The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (493 page)

C
hurchill was seventy-five. He complained to his doctor of tightness in his shoulders and he feared another stroke. Time was now the enemy. But in one regard time was also his ally. Turmoil among the leadership of the Labour party, any internal Labour dissent on matters of budgets, banking, or defense, would lead to a vote of no confidence. In America Churchill would have had to wait four years before another shot at the top, but in Britain—especially in Attlee’s Britain, that year—another general election might be called within months. Although Anthony Eden, Rab Butler, and Harold Macmillan each aspired to higher status within the party leadership (and ultimately the leadership itself), Churchill’s position as leader was secure. Under his command, the Conservatives had retrieved 85 of the seats they had lost in 1945, and Labour had lost 78. Those Tories who had wanted Churchill to take a long rest in 1945 would have to wait their turn. They could not throw over the man who had brought them this far, in war and in peace. Churchill, therefore, though disappointed by the election results, was not shattered. He believed that his day would yet come. He returned to Chartwell to continue work on his memoirs—only two volumes remained. He prepared, too, for the new Parliament and the battles sure to be fought there. Late one night not long after the election, while dictating a section of his memoir, he turned to Jane Portal and announced, “I know I’m going to be Prime Minister again. I know it.”
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One among the family was not shattered in the least by the election results: Clementine. Chartwell was her safe haven; the guest list included children and grandchildren and old friends. In 1945 she believed Winston should have retired, and she believed so still. Increasingly afflicted with neuritis, streptococcal infections, and by a bout of lumbago later in the year, she was ready for a pacific retirement at Chartwell. It was not to be.

On March 6, the new Parliament opened with the traditional Gracious Speech, the King’s message to the Houses of Lords and Commons. The next day, March 7, the first day of debate, Churchill made clear his intent
to press his attacks on the socialist experiment: “The basic fact before us is that the electors by a majority of 1,750,000 have voted against the advance to a Socialist State, and, in particular, against the nationalization of steel and other industries which were threatened. The Government, therefore, have no mandate.” He moved that a full debate of all issues “be accorded us in the next fortnight or so.” Hansard transcripts record the following exchange:

He pressed his attacks for the next twenty months. Debates (and Questions) in the House of Commons are far livelier affairs than business conducted in either the Senate or House of the United States, where long and often boring statements are read into the Congressional Record by members (often to an empty chamber), and where oral interruptions are considered breaches of decorum. In the British House of Commons “Rubbish” and “Nonsense” are oft-heard rejoinders. Laughter—and its cousin the snicker—is a weapon. Members mumble and rustle papers in shows of displeasure at an opponent’s words (or mumble and rustle papers in agreement with their party colleagues). Churchill came to do battle. His political nemesis Aneurin Bevan described Churchill’s approach to the House thus: “He had to wheel himself up to battle like an enormous gun.” When Churchill fired a salvo, his opponents knew it.
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Labour MPs once jeered Churchill as he was leaving the chamber; he turned and blew them kisses. No barb could go unanswered. When Churchill castigated Labour for the fiscal hardships Britons lived with, a Labour MP called out, “Why don’t you sell your
horse?
” Churchill looked up, and replied, “I was strongly tempted to sell the horse, but I am doing my best
to fight against the profit motive.
” A nod of dissent, a derisive grunt, were gauntlets thrown down. When a member mumbled, “Rubbish,” to one Churchill pronouncement, the Old Man replied, “That may be what the right honourable and learned Gentleman has in his head, but it does not carry conviction.” When a member called out, “Rubbish,” after Churchill claimed Czechoslovakia had become a pawn of Moscow, the Old Man replied: “The right honourable Gentleman seems to have nothing in his head but rubbish.” Interrupted during one debate on Moscow’s geopolitical intentions, Churchill shot back, “I think the Communist Members and fellow travelers have a pretty good run in this House.” Here was an incendiary claim that even the junior senator from Wisconsin,
Joseph McCarthy, would not make on the U.S. Senate floor. But Churchill could toss out such a retort without causing an uproar, because all knew he was without guile. As well, wrote Tory MP Earl Winterton (who in 1950 was the Father of the House, its longest-serving member), Churchill could read the mood of the House: “Winston Churchill is steeped in its atmosphere and traditions; he is familiar with all its varying moods… he has an instinctive understanding of what it will accept and what it will not accept.” The British House of Commons was populated by agile minds and quick wits, and after almost fifty years, Winston Churchill was still one of the most agile and quick-witted. Indeed, at about that time, Winterton called him “the greatest living parliamentarian.”
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Another colleague, Sir Alan Herbert, the Independent MP for Oxford University, called Churchill “the greatest living British humorist.” When giving lectures on the topic of humor, Herbert cited the usual suspects: P. G. Wodehouse, Noël Coward, Nat Gubbins, even Aneurin Bevan. But Herbert’s top choice was “Winston Churchill, who, at any time, in any conditions, in any company, on any subject, with never a fault of taste or tact, can make laughter when he wills.”
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Not all agreed. Roy Jenkins believed Churchill’s humor was sometimes “not… wise… or gracious” as a result of “one of Churchill’s narrownesses”—his hostility to left-wing intellectuals. Churchill believed incorrectly that Labour’s leading lights were all products of Winchester College, which he considered a breeding ground of the casuistry he saw and detested in certain intellectuals. Indeed, Hugh Gaitskell and Stafford Cripps, among several other Labour leaders, had come out of Winchester. As a result, Jenkins wrote, Churchill made “constant not very funny anti-Wykehamical [anti-Winchester] jokes in the House.” He did, but one man’s humor is another man’s poison. Churchill, responding to a Labour claim: “We suffer from the fallacy,
deus ex machina,
which, for the benefit of any Wykehamists who may be present, is ‘A god out of the machine.’ ” On another occasion: “I do not know whether they learn French at Winchester.” And during a June 27, 1950, debate on British participation in a European coal and steel community, Churchill tossed out: “In this Debate we have had the usual jargon about ‘the infrastructure of a supra-national authority.’ The original authorship is obscure; but it may well be that these words ‘infra’ and ‘supra’ have been introduced into our current political parlance by the band of intellectual highbrows who are naturally anxious to impress British labour with the fact that they learned Latin at Winchester.” In fact, the word “infrastructure,” a perfectly good Latin-derived word, had come out of France, but Churchill never missed a chance to ridicule his political enemies.
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The “supranational authority” under discussion was known as the
Schuman Plan, proposed on May 9 by French foreign minister Robert Schuman, who called on European nations to join together in a community dedicated to shedding tariffs and sharing resources—coal and steel, to start with—in order to regain a competitive edge in the international marketplace and, most significant, to eliminate the resource monopolization that inevitably ended in European wars. Schuman called for talks in Paris. The Attlee government refused to participate, a decision Churchill denounced as “a squalid attitude at a time of present stress.” He was not advising a blanket acceptance of the Schuman Plan, but merely a willingness to discuss it. He added that if asked, would he “agree to a supra-national authority which has the power to tell Great Britain not to cut any more coal or make any more steel, but to grow tomatoes instead?’ I should say, without hesitation, the answer is ‘No.’ ” What he opposed, he said, “is State ownership and management—or mismanagement as it has proved so far—of the industry.” He pointed out that under Schuman’s proposal, private ownership of industry remained unaffected, adding, “We see no reason why the problems of the British steel industry should not be discussed in common with the problems of the other European steel industries.”

