The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (5 page)

T
hese days it is probably fair to say that thrusting young Tories—and especially males—will regard Winston Churchill as a sort of divinity. These honest fellows may sport posters on their teenage bedroom walls: Churchill in a pinstripe suit and toting a tommy gun, or just giving two fingers to the Hun.

On entering university they may join Churchill Societies or Churchill Dining Clubs that meet in Churchill Rooms where his portrait grimly endures their port-fuelled yacketing. They may even wear spotty bow ties.

When they make it to Parliament they piously trail their fingers on the left toecap of the bronze effigy that stands in the Members’ Lobby—hoping to receive some psychic charge before they are called on to speak. When they in due course become Tory Prime Minister, and they find themselves in a bit of a corner (as inevitably happens), they will discover that they can make a defiant speech in St Stephen’s Club, where the cameras will capture them in the same frame as the image of the old war leader—pink, prognathous and pouting down at his successor with what we can only assume is pride.

The Tories are jealous of their relation with Churchill. It is a question of badging, of political ownership. They think of him as the people of Parma think of the
formaggio parmigiano
.

He is their biggest cheese, their prize possession, the World-Cup-winning hat-trick-scorer and greatest ever captain of the Tory team. So I wonder sometimes whether people are fully aware of the suspicion and doubt with which he was greeted by Tories when he became Prime Minister in 1940—or the venom with which they spat his name.

To lead his country in war, Churchill had to command not just the long-faced men of Munich—Halifax and Chamberlain—but hundreds of Tories who had been conditioned to think of him as an opportunist, a turncoat, a blowhard, an egotist, a rotter, a bounder, a cad, and on several well-attested occasions a downright drunk.

We have seen how they cheered for Chamberlain, and only murmured for Churchill, when he entered the Commons for the first time as PM on 13 May 1940 (an event that rattled Churchill: ‘
I shan’t last long,’ he said as he left the Chamber). They sustained their hostility. From his seat in the parliamentary press gallery, Paul Einzig, the correspondent of the
Financial News
, was able to study the Tories—and he could see the ill-will that formed above them like a vapour.

For at least two months after he took office Einzig recorded that Tory MPs would sit in ‘
sullen silence’ when he rose to speak, even after he had completed one of his historic speeches. When the Labour benches cheered, the Tories were still plotting to get rid of him. On about 13 May, William Spens, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, said that three-quarters of his members were willing to give Churchill the heave-ho and put Chamberlain back.

From about the same time we have a letter from Nancy Dugdale, the wife of a Chamberlainite MP, that sums up the mood of
fastidious horror. She wrote to her husband, Tommy Dugdale, who was already serving in the armed forces:

WC they regard with complete distrust, as you know, and they hate his boasting broadcasts. WC really is the counterpart of Goering in England, full of the desire for blood, Blitzkrieg, and bloated with ego and over-feeding, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air. I can’t tell you how depressed I feel about it.

In the view of these respectable folk the Churchillians were nothing but ‘gangsters’. They were men like Bob Boothby, MP, bisexual bounder and later a friend of the Kray twins; Brendan Bracken, the carrot-topped Irish fantasist and later proprietor of the
Financial Times
; Max Beaverbrook, the deeply unreliable proprietor of the Express group: all together a rabble of disloyal and self-seeking ‘
glamour boys’ led by a ‘
rogue elephant’. They tut-tutted about Churchill’s drinking (‘I wish he didn’t give the impression of having
done himself too well
,’ said Maurice Hankey, a senior civil servant, his nose almost visibly twitching) but not out of some zeal for temperance—more because they enjoyed the feeling of moral disapproval.

Some of the most virulent anti-Churchillians went on to have great careers: had he not been knifed by Harold Macmillan in the 1960s, Rab Butler might have been Prime Minister. In 1940 he was a junior minister, and a strong supporter of appeasement. Here is what he had to say about the ascent of Churchill:

‘The good clean tradition of English politics has been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history,’ he was heard to say. ‘Surrendering to Winston and his rabble was a disaster and an unnecessary one’, mortgaging the future of the country to a ‘half-breed
American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type’.

