The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (7 page)

So how does Churchill treat his political parties? As he once said—with the kind of candour that would be simply intolerable in today’s desiccated politics—choosing a political party is like choosing a horse: you just go for the nag that will take you farthest and fastest. As we have seen, he chooses one, and leaps off just before it is about to die; leaps on a Liberal horse; and when that, too, is obviously about to cark it (or possibly dead on its feet), he leaps back on
a new Tory steed. No one, before or since, has been so magnificently and unrepentantly disloyal.

Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it—a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.

And he gets it from Randolph. Randolph’s formula was called ‘Tory Democracy’. The idea was a bit vague (asked to define it, Randolph said it was ‘
opportunism, mostly’). But Tory Democracy galvanised and invigorated the Tory Party in the 1880s, and the idea certainly invigorated the career of Randolph Churchill.

His son takes up the theme. Randolph campaigned for servants to be entitled to compensation for industrial accidents, and in the same spirit Winston is the author of important social reforms: bringing the pension age down to sixty-five, setting up Labour Exchanges, giving workers the tea break, and so on—while always remaining, on the whole, a steady defender of free markets.

Churchill inherits his political positioning from Randolph; and above all he inherits his style, his self-projection. Randolph became the most famous orator of his day, the man who could clear the tea rooms when he stood up to speak, and whose working-class fans called him ‘
Little Randy’ and ‘Cheeky Randy’. ‘Give it to ’em hot, Randy!’ they cried, when the shrimp-like fellow worked himself up into a frenzy of pop-eyed invective—a snarling version of the P. G. Wodehouse character Gussie Fink-Nottle in the great prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School.

He was a phrase-maker of note, who said that Gladstone was ‘
an old man in a hurry’. Speaking of Gladstone’s habit of relaxing by
chopping wood at Hawarden Castle, he said, ‘
the forest laments in order that Mr Gladstone may perspire’. Churchill adopts the same speaking techniques—mostly writing out the whole text in full, before trying to declaim as much as possible from memory—and becomes the most glorious political speaker not just of his age but perhaps of any age.

But where, you may ask, did Randolph get it all from? Who was his inspiration?

Both Churchills, father and son, are avowedly working in the tradition of that greatest of all Tory magicians and opportunists, Benjamin Disraeli. Randolph was Disraeli’s disciple and his vicar on earth. When Disraeli died, Randolph helped to establish the ‘Primrose League’ in his memory, because the primrose was the favourite flower of the great Victorian leader and dandy.

As Randolph tells his son in ‘The Dream’, ‘
I always believed in Dizzy, that old Jew. He saw the future. He had to bring the British working man into the centre of the picture.’ The two Churchills—father and son—were, as Winston put it, the ‘bearers of the mantle of Elijah’, the heirs of Disraeli.

The continuities are indeed very striking, and go way beyond an interest in social reform. Disraeli and the Churchills also have in common the journalism (and in Winston’s case, the novel), the love of show, the rhetorical flourishes, the sense of history, the imperialism, the monarchism, the slight air of camp and the inveterate opportunism.

These days it seems that Disraeli is in danger of some sort of eclipse. Douglas Hurd has produced a fine but slightly finger-wagging biography, demanding to know what Disraeli actually achieved by comparison with ‘effective’ plodders like Peel.

This is unfair on Disraeli, of course, but also on a crucial tradition in modern British politics. If it hadn’t been for Disraeli, we would not
have had Randolph Churchill, and if it hadn’t been for the example and model provided by Randolph, we would never have had Winston Churchill. What was Churchill’s delighted reaction, when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made him Chancellor of the Exchequer? ‘
I still have my father’s robes!’

I do not mean to suggest that Churchill was identical to his father, or some kind of mini-me. In all sorts of important ways, he was very different, and a very much better man.

Randolph was a serious cad, in a way that Churchill never quite managed. It is hard to imagine Winston contracting syphilis. Both his parents were ‘famous for sex’, in the phrase of Muriel Spark, in a way that Churchill wasn’t.

