The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (62 page)

Astonishingly, his campaign against Brodrick succeeded. He won what was, for a new MP, a major triumph. The cabinet accepted his argument that three corps couldn’t “begin to fight Europeans.” The plan was shelved. The minister resigned and was moved to the India Office. But Churchill’s victory was illusory. His premise, that “the honour and security of the British Empire do not depend, and can never depend, on the British Army,” that “the only weapon with which we can expect to cope with great nations is the Navy,” was rejected. In the House a senior Tory scathingly asked him if he really believed that “in future all that would happen in the case of war with a Continental power would be our magnificent fleet pursuing an inferior fleet?” The MP said: “Such a state of things is unthinkable and I cannot imagine a war between Britain and a Continental power in which the British Army would not be required.” Winston, irrepressible, swiftly interjected, “Not in Europe,” but the army budget passed easily. His father’s battle could not be refought on this ground and won. Wilhelm II, aged twenty-nine, had just been crowned in Königsberg when Randolph left Salisbury’s cabinet. Now he was powerful, aggressive, and a clear threat to British interests.
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Another vernal politician would have congratulated himself for having scored an important point, counted his change, and returned to the fold. But once Churchill had taken a position, no one but himself could persuade him to abandon it. He would be among the last of the Edwardians to appreciate the menace of the kaiser. In the House he distrusted every authority except his own—as, when he finally came to power, he would ruthlessly crush everyone who revolted against
him.
Yet such was his charm and intellect, even in those early days, that he could always find recruits to his cause, sometimes against their own best interests. After Brodrick’s defeat he formed a society of Conservative back-benchers in their twenties, enrolling Lord Percy, the Duke of Northumberland’s heir; Ian Malcolm, Lillie Langtry’s son-in-law; Arthur Stanley, a son of the Earl of Derby; and, a real coup, Lord Hugh “Linky” Cecil, one of the prime minister’s sons. They were called “the Hooligans,” or “Hughligans,” after Lord Hugh, but Winston was their undisputed leader. Every Thursday they dined together in the House, and he laid down their first principle: issues would not be discussed until after the meal—“It shall be High Imperialism nourished by a devilled sardine.” Hooligans were pledged to outrageous parliamentary manners, but each week they invited a distinguished guest, and such was the prestige of their family names that no one refused them, though Salisbury insisted that they dine with him at his home in Arlington Street, a block from Green Park. Their most memorable guest was Joe Chamberlain. He joined them after a stormy House session. An English newspaperman had been imprisoned in South Africa for writing what was considered a seditious article about the war. Having served his sentence, he had been denied the right to return home on the ground, stated from the Treasury Bench, that it was “undesirable to increase the number of persons in England who disseminated anti-British propaganda.” The Liberals had leapt to their feet, shouting objections, and the Hooligans had joined them, Winston crying, “Where else can anti-British propaganda be less harmful at this time than in Great Britain?”
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Over soup Chamberlain eyed them challengingly. He growled: “I am dining in very bad company.” They expostulated; the government’s stand was arrogant, absurd, and ineptly defended. How could they be expected to support it? He shot back: “What is the use of supporting your own party only when it is right? It is just when it is in this sort of pickle that you ought to come to its aid.” Churchill’s reply is unrecorded, but he must have kept himself in check, for Joe thawed; he became mellow and then, according to Winston, “most gay and captivating. I never remember having heard him talk better.” As he rose to leave, he turned at the door and said with great solemnity: “You young gentlemen have entertained me royally, and in return I shall give you a priceless secret. Tariffs! There are the politics of the future, and of the near future. Study them closely and make yourselves masters of them, and you will not regret your hospitality to me.”
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They didn’t, but he bitterly regretted his advice, for Churchill took it, studying tariffs and then rejecting them, thereby contributing heavily to Chamberlain’s political ruin and the fall of the Tory government. The issue, dear to the heart of this self-made businessman, was rooted in the British economy and in his dream of Empire. Victorian prosperity had peaked in the early 1870s. Since then the country’s annual growth rate had sunk below 2 percent. The problem was foreign competition, which, with improved transport and more efficient machinery, had deeply penetrated the English market. Wheat was down ten shillings, the textile industry was in straits, and both the United States and Germany had surpassed Britain’s steel production. Because of the country’s heavy investments abroad, particularly in the United States, these losses had been unfelt by the public. Indeed, per capita income actually continued to grow, a tribute to the Empire’s vast wealth. But the deficit could not be camouflaged indefinitely. Chamberlain believed the answer was imperial preference. After touring South Africa late in 1902—the Boer treaty had been signed at Vereeniging in May—he returned home to propose a tariff scheme which, he was convinced, would unite the Mother Country and her colonies and Dominions in a common market. Imposing heavy taxes on imports from outside the Empire, while establishing preferential tariffs for territories within it, the union would shield imperial industry and agriculture from foreign competitors while strengthening British security and providing funds for social programs at home.

