The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (495 page)

Macmillan and Churchill did not know—and would not learn for another year—that Attlee had good reason to fret about the American position. The previous year Attlee had agreed to abolish the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff organization. That body had been critical to
Churchill’s plans for continued Anglo-American military cooperation. Attlee shared Churchill’s desire for a continuation of the Anglo-American partnership, but whereas Churchill had always badgered the Americans for a real role in that relationship—even in 1944, when Britain was clearly the junior partner—Attlee had willingly assumed the subservient role. He had twice in 1950—in secret—assured Washington that if American air forces commenced bombing operations in China, Britain would commit her air forces to the cause. In doing so, he had written Washington a blank check. Now, with Truman mumbling about the possibility of using the atomic bomb in Korea or China, Attlee had to either stop payment or secure guarantees from Truman that Britain would be consulted if any such measure was taken under consideration. Thus, Attlee went to Washington in early December with hopes of resurrecting the gentleman’s agreement on the use of the atomic bomb that Churchill and Roosevelt had forged in 1943, which stipulated that neither country would use the bomb without the approval of the other, but which the McMahon Act of 1946 had effectively quashed. In this, Attlee failed utterly. Truman flatly refused to “consult” with the British, or anyone, on how America would defend itself. Truman offered to keep Attlee “informed” as a courtesy, but there’d be no “consultation.”

Dean Acheson, by then secretary of state, let Attlee down gently by explaining that any agreement made between the president and another leader was considered by the U.S. Senate to be a treaty, and therefore subject to Senate approval. As the talks progressed, Acheson realized Attlee had arrived with other items on his agenda, including the need to negotiate with—and mollify—China. More than 60,000 British and Commonwealth troops served in Korea during that war, including legendary regiments such as the Black Watch, the Royal Canadian Regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and the Royal Irish Fusiliers. But the Americans sent 450,000 men, and the prospects of those now on the ground appeared bleak. Presuming more defeats were imminent, Attlee proposed that Truman offer a cease-fire in order to pull out the troops. Acheson told Attlee that to negotiate with the Chinese after taking “a licking” was the absolute wrong policy. State Department policy was based on George Kennan’s belief (shared by Churchill) that to negotiate with Communists from a position of weakness was to invite disaster. “To cut and run,” Acheson later wrote, “was not acceptable conduct.” Attlee also proposed that the time was right to give the Communist Chinese government a seat in the UN. He was hoping, as Tories saw it, to detach China from Moscow through kindness. Nothing, he told Truman, was more important than relations with China, to which Acheson replied “acidly” that “the security of the United States was more important.” Attlee was in an appeasement
frame of mind. “Clement Attlee,” Acheson later wrote, “was a far abler man than Winston Churchill’s description of him as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’ would imply, but persistently depressing.”
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W
hen the House of Commons adjourned in December for the winter holidays, it did so from its rebuilt chamber, where it first met in late October. It had been almost ten years since a German bomb had obliterated the old chamber. Clement Attlee generously named a surviving stone arch the Churchill Arch. The new chamber was built to hold only two-thirds of the members, a design Churchill had suggested, such that if only half the members showed up, the room would appear almost full. The decision to build the chamber so, Churchill told the House, confused many around the world who “cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.” He offered, “I am a child of the House of Commons and have been here I believe longer than anyone. I was much upset when I was violently thrown out of my collective cradle. I certainly wanted to get back to it as soon as possible.” Five years after V-E day, the House of Commons had been restored to its prewar splendor, but Britain had not been, and the Empire never would be.
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In London that December, the weather turned depressing, and snow and ice and low temperatures persisted through the New Year. This was Churchill’s travel season. He left mid-month for five weeks in Marrakech, where Clementine was to join him in early January. On Christmas Day he wrote his wife a short note from the Hotel La Mamounia, where he spent his days painting and his evenings dining on champagne and Marennes oysters. He asked after all the animals at Chartwell—the golden orfes, the Black Mollies, the black swans, and Rufus. He had no distractions, and was hard at work on the sixth and final volume of his memoirs. Of Korea, he wrote: “Much depends on the coming battle.”
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In London, there was talk of an Eastern Munich. Harold Nicolson now regretted his switch to the Labour Party and its failing socialist experiment. On New Year’s Eve Nicolson told his diary: “So ends a horrible year with worse to come…. We are all oppressed by a terrible sense of weakness and foreboding…. The year closes in a mist of anxiety. We shall be lucky if we get through 1951 without a war…. It is sad to become old amid such darkness.”
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Harold Macmillan began expressing similar sentiments to his diary and
continued to do so well into the late summer. In January: “The British Govt has almost ceased to function. The P.M. doodles or talks platitudes; the Foreign Secretary has pneumonia; there are no rearmament plans, no economic plan, and now—no coal!” As in 1947, Britons stoked their fires and pulled on another sweater in anticipation of a long, cold, lonely winter. On January 22 Macmillan wrote: “It is tragic that at such a moment we should have Attlee and Bevin…. Churchill is still painting in Marrakesh!”
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He was. But if he was to fight his final battle against Attlee and for the premiership, he needed his rest and his strength, which he nourished over eight days with numerous picnics, long evening meals on his veranda, and painting. Still, he managed to proof eight chapters of volume 6 of his war memoirs as well as work on the final draft of the U.S. Book-of-the-Month Club edition of volume 5. He daubed, dictated, and dined until January 20. He returned to London by way of Paris, where on the twenty-second he dined with Madame Odette Pol-Roger, the beautiful socialite whose company and champagne he thoroughly enjoyed (he later named one of his racehorses for her). Churchill arrived in London on the twenty-third, and set to work to bring down the Attlee government.