And he pointed out the ultimate beauty of the plan: it would bring France and Germany together in mutually beneficial enterprises. It would be “an effective step,” Churchill told a meeting of Scottish Unionists, “in preventing another war between France and Germany and lay at last to rest that quarrel of 1,000 years between Gaul and Teuton. Now France has taken the initiative in a manner beyond my hopes.” He told the House during the debate of June 27 that to reach this day was why Britain had refused to quit in 1940:

He predicted the consequences if Attlee refused participation in the talks about the Schuman Plan:

Attlee stood firm; he would not send any ministers to Paris.

Schuman held his meetings without the British. Almost a year later, in April 1951, France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Paris and by so doing created the European Coal and Steel Community. The six states pledged to create a “common market” for steel and coal. Here, then, was the first step on the road to the European Economic Community and, ultimately, the European Union. May 9—the date Schuman first read his proposal in the French National Assembly—is now celebrated by European Union member nations as Europe Day. (The Council of Europe, which Churchill championed, is not part of the European Union; its member states do not transfer any national legislative or executive sovereignty to the body, which acts through international legal conventions.) The evolution of Schuman’s concept into the European Union is a long and fascinating story, but it is not Churchill’s story. Events on the other side of the globe that June week in 1950 changed the trajectory of Churchill’s thinking, and the final years of his career.

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n June 25, the Cold War turned hot. On that day, 230,000 North Korean soldiers, supported by more than 250 Russian-made T-34 battle tanks (the best tank on the planet) and as many pieces of heavy artillery, drove south across the 38th parallel and into South Korea. South Korean forces were outnumbered by more than two to one in men. They had no tanks. On the twenty-seventh, the day the Commons debated the Schuman Plan, the United Nations passed Security Council Resolution 83, calling on member states to offer military support to South Korea. Moscow did not vote, having boycotted the Security Council for six months. The next day, the South Korean government fled Seoul. Within four weeks, the North Koreans had bottled up the South’s army and the American Eighth Army in the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula, near Pusan. Given that the North Koreans were clients—proxies—of Moscow, Churchill and the West had to entertain the very real possibility that with the attention of the United States drawn to Korea, Moscow might strike in Europe. If that came to pass, Europe west of the Iron Curtain was virtually defenseless.