The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (203 page)

In the next minute Hoare wished he had never heard the word “fluid.”

He was on them now, his vowels soaring and his consonants crashing as he reeled off dates, figures, and information new to those not on the front bench, revealing that 140,000 young Englishmen had volunteered for the territorials (reserves) only to find there were neither arms nor equipment for them; painting the shocking picture of the tank corps (“Nothing has been done in the years that the locusts have eaten for them”); decrying the army’s lack of antitank weapons, antiaircraft weapons, wireless sets. In comic relief, he related the story that a friend of his had come upon “a number of persons engaged in peculiar evolutions, genuflections and gestures.” He thought they must be gymnasts, evangelists, or “lunatics out for an airing,” but found instead, they were “a Searchlight Company of the London Territorials who were doing their exercises as well as they could without having the searchlights.” He waited a full moment, then ripped: “
Yet we are told there is no need for a Ministry of Supply
.”

Many MPs had been in the smoking room or the lobby when he rose, but word spread that this was worth watching, and the House had become crowded. Winston had assumed an almost biblical pose, his feet planted apart, his body immobile save for his head, which slowly toiled back and forth as his eyes swept the chamber and he told off his wrath in heavy cadence: “If we go on like this, and I do not see what power can prevent us from going on like this, some day there may be a terrible reckoning, and those who take the responsibility so entirely upon themselves are either of a hardy disposition or they are incapable of foreseeing the possibilities which may arise.”

Everyone anticipated what was coming next, and now, after one of those staged Churchillian entr’actes in which he feigned confusion, breaking the tension by appearing to fumble for a memorandum and then grope for a word, he resumed his stand, and, moving into another octave, turned to “the greatest matter of all, the air.” On Tuesday night, he recalled, Hoare had given them “the assurance that there is no foundation whatever for the statement that we are ‘vastly behindhand’ with our Air Force programme. It is clear from his words that we are behindhand. The only question is, what meaning does the First Lord attach to the word ‘vastly’? He also used the expression, about the progress of air expansion, that it was ‘not unsatisfactory.’ One does not know what his standard is….”

He broke off. This pause was heavy. Other MPs, whenever within earshot of Hoare, had left his sacrifice of Ethiopia unmentioned. Winston had cared little about the African kingdom; what rankled was Hoare’s mortal blow to the League of Nations, which, he believed, represented Europe’s greatest hope of salvation. To him sabotaging the principle of collective security forfeited any right to pity. He glowered at Hoare across the gangway and said slowly: “His standards change from time to time. In that speech of the eleventh of September [to the League of Nations]
there was one standard
, and in the Hoare-Laval Pact
there was clearly another
.”

Lowering his key Churchill told the House, in general terms, of the July deputation to Baldwin. Baldwin had said Winston’s facts and figures were “exaggerated,” but after checking them over the ensuing three months, Churchill had found them to be absolutely accurate, “and were it not that foreign ears listen to all we say, or if we were in secret session, I would repeat my statement here.” A lucid, rapid-fire summation of Europe’s balance of air power followed, comparing British and German might and reminding the House that “We were promised most solemnly by the Government that air parity with Germany would be maintained by the home defence forces. At the present time, putting everything at the very best, we are… only about two-thirds as strong as the German air force.” Once more his baleful eye fell on Hoare. The first lord had confirmed Churchill’s estimates of both Luftwaffe and RAF strength, yet said: “I am authorised to say that the position is satisfactory.” Winston declared: “I simply cannot understand it. Perhaps the Prime Minister will explain the position.”

The House, he submitted, had no choice but to demand an inquiry by six to eight “independent Members, responsible, experienced, discreet,” who would “make a brief report to the House, whether of reassurance or of suggestion for remedying the shortcomings. That, I think”—and this was the first sign that he would not confine his fire to the Treasury Bench—“is what any Parliament worthy of the name would do in these circumstances…. I hope that Members of the House of Commons will rise above considerations of party discipline, and will insist upon knowing where we stand in a matter which affects our liberties and our lives.” Before approaching his peroration he delivered a straight shot at Baldwin. “I should have thought that the Government, and above all the Prime Minister, whose load is so heavy, would have welcomed such a suggestion.”

