The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (500 page)

Churchill admitted defeat during the cabinet meeting following the arrival of the Soviet message. There would be no talks. Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert, needed only a few words to close this chapter of the Great Man’s life: “Churchill’s last great foreign policy initiative was at an end.”
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By all rights, so, too, should have been his premiership. But he held on, in part to secure cabinet approval on making a hydrogen bomb, which he duly gained on July 8; four days later he told the House that decisions had been made regarding atomic weapons, but he gave no details. Earlier in the year, he had proposed to leave in June, then July, then September. In August he decided against September. As summer gave out to fall, Eden and Harold Macmillan increased their efforts to move him out, to no avail.

In late July, Macmillan approached Clementine on the matter, a tactical mistake. He should have gone directly to Churchill, but perhaps did not, knowing well the Old Man’s blunt style of debate. Churchill summoned Macmillan in order to discuss the matter. Colville feared an eruption. Macmillan was ushered into Churchill’s study to find the Old Man engaged with Colville in a game of bezique. Churchill offered Macmillan a whisky and cigar, and continued his game. Then he insisted the score be tallied and that he pay Colville the monies owed. They disputed the exact amount. Churchill’s checkbook was sent for and a pen. The pen arrived, the wrong pen. Macmillan meanwhile was allowed to fidget for the better part of a
half hour. Finally, Churchill asked if Colville would be so good as to leave the room, because it appeared Mr. Macmillan “wanted to talk about some matter of political importance.” The meeting did not last long; it took Churchill only a minute to make his point, which was that he was staying, although he told Macmillan that the party leaders had the authority to replace him as leader. Macmillan knew full well that given Churchill’s popularity, a coup by the Tory leadership would spell their doom, not Churchill’s. “I cannot understand what all the fuss was about,” Churchill told Colville after Macmillan’s departure. “He [Macmillan] really had nothing to say at all. He was very mild.”
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In early August, Macmillan told his diary: “His [Churchill’s] present mood is so self-centered as to amount almost to mania. It is, no doubt, the result of his disease [his stroke].” Were Churchill a king, Macmillan wrote, he’d be deposed. When pressed by Butler, Macmillan, and Eden, Churchill replied, “You cannot ask me to sign my own death warrant.” Yet by not going he was signing theirs. “All of us, who really have loved as well as admired him,” wrote Macmillan, “are being slowly driven into something like hatred.”
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Churchill’s treatment of Eden became shabby. During one luncheon, he told Eden that it would all be his by the time he was sixty. For Eden, that birthday was three years away. Colville wrote that Churchill had begun “to form a cold hatred of Eden, who, he repeatedly said, had done more to thwart him… than anybody else.” That was a cruel and untrue assessment. Of Churchill during these final months in office, Colville wrote: “And yet on some days the old gleam would be there, wit and good humour would bubble and sparkle, wisdom would roll out in telling sentences and still, occasionally, the sparkle of genius could be seen in a decision, a letter or a phrase.” But Colville asked himself, was Churchill still the man to negotiate with the Soviets and nudge the Americans to a less militant attitude toward Russia? “The Foreign Office thought not; the British public would, I am sure, have said yes. And I, who have been as intimate with him as anybody during these last years, simply do not know.”
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C
hurchill turned eighty on November 30, 1954, the first prime minister since Gladstone to hold that office at that age. He was now the Father of the House and the only MP then sitting who had been elected during Queen Victoria’s reign. Parliament, to mark his birthday, presented him with the portrait painted by Graham Sutherland, for which Churchill had sat throughout the autumn. He loathed it. In public he declared that it “certainly combines force with candor.” In private he called it “malignant.”
Clementine thought it hideous, and soon banished it to the attic, and sometime later had it burned. It portrayed him as old, which he was, and his face as coarse and cruel, which it was not. The royal family sent a birthday gift of four silver wine coasters engraved with the signatures of those who joined in giving it. On Churchill’s birthday, Clement Attlee, who now led the opposition, delivered a long and generous tribute on the floor of the House, during which he declared that Churchill’s wartime speeches reflected both the will of Parliament and of the nation.
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Churchill replied to Attlee’s address the next day:

