The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (496 page)

That night Macmillan told his diary that Churchill’s performance was “one of his most devastating and polished efforts.” Under a mass of Labour “chaff and invective,” Churchill “thus established a complete ascendancy over the party and indeed over the House.” He had, but although he had recovered from his hernia operation and had experienced no minor strokes for two years, such exertions took an increasing toll on his health. House debates were trying, and sessions sometimes lasted until morning, an ordeal even for a younger man. Lord Moran told his diary that if Churchill “goes back to No. 10, I doubt whether he is up to the job… he has lost ground and has no longer the same grip on things and events.” And Moran, worried about Churchill’s mental health if he did not go back to No. 10,
told his diary, “When the struggle for power is at an end, and his political life is over, Winston will feel there is no purpose in his existence. I dread what may happen then.”
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All now expected Attlee to call for a general election, with polling likely to take place in October, after the late summer vacation season.

Although Clementine wanted nothing more than to retire from political life, she did not discourage Winston in his quest for No. 10. Yet neither did she encourage him. She believed that his reputation could not be enhanced by another term at the top, and would most likely be damaged. She preferred that husband and wife live out their days at Chartwell, where she had finally found happiness. Their neighbors accepted the family now, whereas in the past they had considered Churchill something of an
enfant terrible,
and local merchants had considered the family a poor credit risk. All had changed, Mary later wrote. Neighbors were proud of having the Churchills in their midst, and the Churchills for their part became more outgoing and welcoming. Winston and Clementine now opened the Chartwell gardens four times each summer, admission was charged, and the proceeds donated to local charities.

Clementine, though ten years her husband’s junior, lacked his energy and was easily exhausted—mentally and physically—by the strains of the political life. In May she had undergone a hysterectomy; in July she continued her convalescence near Biarritz, on the Bay of Biscay, in the company of Mary. In mid-August, with Parliament in summer recess, Churchill (and two secretaries, his valet, and Christopher Soames) set off for Paris to rendezvous with Clementine and Mary. From Paris the party traveled to the Rhone Alps region, where they planned to spend two weeks in the sun at Lake Annecy, near the Swiss border. But the sun failed to shine. Instead, a cold rain fell for a week, at which time Clementine and the Soameses returned to London, while Churchill prepared to take himself and his retinue off to Geneva by train, and from there to Venice, where he expected the bathing on the Lido would be more enjoyable. Told that the French train to Geneva did not stop at the Annecy station, Churchill instructed one of his secretaries to inform the stationmaster that Winston Churchill wishes that the train be stopped in order for Winston Churchill to board. The train was stopped. Churchill and party boarded, along with fifty-five suitcases and trunks and sixty-five smaller articles.
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O
n September 20, a week after Churchill returned to London, Attlee sent him a short note: “My dear Churchill,” it read. “I have decided to have
a general election in October.” He added that he would issue a formal declaration after that night’s nine o’clock news. The elections were set for October 25.
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Churchill, at seventy-six, knew that this was his final chance to attain his lifelong goal of being sent to No. 10 Downing Street by a vote of the English people. Defeat would mean retirement to the Weald. In a Tory defeat he’d likely retain his Woodford seat, but he would very likely lose the party leadership to a younger man, most likely Anthony Eden. But Eden, at fifty-four, was no longer a young man, nor with his recurring stomach ailments was he a healthy man. The results of a Gallup poll had reached Churchill in Venice: a majority of Conservatives and Liberals favored Eden over Churchill for party leadership. This general election would be Churchill’s last as the Tory leader, win or lose. He had formed two governments, in 1940 and 1945, neither with a public mandate. Now, he would stake the reputation he had earned over fifty years on the final campaign. He had the nerve and sinew for the fight. Most of all he had the lion heart. All who knew him knew also that a loss would leave Churchill with little to hold on to.

The general election campaign of 1951 was a Hobbesian affair—not brutish, but nasty and short. Churchill began his campaign in early October, delivering eight speeches and two broadcasts in the three weeks up to polling day, October 25. Churchill’s overall theme was the “melancholy story of inadvertence, incompetence, indecision and final collapse, which has… marked the policy of our Socialist rulers.”

Foreign affairs offered him rich fields to plow. In late September, after Iranian prime minister Mosaddegh demanded that all British employees in Abadan leave Iran, Britain pulled its personnel out. Churchill, having negotiated the Persian oil concessions in 1914, once again, as during the war, saw events in the Middle East as not only threats to British national security but also personal affronts. During one House debate on the Iranian crisis, he managed to denigrate both the Attlee and the Iranian governments in the same sentence:

