The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (285 page)

Wednesday morning Labour’s leaders were busy. Hugh Dalton breakfasted with Hugh Gaitskell, who told him that “high Foreign Office officials are leaking very freely.” Halifax, he had learned, had threatened to resign unless Trondheim were attacked, and Lord Cork and Orrery had said that “in the first twenty-four hours”—before the Germans arrived—“I could have taken Trondheim with my bare hands.” His request to do so had been denied, not by Churchill, but by Whitehall.
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That morning’s
Daily Herald
, the voice of Labour, reported that the party’s Parliamentary Executive would meet before noon to determine its tactics in the concluding day of the debate. The
Herald
’s political correspondent, Maurice Webb, predicted “sweeping reconstruction of the Government, involving the possible resignation of Mr. Chamberlain… in the near future.” Webb doubted, however, that events would “take this drastic turn at once. Indeed, as I have previously stated, the Government will get through the present debate without immediate disaster.” He noted suggestions “that the Labour Party should either put down a vote of censure or force a division on a motion for the adjournment, a motion which, if passed, would bring the Government down.” To his subsequent regret, he called this “an unwise tactic…. The view taken by the most experienced critics of the Government is that the debate should be allowed to end without any direct challenge.”
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Herbert Morrison and Dalton had given Webb their assurance that there would be no call for a vote. However, he had not talked to Clement Attlee. Throughout Tuesday’s session Attlee had kept a sharp eye on the benches opposite. He had observed the hostility toward their prime minister, and he meant to measure it. The leadership meeting, which he chaired, opened at 10:30
A.M
., and he proposed that the Opposition force a division. Several of his colleagues were reluctant, arguing, as Dalton did, that “a vote at this stage” would “consolidate the Government majority,” that it was precisely what Chamberlain and Halifax wanted. Nevertheless, Attlee’s motion carried and was ratified at a later meeting of Labour backbenchers. Labour therefore prepared to make the first move when Parliament assembled. Morrison rose, as usual, to bait the front bench. At last, he observed, the prime minister had found a newspaper endorsement outside Britain and her commonwealth. It was the official organ of Franco’s Spanish Falangists. He also read a few lines from Hoare’s Norway speech from the BBC in
The Listener
. “Today our wings are spread over the Arctic. They are sheathed in ice….” Hoare flushed crimson as the House roared. Morrison said: “Hon. Members understandably laugh, but I am not quoting this for the purpose of arousing amusement, because it really is serious, for it is an indication of the delusions from which the Government are suffering.” He then announced that “in view of the gravity of the events which we are debating… every Member has a responsibility to record his particular judgment upon them.” Therefore, “we feel that we must divide the House at the end of our debate today.” The Opposition was calling for a censure of the government.
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Chamberlain was startled, then angry. The cockiness of Morrison’s manner—he always seemed to be lecturing a particularly stupid child—was enough to get under anyone’s skin. Moreover, the prime minister had not expected this. There was an understanding between whips that if either party planned to ask for a vote, the other would be told, although recently Sir Charles Edwards, Labour’s chief whip, had warned Margesson, his Tory counterpart, that he couldn’t always carry out his side of the bargain, explaining apologetically, “It’s a very difficult party to manage, you know.”
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Thus taken unaware, the prime minister miscalculated. He jumped up and sputtered: “The words which the right hon. gentleman has just uttered make it necessary for me to intervene for a moment or two at this stage.” Dalton thought he showed “his teeth like a rat” as he cried, “It may well be that it is a duty to criticise the Government. I do not seek to evade criticism, but I say to my friends in the House,
and I have friends in the House
”—here, according to Nicolson, his expression became “a leer of triumph”—“[that] no Government can prosecute a war efficiently unless it has public and parliamentary support. I accept this challenge. I welcome it indeed. At least I shall see who is with us and who is against us, and I call on my friends to support us in the Lobby tonight.”
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Churchill described this as “an unfortunate passage”; his fellow Tories, he noted, “sat abashed and silenced.” “Friends,” in the context and idiom of the time and place, meant members of the P.M.’s party. Thus, in a partisan stroke, he had reduced the debate to the lowest level of politics, demanding that men belonging to the majority vote for him, regardless of how they felt about his prosecution of the war. It led to an unforgettable speech. Churchill called it “the last decisive intervention of Mr. Lloyd George in the House.”
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He was now approaching eighty, and the awesome fire which had fueled the passion of the young Welsh crusader for justice had been reduced to embers. But Chamberlain, by cheapening the office Lloyd George had held in the last war, kindled them; in a final pyrotechnical display he evoked memories of the days when he was in his forties and Churchill in his thirties and the two radicals, the older as chancellor and the younger as president of the Board of Trade, had forged an alliance to emasculate the House of Lords and bring England a maximum work day for miners, pensions for the aged, free meals and free medical attention for all British schoolchildren, and insurance for the jobless and the sick. Violet Bonham Carter, whose father was then the prime minister, had watched them both, and now in 1940, sitting in the Strangers’ Gallery, she thought this, Lloyd George’s last bow, “the most deadly speech I have ever heard from him—voice, gesture, everything was brought into play to drive home the attack.”
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He tried to exculpate Churchill—“I do not think the First Lord was responsible for all the things that happened in Norway”—but Churchill immediately interrupted him: “I take full responsibility for everything that has been done by the Admiralty, and I take my full share of the burden.” After warning Winston not to allow himself “to be converted into an air-raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues,” Lloyd George turned on Chamberlain:

Now the outcome of the House vote was a source of speculation. Labour could not win. They held 166 seats to the Conservatives’ 387. Many men could not switch; commitments had been made, papers signed, obligations incurred. To many others, casting a Conservative vote was a sacrament. And still others knew that if they broke with the party they would be pariahs in their own constituencies, even their own homes. But Chamberlain, smug only yesterday, began to feel uneasy. If the great Tory majority thinned perceptibly, his problems could become grave. Keyes, Amery, and Lloyd George had stirred the House. He was lucky Churchill was on the front bench and would anchor the government’s position in the last speech of the evening.

