The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (128 page)

In October the Dáil adopted the constitution, as drafted by Collins, Griffith, and Churchill. The Free State was then admitted to the League of Nations. After protracted deliberations, the boundary with Ulster was settled. The IRA was outlawed by the men who had served in it. De Valera was captured, imprisoned, freed; agreed to take the oath, lost election after election, and finally, ten years after Collins’s murder, striking a deal with Labour deputies, became president. Ultimately his pitiless will prevailed; seeing his chance when the Empire was transformed into the Commonwealth, he proclaimed the Free State’s sovereignty, the penultimate step toward republicanism, in 1937. That year Churchill, remembering Collins, Griffith, and their bright dreams of an enduring bond between Britain and the Free State, wrote sadly that “Ireland, by paths eventually far more disastrous than those which then seemed open, has gained the power to manage or mismanage her own affairs, and lost the power to manage or mismanage those of the Empire.”
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In 1922 he had dared hope for more, though even then he knew that he and his party would pay a political price for the tumultuous events of that summer. Before the year was out he had found it higher than he had expected.

O
ther political reverses were the collapse of Britain’s postwar boom, the triumph of the Bolsheviks, and dismay over what was regarded as recklessness in the Dardanelles. Martin Gilbert writes that “in the public mind it was widely believed, not only that both Churchill and Lloyd George had hoped for war with Turkey, but also that they had been disappointed when it was averted.” They had also offended the coalition’s Tories, who had been shocked by Churchill’s failure to consult Curzon, the foreign secretary, before appealing for Empire troops to fight for Chanak. This slight had in fact been a grave breach of decorum, and for many it was the last straw. Two senior statesmen, one from each of the two major parties, came out of retirement to register their disapproval. Asquith complained of slipshod diplomacy by “amateurs in Downing Street.” Then Bonar Law denounced the entire Turkish affair in a letter to
The Times.
It was wrong, he wrote, “to show any hostility or unfairness” toward the leading Moslem power, and irresponsible to do so without French support. “We cannot act alone,” he said, “as the policeman of the world.” In those ten words Law wrote an epitaph for the Empire’s golden era, and it says much about the 1920s that no one saw it as such.
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In the opinion of many, Lloyd George and his cabinet had won the war but lost the peace. It was remarked upon that the prime minister’s role at Versailles had been lackluster, and he was blamed for the fact that the membership of the League of Nations, in which so much hope had been invested, did not include the United States, Germany, and Russia. A few Conservative ministers—notably Birkenhead and Austen Chamberlain—remained loyal to George. The others were restless. Critics of the prime minister were appearing on all sides, partly because he had unwisely abandoned the custom of consulting Parliament before taking action. Harold Laski wrote: “He seems determined to sacrifice upon the altar of his private ambition the whole spirit of our public life.”
The Times
declared that the word of England had “lost currency throughout the greater part of the world as the word of an upright land.” Francis Williams observed that the coalition had “produced at the centre an atmosphere more like an oriental court at which favourites struggled unceasingly for position than anything seen in Britain for a century or more.” It moved Sir Edward Grey “to indignation and despair such as I have never felt about any other British Government.” After a weekend with Lloyd George, Austen Chamberlain, and Birkenhead, Arnold Bennett noted: “I never heard principles or the welfare of the country mentioned.” Leo Amery later recalled that Conservatives “felt that they no longer had any policy of their own, but were being dragged along in the wake of an erratic Prime Minister whom they once again profoundly distrusted, by a little group of their own leaders who had lost, not only their principles, but their heads.”
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It was Churchill’s fellow Harrovian Amery, then parliamentary and financial secretary to the Admiralty, who organized what came to be known as the “Revolt of the Under Secretaries,” inviting all Tory MPs to meet at the Carlton Club on October 19, 1922. The annual National Union of Conservative Associations was just a month away, and Tory back-benchers felt their seats were in jeopardy. Austen Chamberlain, then regarded as the party’s emerging leader, thought it wrong to appease them; he said he intended “to tell them bluntly that they must either follow our advice or do without us, in which case they must find their own Chief, and form a Government
at once.
