The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (140 page)

He hated it, and could not reply; he understood their bitterness, for he shared it. In less than two years he would grasp the magnitude of his error in putting England back on the gold standard. Writing Grigg on July 2, 1928, he dealt savagely with the financial experts who had urged him to do it: “They have caused an immense amount of misery and impoverishment by their rough and pedantic handling of the problem. In ruined homes, in demoralised workmen, in discouraged industry, in embarrassed finances, in inflated debt and cruel taxation we have paid the price.” Eleven years after the tumult of 1926 he wrote that industrial strife “has introduced a narrowing element into our public life. It has been a keenly felt impediment to our productive and competitive power. It has become the main foundation of a socialist political party which has ruled the State greatly to its disadvantage, and will assuredly do so again.”
²²¹
Churchill was not the only statesman to be baffled by twentieth-century economics. He was, however, among the very few British Conservatives who had seen the justice of the workers’ cause. It is not the least of the ironies in his career that within twenty years, when he was at the peak of his achievements, their resentment would coalesce to drive him from office.

T
oday’s Europeans and Americans who reached the age of awareness after mid-century, when the communications revolution led to expectations of instantaneity, are exasperated by the slow toils of history. They assume that the lightning of cause will be swiftly followed by the thunderclap of effect. Great political sea changes move at a testudinal pace, however. Change is preceded by reappraisals, false starts, and frequent setbacks. William Lloyd Garrison founded the
Liberator
in 1831, yet over thirty years passed before Lincoln freed the slaves. The big Swede christened Joseph Hagglund and remembered as Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad on November 19, 1915. It would be another generation before organized labor was ready to test its strength. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin at St. Mary’s Hospital, London, in 1928. Not until the later stages of World War II would it become available to physicians, and then in limited supply. The American Equal Rights Association was founded by New York feminists on May 10, 1866, but their great-great-granddaughters are still struggling to realize their dream. Even so cataclysmic an event as the First World War did not reach its maximum impact until more than ten years after the Armistice, when Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front,
Hemingway’s
Farewell to Arms,
Graves’s
Goodbye to All That,
and Sassoon’s
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
reached audiences ready, at last, to believe what, until then, had been thought unbelievable.

So it was with the general strike of 1926 and the career of Winston Churchill. During the three years which followed, he rode a crest of acclaim in the middle and upper classes, unbruised by the grievances of those at both ends of the political spectrum who had been angered by his performance during the nine days and the long aftermath. The strike had been broken, the government had won, the miners were back in the pits, and he had been the cabinet’s most colorful cheerleader. His mistakes were unobserved; hardly anyone understood economics anyway. But he certainly sounded as though
he
did. Each budget speech was more brilliant than the last. Altogether he presided over five Budget Days, a record matched only by Walpole, Pitt, Peel, and Gladstone, each of whom became prime minister. Bets were made on when Churchill would move into No. 10. His only rival was the rising star Neville Chamberlain, and even Chamberlain wrote of him in 1928: “One doesn’t often come across a real man of genius or, perhaps, appreciate him when one does. Winston is such a man.” It was generally agreed that Churchill was mellowing. Lord Winterton wrote: “The remarkable thing about him is the way he has suddenly acquired, quite late in Parliamentary life, an immense fund of tact, patience, good humor and banter on almost all occasions; no one used to ‘suffer fools ungladly’ more fully than Winston; now he is friendly and accessible to everyone, both in the House, and in the lobbies, with the result that he has become what he never was before the war, very popular in the House generally—a great accretion to his already formidable Parliamentary power.”
²²²