You can’t see Churchill getting so deranged with anger as to assault his valet, as Randolph did, and you can’t imagine him writing such dreadful letters to his children. And Winston would never have behaved in the demented way that Randolph did in 1873, when he tried to blackmail the Prince of Wales, and then challenged him to a duel.

This bizarre and revolting story has now faded into a dusty crevice of the library; but when Winston Churchill was beginning his career, there were people who remembered it—and they must have wondered how far the apple had fallen from the tree.

It all began because Randolph’s older brother, the Earl of Blandford, was having a major extramarital affair with a woman called Lady Edith Aylesford. This Edith seems from her photo to have had a longish nose, but she must have been a sex bomb. She was simultaneously involved with Blandford, with her husband, and with ‘Bertie’—the portly and underemployed heir to the throne. That was how they carried on in those days, you see.

Edith decided that she wanted to divorce her husband, Lord
Aylesford, and shack up with Blandford. For reasons that are not quite clear, Randolph decided that his older brother should be party to no such thing. It would bring disgrace on the family even to be cited in a divorce case, he said.

So he came up with a wheeze to get the Prince of Wales—who set the moral tone for society—to forbid the divorce. He found some letters from Prince Bertie to Edith. They were hot stuff, said Randolph. They implied intimacy between the Prince and Lady Edith, and if they were exposed—why, then Bertie would never sit upon the throne!

He threatened to publish. An epic scandal impended. The Queen was informed. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, had to step in. An incandescent Bertie challenged Randolph to a duel, to which Randolph wrote back by figuratively sticking up two fingers to the heir to the throne, by pointing out that no subject could be asked to risk the life of a future monarch.

In the end the whole Churchill family had to be banished to Ireland, with the Duke of Marlborough going as Viceroy and Randolph serving as his Private Secretary; which is why Winston spent his early years in Dublin. As for the various marriages and love affairs, they all came to grief in one way or another.

I dig up this unhappy tale as evidence of that quality of Randolph’s that Winston certainly did inherit—and that is not the caddishness, but the recklessness, or rather, the willingness to take risks. It was loopy of Randolph to think he could stop the divorce of his brother by blackmailing the Prince of Wales.

It was loopy of him, at the end of his career, to think that there was no one who could replace him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that he was safe to threaten to resign. ‘
I had forgotten Goschen,’ he said, once they put Goschen in instead. (Indeed, George Goschen,
the first Viscount Goschen, is only remembered for being forgotten by Randolph.) But that gambler’s temperament he passed on to his son—and it is vital that he did.

By the time Winston Churchill came to power in May 1940, there were many people who were amazed, and many who were appalled—but also many who thought it was inevitable. In 1936—even as he was denying him a place in the cabinet—Stanley Baldwin remarked that they would need to keep Churchill in reserve to serve as a war prime minister.

By 1939 there were poster campaigns in London, with the slogan ‘
What Price Churchill?’ Candidates began to stand in by-elections on a ‘Bring Back Churchill’ ticket. In May 1940, shortly before the Norway debate, his acolyte Harold Macmillan approached Churchill in the lobby and said, ‘
We must have a new Prime Minister and it must be you.’

As Churchill said about the moment when he finally took over, ‘
I felt as though I was walking with destiny. All my life was a preparation for this hour and this trial.’ He did indeed seem somehow predestined for the job, and not just in his own eyes.

No one else had such long experience of fighting—both as a politician and a soldier. No one else seemed built on the same scale as Churchill, or equal to the level of events—and there was a further reason why so many people looked at him in this way, as the natural man for the moment.

They knew that throughout the amazing snakes-and-ladders of his life he had followed the pattern of Randolph not just in his ducal disdain for party or his Homeric desire for glory but in his willingness to back himself and his ideas—to take risks that no one else would take.

In peacetime, such behaviour can be disastrous. But you can’t win a war without taking risks, and you won’t take risks unless you are
brave. That, finally, was the quality that people sensed in Churchill; that was why some people yearned for him in 1940, in spite of all the sneering of the Tory establishment and the appeasers.