They would be in a d——d fix.” He and Birkenhead counted heavily on the results, to be announced that day, of a by-election in Newport. The Tory candidate, running against the coalition, was expected to come in last. Bonar Law, opening the meeting, was contemptuous of Lloyd George’s record. His old colleagues nodded in agreement, though only one cabinet minister rose to echo him. This was the shrewd, stolid, pipe-smoking Stanley Baldwin, president of the Board of Trade, who, at that time, was largely unknown to the general public. Baldwin introduced a resolution which would dissolve the coalition. His biographer writes that he had discovered “a new eloquence; direct, conversational, monosyllabic: rising and falling without strain or effort between the homeliest humour and the most moving appeal.” It was the voice of the new England: uncomfortable with greatness, wary of excellence, indifferent to challenges abroad. Baldwin argued that although Lloyd George was a dynamic force, “a dynamic force is a very terrible thing”—an appropriate debut for this evangelist of political mediocrity.
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Then the stunning tally from Newport was announced. The Tory had won by 2,090 votes; the coalition’s man had come in a bad third. Upon learning this, the MPs in the Carlton Club voted, and to everyone’s surprise the result was lopsided: 87 for the coalition, 187 against. They then rejected Austen Chamberlain and picked Bonar Law to lead them. Informed of the result, Lloyd George submitted his resignation at Buckingham Palace that same afternoon. Law formed a government and a general election was scheduled for November 15, 1922.

Churchill was flat on his back in a Dorset Square nursing home, undergoing an emergency appendectomy. He was widely blamed for the coalition’s fall, and not only because of his controversial policies. His loyalty to Lloyd George was suspect. Seven months earlier George had received several letters suggesting that Winston was conspiring against him. Charles McCurdy, the coalition whip, wrote him that “Liberals are commencing to canvass the situation that would arise” if Churchill defected to the Tories. Another correspondent told him that Winston was plotting the formation of a new coalition, to be headed by Austen Chamberlain, with himself at the Exchequer. Max Beaverbrook warned him that Winston’s “tendency is all to the Right, and his principles are becoming more Tory. I am sure he would not fancy being shut up in a coop with you even for a short time because such collocation within a narrow circle would cloud his own brilliance in the light of your superiority.” If this sounds strange coming from one of Winston’s friends, it can only be added that Beaverbrook was always a strange friend. His virtue was that when Winston was in desperate trouble, he rallied to his aid. He was a fair-weather adversary, a foul-weather ally.
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Winston’s relationship with Lloyd George was more complicated, and had changed often. In their early days together, as radical reformers they had worked splendidly in tandem. After Winston’s eviction from the Admiralty in 1915 he believed that George had betrayed him; on June 9 that year he had written Archie Sinclair that between him and George
“tout est fini.”
When George moved into No. 10, Winston had fumed because no place had been found for him in the coalition cabinet; and in the spring of 1917 he had assailed the prime minister for his “undue love of the assertion of arbitrary power”—an odd charge from one whose own thirst for authority was unslakable. Installed as minister of munitions, he had put this enmity behind him. By 1921 he believed that George would make him the next chancellor of the Exchequer. Then, during his absence in Palestine, George had bypassed him. Austen Chamberlain had written his sister: “Winston has come back from the Middle East as cross as a bear with a sore head & thinks that all the world is out of joint since he is not C/E.” Beaverbrook believed he had “just grounds for his hostility.” The editor of the
Daily Mail
reported to Lord Northcliffe: “Winston is fed up with Lloyd George. He wanted to be Chancellor but Ll. G. refused to give him the job. Winston holds it is not compatible with his seniority… when he wants a little money.” Frances Stevenson noted that Churchill now wrote to her lover as “ ‘Dear Prime Minister’ whereas it used to be ‘Dear LlG,’ or ‘My dear David.’ ” Winston himself thought George’s attitude toward him revealed “a certain vein of amiable malice,” and he was infuriated when, in a November 1921 cabinet meeting, the prime minister taunted him about Gallipoli. Nevertheless, the old Welsh spellbinder could still work feats of magic on him. Lord Boothby recalls waiting in a hall while the two men were closeted for about an hour. Afterward he asked Winston: “How did it go?” Churchill said slowly: “Within five minutes the old relationship between us was completely re-established. The relationship between Master and Servant. And I was the Servant.” He wrote George: “My interests as well as inclinations march with yours, & in addition there is our long friendship wh I so greatly value…. I wd gladly at your side face political misfortune.”
