The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (63 page)

Joseph Chamberlain

Undoubtedly Balfour was wary of Churchill. Shrinking from controversy, he was inviting deeper trouble. There was another possible answer to Winston’s challenge, however, and many Tory colleagues had expected him to make it before now. Traditionally, observes Colin Coote, managing editor of the
Daily Telegraph,
“there are two ways of getting on in the House of Commons—by being very naughty, and by being very good. If you are very naughty, your party says, ‘Give the puppy a nice bone to keep him quiet.’ ” In short, the able young critic of his elders is assigned responsibility and thus silenced. Some MPs thought such a possibility was what Churchill had had in mind when he attacked Brodrick. He had shown parliamentary ability, and he had changed Salisbury’s mind. But Balfour was not Salisbury. Dissent within Conservative ranks alarmed him, and he had been offended by Winston’s tactics. He may also have recalled his uncle’s reply when asked why, after Lord Randolph’s humiliation, he had not invited him back into the government: “When you have got rid of a boil on your neck, you don’t want it back.” In reshuffling his cabinet, Balfour had found room for one Hooligan, appointing Lord Percy under secretary of state for India, but in his view Winston was an even bigger boil than Randolph.
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Arthur Balfour

Everyone knew Churchill was searching for a shortcut to office. Political tacticians had predicted that he would adopt one of two courses. Either he would try to talk Balfour into disowning Chamberlain, hoping to replace him as the party’s strong man, or he would follow Lord Randolph’s example and organize a revolt against the prime minister. His May exchange of letters with Balfour represents the failure of the first. But there is reason to believe that he had already tested the possibility of a coup. On March 4, 1905, J. L. Wanklyn, MP for Central Bradford, told an audience of constituents that more than two years earlier Winston had approached him with a scheme to unseat the Balfour leadership, replacing it with a weak ministry of Tory radicals, which in turn would be succeeded by a Churchill government. According to Wanklyn, Winston already had a list of men he would appoint to his cabinet, including Hugh Cecil as education minister.
The Times
carried Wanklyn’s speech and, the next day, Winston’s statement that the charge was “devoid of the slightest foundation…. The whole story from beginning to end is a pure invention of his own, and, if not a hallucination, can only be described as a wilful and malicious falsehood.”
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Nevertheless, Wanklyn stuck to his guns. He invited Winston to sue him. The offer was declined, and the story credited, for by then the House believed that to reach his ends Winston would stop at nothing, that he was even prepared, if necessary, to bolt his party.