His whole career so far had been a testament to that primordial virtue—the virtue, as he pointed out himself, that makes possible all the others. Of the immense physical and moral courage of Churchill there can be no doubt.

CHAPTER 5

NO ACT TOO DARING OR TOO NOBLE

I
t was a glorious evening in Croydon, on 18 July 1919. The war was over, and Churchill was back in government—long since restored after the disgrace of Gallipoli. He had put in a hard day as Secretary of State for War and Air, and now he hankered for excitement. It was time for one of his flying lessons.

With several hours of daylight left, he had driven down to the aerodrome south of London. Together with his instructor, Captain Jack Scott, he clambered into the biplane—a De Havilland Airco DH4, with its brass fittings and fine wooden propeller. Scott sat in the front seat of the dual-control machine, Churchill behind him. Though he had no formal pilot’s licence, Churchill was experienced enough to perform the take-off himself.

For a while, things seemed to go according to the book. They chuntered down the field; the engine pulled well; they ascended to 70 or 80 feet above the upturned faces of the ground crew. They must have made a fine sight—one of Britain’s most famous statesmen, his big head sheathed in leather flying cap and goggles, soaring heavenward in what was then a cutting-edge piece of British
technology—one of the very first people since Icarus to master the skies, to defy gravity in a machine that was heavier than air.

Just as they reached a fatal distance from the ground, things started to go wrong.

In those days Croydon Aerodrome was bordered by clumps of tall elm trees. In order to avoid these trees the ascending pilot was obliged to make two banked turns, first to the right and then to the left. Churchill made his first turn—no problems. The wind sang through the struts. The speedometer registered 60 knots, healthy enough to avoid a stall.

He turned left, and the delicate fins and ailerons obeyed his touch. Slowly and gently he now centred the joystick—as he had been taught—to bring the machine back on an even keel. He brought it all the way back; he moved the head of the joystick about a foot. He noticed something funny.

The plane remained banked, at 45 degrees. The machine showed no sign of responding to his commands. In fact, it started to list even more to the left. The speedo was falling fast. It was instantly obvious to Winston Churchill that he and Captain Scott were in trouble.

‘
She is out of control,’ said Churchill to Scott—a highly experienced and capable man, who had already endured one bad crash, and had the injuries to show for it. In that moment Churchill felt Scott overriding him, taking control of the joystick and pedals—yanking and pushing to perform the only manoeuvre that you can, in such situations: pointing the nose downwards so as to pick up enough speed to get out of the side-slip. Any higher, and it might have worked. They were only 90 feet off the ground. Disaster was at hand.

As they descended, out of control, Churchill saw the sunlit aerodrome beneath him, and had the impression that it was bathed in a baleful yellowish glare. In a flash—and he didn’t have much longer
than a flash—the thought formed in his head: ‘
This is very likely death.’ And so, very likely, it was.

Let us leave our hero there for a second or two, hurtling headlong towards the packed earth of Croydon. Let us look back at the risks he had already run. Consider the way he had loaded the statistical dice against himself—not just in his career as an aviator, but in his exhibitionist lust for glory of all kinds.

Churchill had begun his obsession with flying before the First War, when he was still First Lord of the Admiralty. At the beginning of 1913 he went to visit the naval air station at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. He was captivated by the atmosphere: young Biggles-like characters nervelessly hurling themselves about the ether as they tested the world’s first seaplane (a word that Churchill was credited with coining). Apart from the moustaches, it must have been like the early days of the US space programme: the Right Stuff exuding from every pore.

Churchill immediately saw the potential of what they were doing. He wanted a proper division, with its own identity and
esprit de corps
: and so began what was to become the Royal Air Force. ‘
We are in the Stephenson age of flying,’ he proclaimed, referring to the inventor of the steam locomotive. ‘Now our machines are frail. One day they will be robust, and of value to our country.’ He was so excited, in fact, that he wanted to take off himself—and to learn how to fly.