That is strong stuff. You can understand why people might have felt loyalty to Chamberlain, widely seen as an honourable man, who was actually polling ahead of Churchill among the public in early 1940; you can see that they felt disconcerted by the arrival of the Churchill gang—in what was effectively a palace coup; Churchill wasn’t actually elected Prime Minister, by the public at large, until 1951. But there is a fascinating malevolence about some of the language.

Lord Halifax deplored the experience of listening to Churchill’s voice, which ‘
oozes with port, brandy and the chewed cigar’. One observer stated that he looked like a ‘
fat baby’ as he swung his legs on the government front bench, and tried not to laugh at Chamberlain’s struggle.

So that was what the Respectable Tories thought of Winston S. Churchill: a Goering, an adventurer, a half-breed, a traitor, a fat baby and a disaster for the country. It is like the shrieking from the ballroom when a pirate comes on the tannoy from the bridge.

How to explain this hysterical rejection of our greatest twentieth-century hero?

From the strictly Tory point of view I am afraid it is all too understandable. In the course of his forty-year parliamentary career Churchill had shown a complete contempt for any notion of political fidelity, let alone loyalty to the Tory Party.

From the very moment when the bumptious and ginger-haired twenty-five-year-old entered Parliament in 1900—when Queen Victoria was still on the throne—he made disloyalty his watchword and his strategy for self-promotion. He bashed the Tory front bench for spending too much on defence (‘
Is there no poverty at home?’ he asked). He bashed them over protection—then a left-wing cause,
because it meant cheaper food for the working man. He peeved his elders so badly that at one stage the front bench all got up, as he began to speak, and stalked huffily from the Chamber.

By January 1904 he was facing the first Tory attempts to remove him as the official Conservative candidate for his Oldham constituency. By April he had already decided to switch parties—and he was pretty honest about his motives. He thought the Tories were heading for disaster. ‘
My prognostication’, he said in October 1904, ‘is that [the Tory leadership] will cut their own throats and bring their party to utter destruction . . . and that the Liberals will gain a gigantic victory at the Election.’

In other words he wasn’t what people thought of as a man of principle; he was a glory-chasing goal-mouth-hanging opportunist. He crossed the floor of the House, sat down next to Lloyd George, and was deservedly called ‘the
Blenheim rat’.

He seemed to reciprocate the feeling. ‘
I am an English Liberal,’ he now wrote. ‘I hate the Tory party, their men and their methods.’ A couple of decades later he of course switched back again—when his Liberal mount had more or less expired beneath him—in the niftiest piece of circus-style saddle-swapping ever seen in Parliament; and for much of the 1930s he lived up to his reputation by continuing to bash his own Tory Party leadership with whatever stick or knobkerry he could find, in a blatant attempt to advance his own cause.

No wonder there was scepticism on the Tory benches—and around the whole political world. If you were an anti-Churchillian in 1940, you had a long charge-sheet before you.

—

E
VEN WHEN
he was at Sandhurst, he was accused of nefarious deeds. First he and his fellow subalterns were charged with fixing their pony
races. Then there was the rum business of poor Allan Bruce, a subaltern whom Churchill and his colleagues allegedly tried to freeze out of the regiment. There was even some suggestion (from Bruce) that Churchill had been engaged in practices of the
Oscar Wilde variety—baseless allegations that were dismissed in an expensive libel suit brought by his mother; but mud has a way of sticking.

Then there was that dodgy affair in Pretoria, when he had escaped the Boers by breaking his parole and leaving his chums behind. As for his political career—my word, what a feast of bungling! If you were an anti-Churchillian you might start your prosecution by citing his handling, as Home Secretary, of the violent strikes of 1910–12. Actually, you could attack him from almost any perspective, since the Tories thought on the whole that he had been too wishy-washy with the strikers, while he entered Labour’s demonology as the man who had ‘fired on’ unarmed miners in the Welsh town of Tonypandy—when in fact the police had used nothing more lethal than rolled-up mackintoshes.

Then in 1911 there was the farce of the Sidney Street siege, when he had gone down to take personal charge of an East End gun battle between the police and a mysterious gangster called ‘Peter the Painter’, who was never found and in fact may never have existed.