Britain by then was losing prestige along with the Empire. It could not mediate the Kashmir border dispute. It could not protect Malayan rubber plantations from roving bands of Communist guerrillas. The news from Korea only worsened. In April, the 1st battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment was surrounded by Chinese forces and annihilated—704 of 750 men were killed or captured. The news from the Middle East became increasingly worrisome. The Egyptian government denied passage through the Suez Canal to British oil tankers bound for the refinery at Haifa, this in abrogation of international agreements.

Then, in late April, the Iranian parliament elected Mohammad Mosaddegh—Churchill called him Mousy Duck—prime minister. The Shah, whom the British and Americans had put on the Peacock Throne a decade earlier, appointed Mosaddegh premier. On May 1, Mosaddegh nationalized the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, including its refineries at Abadan. The Attlee government pledged to not abandon the Abadan complex, but failed to explain whether it would meet that pledge through force or negotiation. It resorted to neither.

In February, Labour won a no-confidence vote by a majority of 9. A vote on steel nationalization went to Labour by 10 votes. Remarkably, almost the entire House showed up for these sessions, and divided strictly along party lines, with the Liberals sometimes splitting their few votes. The
Times
speculated that if an influenza outbreak that was then spreading through the land kept enough Labourites from appearing in the Commons,
the government might fall. Macmillan told his diary he hadn’t seen such attendance—and such partisanship—since the General Strike of 1926. On the day following the steel vote, Labour won a referendum on meat rationing by eight votes. Macmillan scribbled in his diary: “The people do not go into little shops every weekend to buy a piece of steel. But they do grumble every weekend about their minute portion of meat.”
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T
he Attlee government hung on, but just. When Labour came to power in 1945, the party was led by the Big Five: Attlee, Ernest Bevin (Foreign Office), Herbert Morrison (leader of the House), Sir Stafford Cripps (Board of Trade), and Hugh Dalton (Exchequer). By the end of 1947, Dalton was out, having been driven from the Exchequer for the egregious offense of leaking vital parts of HMG’s budget to a reporter, before the House saw the budget and while the stock market was still open. Cripps took over at the Exchequer, where he raised taxes and forced a reduction in consumer spending, in order, he hoped, to raise exports. He failed. Morrison, who according to Colville “was not short of ambition,” sought to maneuver Attlee out of the party chairmanship and himself in. Bevin, a bitter enemy of Morrison, refused to accede to that notion. After five years of marshaling nationalization schemes through the House, Morrison took over the Foreign Office when Bevin finally resigned due to ill health in March 1951. He was dead a month later. Bevin had always been on the opposite side of the House from Churchill, but like Churchill he was a great English patriot. Attlee, who was in the hospital with a duodenal ulcer, could not even pay tribute to Bevin in the House.

Cripps, too, had departed the scene. Plagued by severe digestive distress that his vegetarian diet failed to ameliorate, he resigned from Parliament and the cabinet in 1950, and took himself off to a Swiss sanatorium. He died two years later. Hugh Gaitskell, who also had his eye on the party leadership, succeeded him at the Exchequer in October 1950. When in early April 1951 Gaitskell announced plans to reel in costs associated with Aneurin Bevan’s National Health Service by forcing Britons to pay half of their of eye care and dental expenses, and to contribute one shilling (about twenty-five cents) to their prescription costs, Bevan resigned in protest. Two days later, the head of the Board of Trade resigned. When Harold Macmillan heard the news, he told his diary, “If this is true, the Government must fall, and a general election follow.”
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By the summer of 1951, in contrast to the fractious and disputatious Labour leadership, the Conservatives, led by Churchill, in harness with
Eden, Lord Woolton, Oliver Lyttelton, Rab Butler, Duncan Sandys, and Harold Macmillan, presented a unified opposition front, with Churchill firmly in the role of party leader.

By then, House debates, sometimes lasting all night, regularly descended into bitter shouting matches, with Churchill often being the object of the invective. But he gave as good as he got. When the minister of defence, Emanuel Shinwell, muttered his disagreement over re-arming Germany, Churchill shot back, “Oh shut up. Go and talk to the Italians; that’s all you’re fit for.” That outburst resulted in one hundred Labour MPs signing and sending an apology to the Italian government, which in turn demanded an apology from Churchill, who gave one. During a May debate on the matter of the Attlee government continuing to sell Malay rubber and other raw materials to China over the strident objection of the United States (Churchill opposed the sales), a member shouted, “Do not write down [criticize] your country all the time.” Churchill replied: “Will the honourable Member yell it out again?” The member did just that.
“Sit down!” “Untrue!” “Get out!”
and
“Give way!”
were regularly yelled from both benches. When Churchill once averred that he only wanted to do what was best for Britain, a member called out,
“Resign!”
An extraordinary exchange took place during a July debate on the handling of the Suez and Iranian crises, when Herbert Morrison, recently elevated to foreign secretary, interrupted Churchill with “They are laughing at the right honourable Gentleman behind him.” Churchill replied, “I expect that the right honourable Gentleman wishes that he had such cordial relations with his own back-benchers.” But Churchill could not leave it there, for Morrison had recently told an audience of coal miners that Churchill and the Tories sought war in both Egypt and Iran. Morrison, Churchill declared, “shows to all the world that his main thought in life is to be a caucus boss and a bitter party electioneer.” Churchill added, “It is tragic indeed that at this time his distorted, twisted and malevolent mind should be the one to which our Foreign Affairs are confided.”
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