Thus, the campaign’s first week found Attlee acceding to Mosaddegh’s demand that the British leave Abadan. Mosaddegh, known for fits of public
weeping and the occasional swoon, had actually rattled his saber. And Attlee had stood down, leading Churchill to tell a Liverpool audience that Britain had “fled the field” and had “been ejected” from Iran after “fifty years of British enterprise and management.” He added a charge of appeasement: “Mr. Morrison, the Foreign Secretary, and his party associates no doubt hope to cover up their failure by saying that the Tories want war, while they are for peace at any price.”
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Indeed, painting the Tories as warmongers, Churchill foremost among them, formed the core of Labour’s strategy. Labour did not fight the election on the merits of socialism, Macmillan told his diary, but on fear—fear of unemployment, reduced wages, fewer social benefits, and, the greatest fear of all, war. During the first week of the campaign, the socialist
Daily Mirror,
with a circulation of four million, introduced a slogan that encapsulated the message: “Whose finger do you want on the trigger, Churchill’s or Attlee’s?” Churchill pointed out that the finger might be American, or Russian, but it could not be British, as Britain had no atomic bomb because its “influence in the world is not what it was in bygone days.” All knew that to be true; and all asked, how does Churchill intend to reclaim that influence? By war, answered Labour.
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On the domestic front, Churchill let the Labour record speak for itself. He had stated his case for months, with feeling, but with little exaggeration. Britain’s plight would have been hard to exaggerate. The country was stumbling toward financial disaster. Labour had imposed the highest tax rates in the free world. During that fourth quarter of 1951, Britain was hemorrhaging from its gold and dollar reserves at a pace never before seen in its history. At the current rate, the reserves would disappear sometime around mid-1952. The Iranian crisis meant that future oil purchases might have to be made in American dollars, a further drain of three hundred million on Britain’s dollar balances. The pound had lost one-third of its value since the war ended. Internal inflation had been creeping up for six years, and was now accelerating as the Attlee government undertook to re-arm, a policy Churchill agreed with. Now, with America beginning its second year on a re-armament spending binge, worldwide commodity prices were spiraling upward, and Britain’s finances were out of control. Britain was still the world’s second-wealthiest country, a distant second behind the United States, but it clung to that status only because the economies of France, Germany, and Japan were just climbing out of the ruins of war. Churchill could not know it then, but that year’s inflationary spike (12.5 percent) would reverse itself within months as the world’s largest economies settled into the new order of the consumer society. America’s new economic model, based on ever-increasing defense and consumer spending, soon begin to lift Britain from its economic mire, as a rising tide lifts
all boats. It was a process that neither Attlee nor Churchill had much control over.
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On domestic issues, Churchill chose to tread a mostly metaphorical path during the election campaign. He gave Britons few precise details of Tory economic plans, as he told Moran: “We propose to give the people a lighthouse not a shop window.” During one broadcast he averred: “The difference between our outlook and the Socialist outlook on life is the difference between the ladder and the queue. We are for the ladder. Let all try their best to climb. They are for the queue. Let each wait in his place till his turn comes.” He nebulously pledged to slow the nationalization of steel and coal. Yet he did make two specific promises, which at his insistence were included in that year’s Conservative manifesto. He pledged to build three hundred thousand houses, and in an adroit reading of the public mood, he proposed an excess profits tax be levied on corporations. Britain was re-arming, and would re-arm even more were he to win. Profits were being made on the stock exchanges and in boardrooms, the type of profits the common man did not partake in. Churchill, too, knew how to play the fear card. Ever unable to resist a shot at Bevan, he told an audience at Woodford: “It is certain that a vote for Bevanite Socialism is in fact, whatever its intention, a vote which increases the hazard of a world catastrophe.” A return to power of the socialists, he said, would deal “a real blow to our hopes of escaping a Third World War.”
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Several Tory and Liberal candidates volunteered not to run against each other in constituencies where a divided vote might throw the seat to Labour. One such was at Huddersfield, where Lady Violet Bonham Carter—daughter of the great prime minister H. H. Asquith—ran as a Liberal. She and Churchill had been best of friends since first meeting at a dinner party in 1906, when he was thirty-two and she nineteen. She later wrote that Churchill “seemed to me to be quite different from any other young man I had ever met.” Churchill did not appear to notice her at first. When he did, he abruptly asked her age. She gave it. “ ‘And I,’ he said almost despairingly, ‘am thirty-two already, younger than anyone else who
counts,
though.’ Then savagely: ‘Curse ruthless time. Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram in.’ ” He then proceeded on a long discourse on the shortness of human life and the vast potential for human accomplishment, at the end of which he announced, “We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm.” By the end of the dinner Bonham Carter was convinced he indeed was, “and my conviction remained unshaken throughout the years that followed.” Now, speaking on her behalf at Huddersfield, Churchill reminded the crowd of his two decades as a Liberal, his service to Asquith, and his role in bringing unemployment insurance and old age pensions to Britons. He told the audience:
“ ‘All men are created equal,’ says the American Declaration of Independence, ‘All men shall be kept equal,’ say the British Socialist Party.” He added, “Now is the time to break with these follies.”
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Speaking in Plymouth on Randolph’s behalf two days before polling day, he denounced Labour and Communist charges of warmongering as “a cruel and ungrateful accusation.”

Max Beaverbrook predicted a Tory majority of at least one hundred. Max was well informed, but not always accurately informed, as borne out by the margin of error of his predictions in the last two elections. Moran advised Churchill not to put too much stock in Max’s rosy prognostications. Churchill replied that since Max’s papers were read by millions, “he must know what he’s talking about.” Max may be right, Moran told his diary, but on all sides Tories were worried, not only about the election results but by Churchill’s age and his penchant for neither asking for nor taking advice. Churchill told Macmillan that he hoped for a majority of ninety but would settle for fifty. Macmillan also learned from Brendan Bracken that the Old Man, if victorious, planned to hold office for just one year, perhaps eighteen months at most. Churchill alluded to his planned retirement during a campaign address when he told the audience, “Mr. Eden will carry on the torch of Tory democracy when other and older hands have let it fall.” Eden, though ill, was eager, his arms outstretched, to catch the torch.
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