His wit could still wound—“Politics are very much like war,” he said; “we even use poison gas at times”—and once he devastated a hostile woman MP who berated him during a dinner party, ending her diatribe by observing with scorn: “Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.” “And you, madam,” Churchill replied, “are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow.” Yet his humor now was often gentle, even self-deprecating. After a small dinner at Pratt’s Club in London, F.E. proposed that Lord Melchett, the richest man in the party, should pay the bill. Winston demurred: “My dear Freddie, surely you would not deprive me of the pride and pleasure of giving a crust to Croesus?” After he had switched parties and Baldwin had made him chancellor, Churchill said: “You know, the family motto of the House of Marlborough from which I descend is ‘Faithful but Unfortunate.’ ” A gushing woman asked him: “Doesn’t it thrill you, Mr. Churchill, to know that every time you speak the hall is packed to overflowing?” Winston said: “It is quite flattering, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that, if instead of making a political speech, I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.”
²²³

Baldwin was dazzled by him, and during these years, when there was no threat to it, their relationship approached genuine friendship. On the evening of each Budget Day the prime minister sent the King an appraisal of the chancellor’s presentation. Each was giddier than the last. In one he wrote that Churchill “has a power of attraction which nobody in the House of Commons can excel.” Another spoke of Churchill’s “masterpiece of cleverness and ingenuity.” In a third, reporting on a speech which had lasted three and a half hours, he wrote: “The House became intensely interested in watching a master in the art of oratory and tantalizing the imagination unfold his ideas in a speech packed with ideas, yet so simple and clear that there could be no possible misunderstanding.” Then he sent Winston himself a note: “I hate to use the word ‘brilliant’: it has been worked to death and is too suggestive of brilliantine: but, if I may use it in its pristine virginity, so to speak, it is the right one. I congratulate you with both hands.” Some veteran MPs across the aisle were also impressed. Lloyd George called him “the merriest tax collector since the days of Robin Hood.” And the press, for once, was on his side. Cartoonists depicted him as the “Smiling Chancellor,” and “Winsome Winston.” The
Times of India
commented: “In appearance Mr Churchill is almost jovial; one can imagine him, dressed in a cowl, the incarnation of the jolly monks and friars of centuries ago.”
²²⁴

Of course, there were those who saw him very differently. Ardent Labour MPs attacked him relentlessly, Snowden crying after one budget speech: “There is not one penny of relief for the wage-earning classes. Shorn of all the glamour of the Right Honourable Gentleman’s eloquence, this is his Budget. No more of a rich man’s Budget has ever been presented. It will not take long for the glamour to disappear, and then the great toiling masses will realize the true character of this Budget, and will realize, too, that the Tory Party is still more than ever what Lord George Hamilton declared many years ago: ‘A party that looks after its own friends, whether it be in office or out of office.’ ” On Churchill’s own side of the House, Conservative back-benchers had not forgotten his stands on Home Rule and Free Trade, and their wrath was rekindled in 1928, when, led by Leo Amery, they made a fresh attempt to follow the American example and introduce protective tariffs, arguing that they would put a million Englishmen back to work. Churchill blocked them; Baldwin supported him. Amery wrote angrily in his diary of “the whole attitude of the Cabinet under Winston’s influence, and the PM’s decision not to do anything”; Lane-Fox noted that the protectionists were “now very angry and a lot is going on. It is the first sign of a real party fissure that I have yet seen.” The storm was small and it passed quickly. Winston wrote Clementine: “Really I feel vy independent of them all.”
²²⁵