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Churchill faced it now, though he was slow to grasp his peril. He proudly wrote that “the session of 1922 was the most prosperous I have ever had as a Minister in the House of Commons.” And others agreed. Clement Attlee later recalled: “I learned in that Parliament of 1922 what a master he was in the art of answering Parliamentary Questions. He could deliver a knock-out blow or give the retort courteous with equal facility…. One never could anticipate just what line he would take, except that it would generally be effective.” After the Irish debate of May 31, Austen Chamberlain had written the King of “Mr Churchill’s great and growing parliamentary qualities,” commending “to Your Majesty’s particular attention a speech faultless in manner and wording, profoundly impressive in its delivery and of the first consequence as a statement of policy. It gripped the attention of the House from the opening sentences and held it, breathlessly intent, to the end.” On February 8 Winston had decided to address the House extemporaneously about Iraq—he had not tried speaking without notes in eighteen years—and afterward he wrote Clementine: “It was really a great success: no worry, nor work, but quite an agreeable experience…. I think I have really got my full freedom now in debate, and I propose to make far less use of notes than ever before.” He had learned to be savage in the attack and, in the next moment, completely disarming. When the teetotal, American-born Lady Astor became the House’s first woman MP, he paused in his address to refresh himself, saying, “I think it is a great pleasure for the noble lady, the member of the Sutton division of Plymouth, to see me drinking water.” Afterward in the smoking room he said: “Nancy, when you first entered the House, I felt you had come upon me in my bath and I had nothing to protect me but my sponge.”
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But wit and oratorical pyrotechnics, though dazzling in Parliament, could not be readily translated into votes in a general election. Preoccupied with imperial and foreign issues, he had lost touch with the new, growing forces on the left. Churchill had not entirely lost his reforming zeal; he had wanted to see social legislation introduced. So had Lloyd George. But they had been thwarted by the Tory dominance in the coalition. As a consequence, the Liberal party was being devoured by Labour, which, lacking membership in the coalition, had become its most effective opposition. British socialism brought out the worst in Churchill. When he saw red at public meetings—literally saw it, for hecklers waved red flags and drowned him out by stridently singing “The Red Flag”—his instincts overcame his good judgment. In his view, the Labour party was a sinister strand in a Bolshevik rope braided to lynch England’s political and social institutions. Therefore he stalked it, declaring that “the enthronement in office of a Socialist Government would be a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great states on the morrow of their defeat in war.” It would, he predicted, turn all Britain into a “bear garden.” He thought Labour’s proposal to lend the Russians money confirmed him. Socialism, he said, would bring “Government of the duds, by the duds, for the duds.” If England survived its misrule Labour would vanish “unwept, unhonored, unsung and unhung.” Behind its movement “crouched the shadow of Communist folly and Bolshevik crime.”
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This was superb as obloquy. It was an effective antidote for his Black Dog. And it is arguable that he foresaw socialist egalitarianism—from the few who are rich to the many who are poor—as the decisive blow to leadership by a talented, privileged elite. Yet he recruited only a handful of converts. Even his wife urged him to take “a less hostile and negative attitude” toward the socialists. When he insisted that they were mounting “a great vehement, deliberate attack upon the foundations of society,” Baldwin replied that he simply didn’t believe it. Asquith thought the socialist leaders should be given posts of responsibility, that excluding their party from power would only embitter them. Winston told Violet Asquith that he passionately disagreed. As a consequence, he became the bogeyman of the British left. Emmanuel Shinwell, a Labour MP, recalls: “The mention of his name at Labour gatherings was the signal for derisive cheers; when a Labour speaker found himself short of arguments, he had only to say, ‘Down with Winston Churchill.’ This never failed to draw thunderous applause. Undoubtedly, he was our most valuable propaganda asset.” They distributed pamphlets describing “Winston’s Black Record.” Considered the chief obstacle to Labour’s ambitions, he was, Shinwell recalls, “the target for every epithet in the English language.” A Labour spokesman charged: “Mr Churchill did all he could to maintain militarism in Europe and to march armies against Russia.” The
Daily Herald
denounced him for sending “munitions which cost us over twenty million pounds sterling to produce” to Russian counterrevolutionaries, “all of which has gone down the drain.” In another issue, the
Herald
declared that “Churchill cannot see that the revolt in far-off costly and reactionary adventures grows into ‘turbulence’ at home,” that he was “utterly out of touch with public opinion, here as everywhere else.”
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