The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (147 page)

Baldwin was unmoved. He had already confided to a friend that if he formed another government, Churchill would not be part of it. Winston’s incapacity for teamwork, he said, far outweighed his talents. Clementine saw what was coming. Politics, she wrote their son, “have taken an orientation not favourable to Papa.” India was the main issue, but Baldwin, strongly supported by the shadow cabinet in this instance, endorsed high tariffs. Churchill protested. On October 14 the two men held a long private talk and agreed that there was a definite breach between them. That evening Baldwin wrote Churchill of his “profound regret that there is a real parting of the ways and a friendship towards you which has grown up through six years of loyal and strenuous work together.” He insisted that he continued to “cherish the hope that you may yet see your way to stay with us,” but by his actions he was sabotaging that hope, if indeed it existed. The Tory tariff policy remained unchanged, and Winston contemplated resignation from the shadow cabinet. He was nudged again when Lord Lloyd, the strong British high commissioner in Cairo, was recalled with Baldwin’s approval as the first step in the evacuation of all British troops, except those in the canal zone, from Egypt. “During the last forty years,” a furious Churchill told the House, “everything has turned upon the British garrison in Cairo. With its departure the once glorious episode of England in Egypt comes to an end. It is not without a bitter pang that I contemplate this.” He observed that “there is a sombre philosophy nowadays which I hear in some quarters about Egypt and India. It is said: ‘Give them all they ask for! Clear out and let things go to smash, and then there will be a case for us to come back again!’ ” Such a doctrine, he said, “is no foundation for the continuance of British fame and power. Once we lose our confidence in our mission in the East… it will be a presence which cannot long endure.”
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Baldwin wrote a friend that Churchill wanted “to go back to pre-war and govern with a strong hand. He has become once more the subaltern of hussars of ’96.” But Winston was far from alone. The very die-hard members of the party to whom he had once been anathema founded the Indian Empire Society and invited him to address their first meeting. It was held in London’s Cannon Street Hotel, hard by St. Paul’s, on December 12, 1930. They wanted powerful political medicine, and he believed he knew the prescription. In Lahore, Kipling’s beloved citadel in the Punjab, members of the congress had burned the Union Jack. Their meeting, said Winston, should have been “broken up and its leaders deported.” Gandhi had been treated far too leniently in the beginning; he should have been arrested and tried “as soon as he broke the law.” Even now, firm measures, demonstrating Parliament’s resolve “to govern and guide the destinies of the Indian people in faithful loyalty to Indian interest,” could, perhaps within a few months, “bring this period of tantalized turmoil to an end.” Each Indian province should be given “more real, more intimate, more representative organs of self-government,” leaving the central authority in the hands of the Raj. But there could be no compromise with “the forces of sedition and outrage,” because “the truth is that Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed. It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him with cat’s meat. The sooner this is realised, the less trouble and misfortune will there be for all concerned.”
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“What a monstrous speech Winston has just made,” Irwin wrote Geoffrey Dawson at
The Times.