As the debate continued into evening it became obvious that Winston would not be called before 10:00
P.M
. He wandered into the smoking room, and was poking a hole in a new cigar when he glanced up and saw Harold Macmillan. Macmillan recalled long afterward: “He beckoned to me, and I moved to speak to him. I wished him luck, but added that I hoped his speech would not be too convincing. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Because,’ I replied, ‘we must have a new Prime Minister, and it must be you.’ He answered gruffly that he had signed on for the voyage and would stick to the ship. But I don’t think he was angry with me.”
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Churchill was, however, worried. After Lloyd George’s valediction he had been heard to say to Kingsley Wood, “This is all making it damned difficult for me tonight,” and to Walter Elliott that the old man had been “absolutely devastating.” Nevertheless, when the Speaker recognized him shortly after ten o’clock, he squared away like a prizefighter, assuming his most pugilistic stance. He had taken the queen’s shilling, had signed on for the cruise, and intended to give the captain his best possible performance. In his diary Channon observed, “One saw at once that he was in a bellicose mood, alive and enjoying himself, relishing the ironical position in which he found himself: i.e. that of defending his enemies, and a cause in which he did not believe.” Channon called the speech “slashing, vigourous… a magnificent piece of oratory. I was in the gallery behind him, with Rab”—R. A. Butler—“who was several times convulsed with laughter.”
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Winston said he understood Keyes’s “desire to lead a valiant attack” but regretted “that this natural impulse should have led him to cast aspersions upon his old shipmates and his old staff officers, Sir Dudley Pound and Vice-Admiral Phillips.” Then he turned on those who had deplored the prime minister’s appeal to his friends. He had shared their dismay, but he wasn’t going to let that prevent him from having fun with them. “He
thought
he had some friends,” he said, “and I
hope
he has some friends. He certainly had a good many when things were going well.” At one point he said that Allied shipping losses had almost been redeemed by new shipbuilding and the capture of German ships. “Oh!” cried Emanuel Shinwell, an exasperated socialist and a favorite Churchill target. Winston rounded on him. “I daresay the hon. Member does not like that. He would like me to have a bad tale to tell. That is why he skulks in a corner.” A Labour MP, “rather the worse for drink,” according to Channon, had never heard the word “skulks”; he thought Winston had said “skunks” and protested, with the support of several colleagues who had it aright, that he had used unparliamentary language. The brief exchange in Hansard is hilarious:

He had a knack for that—drawing them out and then playing the outraged injured party. “How much of the fire was real, how much ersatz, we shall never know,” Channon wrote, “but he amused and dazzled everyone with his virtuosity.” John Peck, a young civil servant who had recently joined Winston’s staff, was fascinated—and troubled. Winston, he later wrote, “was constantly heckled by the Labour opposition, and he tore into them vehemently and often angrily. I had never heard him in action in the House of Commons and I was strangely uneasy.” Somehow, he felt, “it did not ring entirely true.” Actually, he reflected, it was impossible to offer “a completely sincere and heartfelt reply” to the attacks on the government. “Churchill knew that he was defending positions which were in many respects, indefensible. He knew that if the bitterest critics had their way, Chamberlain would resign. He knew that, in that case, he would probably become Prime Minister himself. But throughout the entire political crisis he never spoke or acted except in absolute loyalty to his Prime Minister.” The fact was that the more eloquent his defense of Chamberlain, the more Chamberlain’s chances shrunk. After this no one would ask: “If not Chamberlain, who?”
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The House was blinded, and beguiled, by the skyrockets and pinwheels, but in solemn moments Churchill, though entertaining, was never a mere entertainer. He knew serious men would pore over Hansard, looking for a chain of logic, and he provided them with it. He did not lie, he did not distort. But it was sophistry all the same. He omitted certain facts; since they reflected well upon him, it would have been difficult for anyone to argue that he had deliberately remained mute. Among his omissions was the fact that he had spent seven months trying to persuade the War Cabinet that they must move on Narvik (though he
did
say, “My eye has always been fixed on Narvik”), nor did he reveal his original doubts about Trondheim. Once the Nazi invasion had begun, he said, no one could “dispute that we were bound to go to the aid of the Norwegians and that Trondheim was the place.” Not a voice in the chamber cried: “Why?” Yet that was his one weak point; had he been challenged here, the whole structure of his presentation could have collapsed.

But he got by it and was home free. He conceded that Trondheim had been “a hazardous operation,” but could have succeeded had the Norwegians not neglected to blow key bridges, destroy railroad junctions, hold the mountain passes, or block the Nazi advance north of Oslo. All these delaying tactics having failed, the British commanders were left with a Hobson’s choice: either evacuate their troops “or leave them to be destroyed by overwhelming force.” Could they have been strengthened? They could—by ignoring the military maxim “Never reinforce failure” and by withdrawing divisions from the BEF in France. Escalation in Norway would have led to “a forlorn operation on an ever-increasing scale.” Perhaps he was thinking of Gallipoli. Here he added a warning; he had not abandoned his illusion that sea power was omnipotent, but he foresaw the danger of recklessly committing the RAF unless the need for it became absolute: “We must be careful not to exhaust our air force, in view of the much graver dangers which might come upon us at any time.”
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