This was logical, sensible, and political dynamite. Free Trade had been the keystone of English economic policy for a half century. Its obvious advantage, for the middle and working classes, was an abundance of cheap imported food, but to them it represented more than that; they believed that it meant peace with the rest of the world, while protective tariffs led to war. Campbell-Bannerman—who believed that Chamberlain, before turning his coat, had wrecked the Liberal party by fighting Home Rule in the 1880s—now wrote a friend: “This reckless criminal escapade of Joe’s is the great event of our time. It is playing Old Harry with all Party relations.” The Liberal Violet Asquith thought the issue “money for jam.”
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The ruling coalition was deeply split; three members of the cabinet resigned in protest. A lull followed. On July 11, 1902, in the middle of a conference of colonial leaders considering the tariff proposal (they favored it), Salisbury stepped down as prime minister. Balfour then succeeded him. The new leader needed time to settle in. Chamberlain welcomed the break; given time, he believed, he could bring the party around. And he was largely successful. The Conservative newspapers and the constituency committees rallied to him. At Sheffield a party conference voted overwhelmingly to support protectionism, backing it with almost ideological fervor as a way to bind the Empire together.

Nevertheless, there were a few important holdouts, among them Linky Cecil and his brother Robert—and Winston Churchill. At the beginning of the controversy Winston’s position had been unclear. He believed colonies should stand alone economically—earlier in 1902 he had voted against a West Indian sugar subsidy because “I object on principle to doing by legislation what properly belongs to charity”—but the following summer, in his annual report to Oldham Conservatives, he had cautiously noted that he was merely looking into “the question of what is called Fair Trade,” adding, noncommittally, “Time is, I think, coming near when men will have to make up their minds on this great issue, to formulate their opinions, and set them forth without hesitation or doubt.” This sounds casual. Actually, he was examining the matter with great care. He knew that his father’s old friend Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, who had been Salisbury’s chancellor of the Exchequer, was an ardent Free Trader. This, however, was something he had to think through for himself. “First,” he told Violet Asquith afterward, “I had to learn economics. I had to learn economics in eight weeks.” She asked how he set about it. He had gone to Mowatt, he said, and Mowatt, risking dismissal as joint permanent secretary of the Treasury, “coached and grounded me with facts and general principles and arguments and gave me half a dozen books to read. He girded on my armor and equipped me for a fight. And then,” he concluded with relish, “I found no difficulty in doing the rest myself.” Thereafter his faith in Free Trade, Violet wrote, became “a passionate conviction, perhaps the only economic conviction he ever held, and it was upheld and reinforced by the assurance”—given him by Hicks-Beach, Mowatt, and Sir Edward Hamilton, another elderly civil servant at the Treasury—“that his father would have shared it.” By the autumn of 1902 his position was firm and irreversible. On November 14 he wrote an Oldham constituent that he believed protection “a fantastic policy to endeavour to shut the British Empire up in a ringed fence…. Why should we deny ourselves the good and varied merchandise which the traffic of the world offers, more especially since the more we trade with others, the more they must trade with us; for it is quite clear that we give them something else back for everything they give to us.”
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O
n May 15, 1903, confident that his troops were in line, Chamberlain renewed his campaign for imperial preference with a forceful address in his political stronghold of Birmingham, dismissing Free Traders as “a small remnant of Little Englanders, of the Manchester school.” The Cecils and other dissidents having chosen to remain silent out of loyalty to him, Joe thought himself the party’s spokesman on the issue. He found otherwise when, six days later, Churchill told a crowd at Hoxton that he could not believe anyone would “persuade the British people to abandon that system of free trade and cheap food under which they have thriven so long.” A few days later Winston rose from his House seat below the gangway to deliver a fighting speech, charging that protectionism “means a change, not only in the historic English Parties but in the conditions of our public life. The old Conservative Party with its religious convictions and constitutional principles will disappear and a new party will rise… perhaps like the Republican Party in the United States of America… rigid, materialist and secular, whose opinions will turn on tariffs and who will cause the lobbies to be crowded with the touts of protected industries.” If a European war broke out, he asked, would it not be “very much better that the United States should be vitally interested in keeping the English market open,” rather than be indifferent to the fate of “their present principal customer?”
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He now took a momentous step. In a May 25 letter to the new prime minister marked “Most Private,” he promised “absolute loyalty” to the party—“I would even swallow six army corps”—if Balfour pledged support of Free Trade. “But if on the other hand,” he added ominously, “you have made up your mind & there is no going back, I must reconsider my position in politics.” By now, after watching Churchill in the House for two years, AJB must have known that he did not make idle threats. At the very least Winston was entitled to a frank statement of his leader’s stand on this issue. So, for that matter, was the public. Balfour, incredibly, had left tariff policy to Chamberlain. Although he had been prime minister for ten months, and had urged new policies, he had taken no stand on this crucial point. Sphinxlike, leonine, outwardly a model of poise, and apparently bereft of personal ambition, Salisbury’s nephew and political heir was in reality a gifted but unpredictable statesman, best remembered for a declaration in which he gave away Palestinian land Britain did not own. His answer to Winston, dictated on May 26, was tortuous and weak. Unbelievably, he wrote: “I have never understood that Chamberlain advocated protection.” As he perceived it, his colonial secretary was recommending “a duty on food-stuffs,” which might “incidentally be protective in character” but whose main purpose was “to provide an instrument for fiscal union with the colonies.” Then, absurdly: “This is a very different thing from protection, both in theory and in practice. But undoubtedly the matter is one of difficulty, and requires the most wary walking.”
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