Dawson, agreeing, ran an editorial declaring that Churchill was “no more representative of the Conservative Party” than “the assassins of Calcutta” were of the Indian Congress, and his speech would “have just as little influence.” Dawson and his fellow lords of the British media were doing something about this last. Churchill wanted to address the nation on the issue. He offered Sir John Reith £100 for ten minutes on the BBC. Reith, like any trapped civil servant, scurried to higher authority, in this case Wedgwood Benn, who replied that he felt “most apprehensive” at the prospect of Winston on the air; he was afraid the consequence would do “immense harm to India.” Reith thereupon rejected Churchill’s proposal, explaining that he opposed “American” broadcasting methods. This, Winston said, was an “oppressive decision.” He thought “the American plan would be better than the present British methods of debarring public men from access to a public who wish to hear”; when “an Imperial issue like the discharge of our mission in India is being debated, it seems to me that at least an equal solicitude for impartiality is required from you.” The Establishment was closing ranks against him. News accounts of his speeches in Parliament shrank and appeared deeper and deeper in newspapers’ inside pages. He protested to Rothermere of the
Daily Mail
that they were “the only weapon I have for fighting this battle.” If the
Mail
buried its accounts of them, “Baldwin with the Times at his back is master of the fate of India.” Gagged, he struggled on, addressing the Indian Empire Society twice more, always assailing Gandhi, whose cause and dedication were incomprehensible to him. In his view the Mahatma was “a malignant and subversive fanatic,” a cynical manipulator of “Brahmins who mouth and patter principles of Western Liberalism and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians.” And all the time he continued to attend meetings of the shadow cabinet. If his colleagues felt awkward, he was not in the least embarrassed. As he saw it he was true to the widow’s uniform he had once worn:
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As the rift grew between Baldwin and Churchill, Conservative MPs were faced with the nightmare of every workaday politician: the obligation to choose sides in an intramural quarrel. Some found it relatively easy. Lord Weir thought Britain needed “inspiration” and Winston could provide it. Lord Knutsford wrote him: “Some day you must lead the whole country. I look for this.” But others were more vulnerable. Neville Chamberlain privately wrote a young MP on November 29: “I, myself, would very much prefer to go more slowly in the matter of Indian reform, and try a series of cautious experiments, which might perhaps last for fifty years or more, before culminating in a complete system of Central and Provincial self-government.” Publicly, however, Chamberlain was among Baldwin’s most enthusiastic backers. Lane-Fox wrote Irwin that the party was “not very comfortable” with his declaration, and in another letter told him: “The average Conservative was of course rather shocked by the way in which Gandhi was originally allowed to break the law in the matter of his salt campaign and march to the sea.” A clear majority of the Tory MPs thought Churchill right, but most of them had too much to lose to say so. Despite their convictions, men like Chamberlain persuaded themselves that they were bound by a higher loyalty to oppose, in his words, those who were “either hostile” to their leaders “or disposed to join cliques led by men whose motives are much more complicated.” This last referred to the possibility that Winston was planning a revolt, deliberately dividing the party, as his father had, hoping to reach No. 10 through a coup. Davidson put it bluntly in a letter to Irwin: “Winston’s game, of course, has been obvious, as it always is. He is not the son of Randolph for nothing.” Beaverbrook thought Churchill’s stand revealed “a defect of character” and a willingness “to take up anything as long as it leads to power”; that he had changed “party, political friends and political dogmas so often” that his credibility was “nearly gone.” At present, said Beaverbrook, he was “trying to make a corner for himself in Indian affairs. He is now taking up the stand of a veritable die-hard. But,” he concluded, “he does not carry conviction…. His voice lacks that note of sincerity for which the country looks.” Irwin disagreed. To him, Churchill presented a real threat. Irwin noted that at least twenty times between March and December Winston had challenged the leadership’s position on India, and, on each occasion, Baldwin had barely mustered a majority of Tories.
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Clearly a break between Churchill and him was imminent. Yet where could Winston go? In 1904 he had crossed to the Liberals; in 1924, back to the Conservatives. But Labour was now the Opposition, and he and they glared at one another from opposite ends of the parliamentary spectrum. Therefore his only choice was what political journalists call “the wilderness”—the cold, bleak, barren limbo of discredited or incompetent MPs whom no party wants. Nevertheless, no one can doubt that he was moved by a genuine conviction. That cannot be said of those with whom he was parting company. The Tory leaders were uninspired by Indian nationalism. One searches in vain for ringing affirmations of freedom or admiration for Gandhian saintliness in their speeches, letters, and diaries. What comes through, like the pounding on a wall of a man who wants the party in the next apartment to quiet down so he can sleep, is a determination to avoid discord, unpleasantness, or any rude interruption of long serene weekends in the country. England’s ruling class, or those of them in power, had lost their fathers’ inflexible determination. A. G. Gardiner had described the English patrician as “a personality that is entirely fearless,” belonging to “a caste that never doubts itself.” A. L. Rowse, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, quotes Gardiner and then adds: “Never till 1931, we may say; for in that year the caste lost confidence in itself and, undermined by fear, it lost not only confidence but conscience. Confused in mind about everything, except the main chance—its own preservation—it survived from year to year, from month to month, from day to day, by blurring the clarity of all issues, even the most dangerous—that of the nation’s safety; it maintained its enormous majority by electoral trickery, it spoke and perhaps thought in the language of humbug, it hoped to stave off conflict… by offering appeasement.”