Churchill can be seen in the photographs of the event, peering round a corner in the direction of the supposed anarchist terrorists, and looking thoroughly conspicuous in a top hat.

‘
I understand what the photographer was doing,’ a languid Balfour told the House of Commons, ‘but what was the honourable gentleman doing?’ Cue roars of laughter. The answer, as everyone knew, was that he was trying to get himself into the photograph.

This was nothing, though, to what an anti-Churchillian would see as his epic misjudgements during the First World War. First there was the Antwerp ‘blunder’ or ‘fiasco’ of October 1914, when Churchill
had taken it into his head that Antwerp must be saved from the Germans and that he alone could save it.

For four or five days he masterminded the defences of the port, and even had nominal control of the whole of Belgium. One journalist captured the Napoleonic demeanour of this ‘
man enveloped in a cloak and wearing a yachting cap. He was tranquilly smoking a large cigar and looked at the progress of the battle under a rain of shrapnel . . . He smiled and looked satisfied.’

Antwerp surrendered shortly thereafter, and it became an accepted view that Churchill’s intervention was a pointless ego-trip that rendered him—in the words of the
Morning Post
—‘
unfit for the office he now holds’. Unfit or not, he persisted in that office, First Lord of the Admiralty, long enough to engineer what an anti-Churchillian would say was an epic and unparalleled military disaster—a feat of incompetent generalship that made the Charge of the Light Brigade look positively slick. It was an attempt to outflank the stalemate on the Western Front that not only ended in humiliation for the British armed forces; it cost the lives of so many Australians and New Zealanders that to this day their 1915 expedition to Turkey is the number-one source of pom-bashing and general anti-British feeling among Antipodeans.

Gallipoli, or the Dardanelles, was perhaps the most pungent of all the charges against Churchill; and the memory would certainly have been strong enough in 1940 to infect people’s feelings about him and whether or not he was the right man to lead the country in war. Even those who thought he was brilliant—and most people could see that—were often dismayed by his seeming lack of judgement, his tendency to hyperbole, to overexcitement, even to hysteria. In 1931 he became so worked up about the prospect of Indian independence that he called Mahatma Gandhi a ‘
half-naked fakir’—in words that have certainly not been forgotten in India.

He had misread public feeling in his attitudes towards the Abdication in 1936, seemingly taking the view that the King of England could marry whatever filly he damn well pleased, American divorcee or not, or else what was the point of being King? At one stage he was making a speech in defence of Edward VIII—who was, paradoxically, a pro-Nazi, and who would have presented all kinds of problems to Churchill had he remained on the throne—when he was howled down by his audience and lost control of the House.

His enemies detected in him a titanic egotism, a desire to find whatever wave or wavelet he could, and surf it long after it had dissolved into spume on the beach. When the anti-Churchillians heard him rail portentously about Hitler, and the dangers of German rearmament, they heard a man who had railed before and would rail again, and whose railings had just become part of the landscape—like the railings of Hyde Park.

We have to acknowledge that this reputation didn’t just come from nowhere. There was a reason he was thought to be arrogant and ‘unsound’, and that was because to a certain extent it was true: he did behave with a death-defying self-belief, and go farther out on a limb than anyone else might have thought wise. And why did he behave in this way?

Throughout his early career he was not just held to be untrustworthy—he was thought to be congenitally untrustworthy. He had been born under a wonky star.

The other day I found myself in the very room, and looking at the very bed, where this momentous event had taken place. Down the corridor—several corridors, in fact—a huge party was getting under way to honour the sixtieth birthday of a twenty-first-century hedge fund king.

‘Wait,’ I said, as we were ushered towards the first phalanx of
waitresses bearing champagne. ‘Can you show us the room where Churchill was born?’ A nice housekeeper led us down a side corridor, into a little square ground-floor room.

As the door closed, the noise faded—and it was possible to imagine that we had gone back 140 years, to the climax of another great party. You could screw up your eyes and see gaslights instead of electricity, but the same chintzy wallpaper, the same cheery little fire, the same bowls and ewers with the Marlborough crest.