His nine grandchildren and four children were on hand for the holiday season. During a family celebration that season, his daughter Diana expressed wonderment of all that he had seen and done in his life. He listened and said, “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.”
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Churchill pondered his exit during the Christmas holidays and into the winter. Colville later wrote that during the long winter months, “alone with him at the bezique table or in the dining-room, I listened to many disquisitions of which the burden was: ‘I have lost interest; I’m tired of it all.’ ” During a mid-March dinner with Rab Butler, he proclaimed: “I feel like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.” Finally, in late March, he told Colville that he’d leave just before the Easter recess. Easter fell on April 10 that year.
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C
hurchill made his last major address to the House of Commons on March 1, 1955, on the subject of that year’s defence white paper, wherein his government announced for the first time the decision to build a hydrogen bomb. Churchill understood that Britain was indefensible against such
weapons, yet he was determined that other countries—Russia—be made indefensible as well. The bomb could not help England regain its former glory but it might just offer England the means to survive. He titled his speech “The Deterrent—Nuclear Warfare.” “There is no absolute defence against the hydrogen bomb,” he told the House, “nor is any method in sight by which any nation, or any country, can be completely guaranteed against the devastating injury which even a score of them might inflict on wide regions.” He went on to ask, “What ought we to do?”

He took care to speak of the “Soviets” and “Soviet communism,” telling the House that he was avoiding the term “Russian” because he greatly admired the Russian people “for their bravery, their many gifts and their kindly nature.” It was the Communist dictators who posed the threat to human survival, not the Russian people. He declared, “There is only one sane policy for the free world in the next few years.”

Entire continents, not simply small islands such as Britain, were now vulnerable and would become more vulnerable as the Soviets developed new means to deliver atomic bombs:

A “curious paradox has emerged,” he declared. “Let me put it simply. After a certain point has been passed it may be said: The worse things get,
the better.” He still believed that, as he told the House, “mercifully, there is time and hope if we combine patience and courage…. All deterrents will improve and gain authority during the next ten years. By that time, the deterrent may well reach its acme and reap its final reward.” After forty-five minutes, his voice still strong, he came to the end, and his valediction to the House and to his countrymen:

Churchill’s powers, declared that week’s
Sunday Times,
“as he has so brilliantly demonstrated, are still of the highest order.” The next day, as the defence debate continued, Aneurin Bevan accused Churchill of allowing America to dictate Britain’s foreign policy, declaring that Churchill had canceled his 1953 Bermuda trip because he knew Eisenhower would not accede to a request to hold talks with the Russians. Churchill’s reply stunned the House, for he revealed for the first time in public that he had not gone to Bermuda because “I was struck down by a very sudden illness which paralysed me completely. That is why I had to put it off.”
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Moments later he tucked his reading glasses into a jacket pocket, gathered up his notes, and departed. He delivered two minor speeches in the House during his final month in office, the last a tribute to Lloyd George on March 28. Though he remained the member of Parliament from Woodford for nine more years, Churchill never again spoke in the House of Commons.

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n April 4, Winston and Clementine hosted their last dinner at No. 10. Some fifty guests attended, including Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The other grandees present, Colville wrote, included high government officials, members of Churchill’s family, and several dukes and duchesses, including the sixteenth Duke of Norfolk, soon to chair a special top-secret government committee code-named Hope Not and vested with the task of planning Churchill’s state funeral. Randolph Churchill attended, and predictably got drunk, at one point haranguing his cousin and Anthony Eden’s wife, Clarissa, over a nasty article he had written about Eden for
Punch.
Sir Winston presided over all, attired in his Garter, Order of Merit, and knee breeches. His after-dinner speech took the form of a long toast to
the Queen: “I used to enjoy drinking during the years when I was a cavalry subaltern in the reign of your Majesty’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.” At the end, he raised his glass
“to the Queen.”
Later that night, after the last guests had left, Jock Colville escorted Churchill up to his bedroom. The Old Man sat on his bed, and for several minutes did not speak. Colville imagined Churchill was “contemplating that this was his last night [as P.M.] at Downing Street. Then suddenly he stared at me and said with vehemence, ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’ ”
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