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By January 8, 1931, Churchill had made his decision. He foresaw MacDonald’s fall and the formation of a new government, but, he wrote his son, “I have no desire to join such an administration and be saddled with all the burden of whole-hog Protection, plus unlimited doses of Irwinism for India. I shall be much more able to help the country from outside.” The “breaking-point in my relation with Mr Baldwin,” as he later called it, came less than three weeks later. Irwin wanted to lay the foundations for his “round-table” conference with the congress leaders, to be held in London. To clear the air he planned to release Gandhi from jail, and on January 23 he cabled Baldwin: “My immediate fear is lest, in the forthcoming debate in Parliament, Winston should make mischief. Do, if you can, get some helpful and cordial speeches made from our side to discount possible bad effect of what he may say. Best of all, speak yourself and send him to Epping for the day.”
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Gandhi was freed forty-eight hours later. Outraged Raj officials in India and Conservative associations throughout England were speechless. Churchill, of course, was not. On the evening of Monday, January 26, he rose in the House and—his other remarks on India having been delivered elsewhere, “out of doors,” in the parliamentary expression, and therefore being forgivable—took his first fateful step into the wilderness. “I must of course first of all make it clear,” he said at the outset, “that I do not speak for the official Opposition nor for my right hon[orable] friend the Leader of the Opposition.” He spoke, he said, “solely as a Member of Parliament, of some service in this House,” whose views ought not to go “unrepresented in this discussion.” He then laced into the viceroy’s declaration, deplored the tabling of the Simon Report, and criticized the government’s decision to bar Simon and his fellow commissioners from the round table. “Our trusted friends and lawful, formal authoritative advisers are set aside,” he charged, “in order to placate those who are the bitterest opponents of British rule in India.” The promise of dominion status was to be laid before “the gleaming eyes of excitable millions” while sixty thousand Indian agitators were locked up, a situation virtually without precedent, at least since the Mutiny. To imagine that these resentful men would emerge docile was, he thought, absurd. Britons should not permit themselves “to be edged, pushed, talked and cozened out of India.” After two hundred years of fidelity and achievement, and thousands of British soldiers’ lives sacrificed “on a hundred fields,” Englishmen had earned “rights of our own in India.” Public opinion in the United Kingdom would not tolerate the spectacle of British women and children “in hourly peril amidst the Indian multitudes,” yet this was the future to which, “step by step and day by day, we are being remorselessly and fatuously conducted.”
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By custom, either MacDonald or Wedgwood Benn should have replied to him. Baldwin did it instead. His decision was unwise; he answered Winston’s rolling, cadenced rhetoric with a meandering, legalistic defense of the round table. Lane-Fox reported to Irwin that “while S.B. was vigorously cheered by the Socialists, there was an ominous silence on our benches. And I am afraid this represents the position in our party on many things.” Nevertheless, it was Churchill who had sinned, and now he must pay the forfeit for flagrant disobedience of his party’s leader. Tuesday morning Lord Hailes approached him, like a summons server, with the formal request for his resignation from the shadow cabinet. Afterward Hailes set down Winston’s reaction. “Face reddened then went white. Pouted furiously. Walked to a corner of the room, picked up his silver knobbed cane, came back and brought the cane down full force on the table. As he looked at me, I imagined that I might be the next victim. Then his face suddenly puckered into a smile. ‘So the Conservative P. wants to get rid of me, does it? All right, I’ll go quietly now.’ ” He scrawled a paragraph to Baldwin: “Now that our divergences of view upon India policy have become public”—persisting in the quaint conceit that nothing in British politics becomes public until uttered in the House—“I feel that I ought not any longer to attend the meetings of your ‘Business Committee’ to which you have hitherto so kindly invited me.” Baldwin replied on Wednesday: “I am grateful to you for your kind letter of yesterday and much as I regret your decision not to attend the meetings of your old colleagues, I am convinced that your decision is correct in the circumstances.”
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