazement at what he now saw as the speed of others. He still went to the House of Commons, though other MPs were shocked by how frail he had become. It was only after quite some pressure from Clementine that he agreed finally not to seek re-election, and on 24 July 1964 he went to the House for the last time.

When you think of the punishment he had given his mortal frame—the toxins he had ingested all his life—you can see in that very longevity his essential character: his instinct to hold on, fight on, never give in. But he also knew that his work was done, and that his career was beginning to merge with history. As he said to his daughter Diana, ‘
My life is over, but it is not yet ended.’ He liked to be gloomy about his accomplishments—possibly because he was fishing for compliments. Really he had no right to such gloom.

In those days his legacy was everywhere, his very name a meme that spread through all levels of society. In that year students were already graduating from Churchill College, Cambridge. Communities in Britain were voluntarily anointing some of the 430 roads, closes, squares and cul-de-sacs that bear his name to this day. When he left the Commons in 1964 a young John Winston Lennon was celebrating the sale of 1.5 million copies of a record called ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’.

Lennon had been born in October 1940—the year of the country’s maximum peril and Churchill’s supreme leadership. For more than ten years Churchill had shared the House of Commons with a man who in 1964 became Defence Secretary—Denis Winston Healey. Healey had been born in 1917 to Churchill fans in Mottingham, south-east London—and he entered the House of Commons in 1952 with the unique distinction of having been named at birth after the man who was then still serving as Prime
Minister; which tells us something about the sheer span of Churchill’s life.

Can anyone beat Healey’s record of being named after Churchill in 1917, when he was only forty-two? Step forward Winston Graham, author of the Poldark novels, who was born in Manchester in 1908—the year Churchill fought the North-West Manchester by-election; the year he entered the cabinet at the age of thirty-three, as President of the Board of Trade, and began his campaign to create Labour Exchanges and end the exploitation of child labour.

Then across post-war Britain and the world there were hundreds if not thousands of young Winstons—many of them Afro-Caribbeans—who were surely named with the war leader in mind.

There are Churchillian eponyms to be found in great works of literature—Winston Smith, hero of George Orwell’s dystopia,
1984
. Of famous cinematic Winstons we might mention
Pulp Fiction
’s superbly confident Mr Winston Wolf, played by Harvey Keitel, who is called upon to clear up the mess when John Travolta accidentally shoots someone’s brains out in the back of a car.