That was precisely his problem. His independence had become a point of political vulnerability. Of all the major prewar public men, he alone had survived; as A. G. Gardiner put it, “Like the camomile, the more he is trodden on, the more he flourishes.” Yet after nearly three decades in public life he still floated free of any power base. Epping was a mere convenience. Unlike most senior members of the House, he had no national following, controlled no political hierarchy. Party discipline has always been taken more seriously in Britain than in the United States, and Churchill had been a disciplinary problem all his life. Beaverbrook noted that he “neither tied the Liberals to him nor conciliated the Tories.” Gardiner wrote in 1926: “If he changes parties with the facility of partners at a dance, he has always been true to the only Party he really believes in—that which is assembled under the hat of Mr. Winston Churchill.” Gwynne’s
Morning Post,
now more generous in tone, observed: “Mr Churchill is still his own Party, and the chief of the partisans. He still sees himself as the only digit in the sum of things, all other men as mere cyphers, whose function it is to follow after and multiply his personal value a million-fold.” Harold Nicolson saw him as “the most interesting man in London. He is more than interesting: he is a phenomenon, an enigma. How can a man so versatile and so brilliant avoid being considered volatile and unsound?” Arthur Ponsonby, who had switched allegiance from the Liberals to Labour, wrote Eddie Marsh that Winston was “far and away the most talented man in political life…. But that does not prevent me from feeling politically he is a great danger, largely because of his love of crises and faulty judgment. He once said to me years ago, ‘I like things to happen, and if they don’t happen I like to make them happen.’ ”
²²⁶

The Conservative party’s rank and file didn’t want anything to happen, ever. They could identify with Neville Chamberlain, not with Churchill. Winston could have won their loyalty at the Treasury had he pursued traditional Conservative fiscal policies. Instead, he had alienated them by introducing welfare legislation. In Parliament he was not Scottish, Welsh, or a representative of the Midlands; he was known only as a Londoner who had been elected by none of London’s constituencies. That was a grave weakness in a man who hoped to become No. 10’s next occupant. He seemed completely unaware of the danger inherent in an eminence acquired solely by ministerial talents, parliamentary skills, and Baldwin’s fosterage. The
Weekly Dispatch
of July 10, 1927, reported that during the past week the chancellor had filled more pages in
Hansard
than any other six MPs put together; that he, not Baldwin, was leading the party, and doing it adroitly; and that he “also has a way of dealing with the Socialists which, while it never lacks anything in force or directness, yet appeals to their sense of fair play and good humour. ‘Winston is up!’ empties the smoking room quicker than any other announcement.” The piece ended: “Yet with all his talents and his force of character, the main body of conservatives would never follow him as Prime Minister.” Even Baldwin doubted that the Tories would choose Churchill as his successor. “Our people like him,” he wrote a friend in September 1927. “They love listening to him in the House, look on him as a star turn, and settle down in the stalls with anticipatory grins. But for leadership, they would turn him down every time.”
²²⁷

The real complaint about Churchill’s years at the Exchequer is that for the only time in his life he ignored his instincts. Intuition had warned him to shun the goldmongers, but, uncharacteristically unsure of himself, he learned the rules of fiscal orthodoxy and, for the most part, followed them. His policies were not wholly unimaginative; he established a reparations pool, whereby the Treasury would be enriched by German goods sold in Britain, and—over the strong objections of Neville Chamberlain—he introduced the rating apportionment bill of 1928 (actually young Harold Macmillan’s idea), under which industry and agriculture were provided with local tax relief, the gap in income being plugged by cuts in defense and a gasoline tax which brought in £15,000,000 a year. Because England’s economy had been crippled by the general strike, he had little room for maneuver in the two budgets following it. The deficits were met by a temporary tax on rubber tires and increased levies on wines, matches, and tobacco; by taking £12,000,000 from the Road Fund; by reducing the brewers’ credit period by a month; and by rescheduling property taxes. But it was all legerdemain—“jugglery and deceit,” as Snowden called it. Winston himself acknowledged that he had drawn on his “adventitious resources.” Grigg pointed out that “in spite of all the Keynesian gibes, his main object was always the reduction of unemployment.” Tinkering wouldn’t do the job, however, and Churchill shied away from the deficits and bold governmental intervention Roosevelt would introduce within a few years in the depressed United States. Amery summed up Winston’s financial program in a letter to Baldwin: “A few hand-to-mouth dodges for picking up odd windfalls, a hope that better trade and a few millions saved by cheese-paring here and there may ride matters over the next year: that is the beginning and end of it.”
²²⁸