Then:

Here another speaker would have ended. But Winston was not finished with them. The quintessential Churchill of the 1930s stood proudly alone. He had not been swayed by public opinion. But others had, and he meant to put them on notice. If he offended them they had it coming. One cannot imagine Franklin Roosevelt condemning Congress, or Hitler—though he could have done it with impunity—the Reichstag. Churchill could, and did, damn the House of Commons. And it was the finest passage in his speech. Harold Nicolson, watching, noted: “His style is more considered and slower than usual, but he drives his points home like a sledgehammer.”
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Even
The Times
described his coda as “brilliant”:

Baldwin’s reply—halting in delivery and appalling in content—has, in the words of one historian, “haunted his reputation to and beyond the grave.” “He speaks slowly,” Nicolson wrote, “and with evident physical effort.” One of the whips whispered: “This will take three months energy out of him.” Toward the end of his speech, Nicolson thought his voice was as “limp as if he were a tired walker on a long road. The House realizes that the dear old man has come to the end of his vitality.”
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The result was shocking. He was talking extemporarily—he usually did; that was part of his charm—but for once his celebrated candor betrayed him. He said: “I want to speak to the House with the utmost frankness…. The difference of opinion between Mr. Churchill and myself is in the years 1933 onwards.” After reminding them of the financial crisis then, and remarking that in establishing and enforcing policy “a democracy is almost always two years behind the dictator,” he declared: “I put before the whole House my own views with an appalling frankness.” Speaking of 1933 and 1934, he reminded them that “at that time there was probably a stronger pacifist feeling running through the country than at any time since the war.”

Suddenly he was talking, not about the threat to British lives and homes, but of votes, campaign slogans, and by-elections in which any candidate “who made the most guarded reference to the question of defence was mobbed for it.” That, he said, “was the feeling of the country in 1933. My position as the leader of a great party was not altogether a comfortable one.” After the East Fulham results, in which a previously safe Tory seat was lost resoundingly “on no issue but the pacifist,” he had asked himself “what chance there was within the next year or two of that feeling being so changed that the country would give a mandate for rearmament? Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.”
¹²⁸

From my point of view
. Surely this admits of but one interpretation. Tory victories were more important to Stanley Baldwin than the specter of Luftwaffe bombers overhead. Even
The Times
, after Baldwin’s death a decade later, sadly concluded in its editorial columns that “what he sacrificed to political expediency obscured the real issue, delayed the education of public opinion, and impeded the process of rearmament, on the speed of which the success of any conceivable foreign policy then depended.”

Baldwin has his defenders. Had the coalition lost, they point out, power would have passed to the parliamentary Labour party, which opposed any rearmament whatsoever. It is true that Labour didn’t want it done. But then, Baldwin hadn’t really done it. In 1935, urging support for Conservative candidates, he had told crowds that despite the ugly stories from Germany, “I confess that in my own political experience I have not encountered Governments possessed of all these malevolent qualities,” and adopted as his rallying cry, “No great armaments!”
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To Churchill the argument that “the Government had no mandate for rearmament until after the General Election” was “wholly inadmissible”:

Afterward Londonderry wrote Winston: “SB’s admission was a very remarkable one.” The prime minister, he noted, had never acknowledged that “the country was running risks. In fact his lips were sealed. We told him and Neville of the risks, but they were too frightened of losing bye-elections.” In a postscript Londonderry added: “Neville was really the villain of the piece because he as Chancellor blocked everything on the grounds of Finance.” Nevertheless, Churchill’s later indictment of Baldwin’s confession stands: “It carried naked truth about his motives into indecency. That a Prime Minister should avow that he had not done his duty in regard to national security because he was afraid of losing the election was an incident without parallel in our political history.”
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This second confession that he had broken his pledge, coming eighteen months after the first, shocked all England. Baldwin’s prestige plummeted. William James had written: “Truth
happens
to an idea. It
becomes
true, is
made
true by events.” Now it was happening to the Dear Vicar. “Today,” Morton wrote Churchill, “his name is mud.” Only a year earlier, Macmillan recalled, his prestige was “higher than it had ever been. He was universally trusted. He stood on a pinnacle.” A few days before the general election in which Baldwin took so much pride he had delivered a memorable address to the Peace Society, speaking first of the generation shattered in France and Flanders, and then, on the issue of peace: “Everything that we have and hold and cherish is in jeopardy.” He had spoken eloquently of the beauty which war could destroy. But he had not addressed the issue of how that destruction could be prevented. He was, writes Telford Taylor, “too easily swayed by the perils of the moment, too little governed by the dangers of the future.”
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For the prime minister the past year had been a year of almost unrelieved disaster: Hoare-Laval; his unseemly reward of Hoare’s groveling encomium by returning him to the cabinet; the even more unsuitable appointment of Inskip; the loss of the Rhineland; his humiliating, unsuccessful attempts to wring concessions from Mussolini and Hitler after their illegal conquests; and now Churchill’s philippic, followed by his own shocking admission that he had put party before country.

Baldwin’s friends were worried, concerned about both his health and his emotional stability. Distress signals had been visible for some time. Since February he had been afflicted with spells of disabling fatigue, and on April 30 Tom Jones found him swallowing pills which he told Jones relieved “nervous exhaustion.” After a thorough examination, his physician found him free of functional disorders. His patient, he concluded, was simply worn out.
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