Churchill always nailed his colors to the mast, but not always to the same mast. He “did not,” he later said, “understand the importance of party discipline and unity, and the sacrifices of opinion which may lawfully be made in their cause.” The issue was everything. Less than forty-eight hours after receiving Balfour’s squelch, he wrote another confidential letter, this time to Campbell-Bannerman. Describing his position on tariffs as “one of great difficulty and danger,” he nevertheless proposed a joint strategy to prevent “an immense victory for Chamberlain.” C-B swiftly agreed, and thenceforth Winston was increasingly drawn into Opposition councils. He felt comfortable there. He found John Morley, Asquith, Haldane, and Grey attractive. And he approved of their legislative program: wider suffrage, an eight-hour day, a graduated income tax, and less expenditure on foreign and imperial affairs. Most significant, he had become an advocate of Irish Home Rule. Violet Asquith wrote that “Irish self-government might well have stuck in his throat, for to Lord Randolph Home Rule had become anathema. But he swallowed it, apparently without effort. His filial piety had ceased to be his sole directing light. He was now charting his own course.”
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As early as 1901, a few months after entering Parliament, he had flirted with the thought of switching parties. His motives then had been less than lofty. Lady Warwick held a long political discussion with him at Cecil Rhodes’s Scottish home on Loch Rannoch. She wrote that Winston “had just been on a visit to Lord Rosebery, and he said he was inclined to leave the leadership to Mr. Balfour and proclaim himself a Liberal. He wanted power and the Tory road to power was blocked by the Cecils and other brilliant young Conservatives, whereas the Liberal path was open. Cecil Rhodes was all in favour of his turning Liberal.” Winston had written his mother: “I am a Liberal in all but name.” He was corresponding with Bourke Cockran, who was campaigning against Republican tariffs in Washington, and he knew that Cockran, still one of his heroes, had left Tammany on a matter of principle in 1896 to support McKinley for President. His aunt Cornelia begged him to cross the floor: “Of one thing I think there is no doubt & that is that Balfour & Chamberlain are one, and that there is no future for Free Traders in the Conservative party. Why tarry?”
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He tarried because he wasn’t so sure about Balfour’s position. On this issue the man was a Hamlet. Thus far the duel had been between Churchill and Chamberlain, and in the House, Winston had more Conservative followers than Joe; when he launched his Free Food League on July 13, 1903, sixty Tory MPs signed up, while the rival Tariff Reform League enrolled only thirty. Outside Parliament, however, Chamberlain was much stronger among the party rank and file. He was a hero to the constituency committees, the men who got out the vote. That summer he crisscrossed the country, speaking fervently for imperial preference. Churchill, fighting it, made the same tour, matching him speech for speech. Both sides were still civil. Winston’s sharpest barb was: “Mr. Chamberlain loves the working man. He loves to see him work.” On July 26 Sir Edward Hamilton wrote in his diary: “W.C. is taking a very devoted line against C…. It is the fashion to run him down—but I think there is a great deal in him and that he is bound to win in the end.” On August 12 Churchill and another MP entertained several members of the party leadership, including the prime minister, at a dinner in the House. Afterward he wrote his mother, “A.B. was most amiable and very good humoured” even though “I had been very rude to him in the House of Commons in the afternoon.” Leaving the dinner he “ran straight into J.C. who gave me an extraordinary look of reproach as much as to say ‘How could you desert me’ and I confess I felt very sorry for him indeed…. I cannot help admiring Chamberlain’s courage. I do not believe he means to give way an inch, and I think he is quite prepared to sacrifice his whole political position… for the cause in which he is so wrapped up.” Yet Winston came to regard Joe as the turncoat, the subversive, the renegade. In early September the
Pall Mall Gazette
quoted Churchill as saying: “Some of us were born in the Tory Party and we are not going to let any aliens turn us out.” The
Gazette
reporter asked him about rumors that he would cross to the Opposition, and he replied: “Oh, absurd. I am a Tory and must always remain a Tory.” The article concluded: “He is a Tory by birth and inheritance. Toryism possesses him…. It is with him something of a religion.”
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It wasn’t, really. He was on the verge of sacrilege. The turning point came that month. On September 12, 1903, Chamberlain quit the cabinet to devote himself to his crusade. Momentarily it seemed that the prime minister might be able to ignore the issue. It was an illusion. The tension was still there, and it was growing. Two days after Joe had stepped down, Churchill wrote his mother: “I fancy a smash must come in a few days. Mr Balfour is coming to Balmoral on Saturday. Is he going to resign or reconstruct?… If he reconstructs—will it be a protectionist reconstruction of a cabinet wh does not contain the free trade Ministers, or a free trade reconstruction of a Cabinet from which J.C. has resigned? All these things are possible.” But there was no ministerial reshuffle. Two weeks later a second Conservative conference at Sheffield strongly reaffirmed imperial preference as a means of strengthening the Empire. In his speech to them, Balfour then tumbled off the fence and, with some characteristic reservations, declared himself to be on their side. This, to Winston, meant the time had come to take off his gloves. He wrote (but did not mail) a letter to Linky Cecil, declaring that “to proceed making perfervid protestations of loyalty to the ‘party’ & yet to trample on the dearest aspirations of the party & thwart its most popular champions is to court utter ruin.” He added, bitterly: “I am an English Liberal. I hate the Tory party, their men, their words & their methods.” Even so, he was not yet ready to make his change of heart public: “Nothing need happen until December at any rate, unless Oldham explodes.”
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But Oldham did explode. Despite promises to jump to the Tory whip, he endorsed the Liberal candidate in a Ludlow by-election on the ground that “Free Traders of all parties should form one line of battle,” and at a Free Trade rally in Halifax he cried: “Thank God we have a Liberal Party.” On December 23 Oldham’s Tory executive committee resolved that he had “forfeited” their confidence and could not expect their support in the next election. The resolution would be laid before the full body on January 8, 1904. In a spirited defense, Churchill wrote them that he was responding to a higher loyalty: “When Mr Balfour succeeded Lord Salisbury, he solemnly pledged himself at the Carlton Club that the policy of the party should be unchanged. And yet at Sheffield, only a year afterwards, he declared for a ‘fundamental reversal of the policy of the last fifty years.’ Therefore it is not against me that any charge of breaking pledges can be preferred.” He said he meant to continue representing the thirteen thousand men who had voted for him, doing his best “to oppose all protectionist manoeuvres in Parliament and to explain to the electors of Oldham how closely Free Trade and cheap food are interwoven with the welfare of the Lancashire artisan.” The committee was unconvinced. The resolution carried with but one dissent. He offered to resign, which was crafty of him; in a by-election he would either split the vote with their candidate or win as a Liberal—a Tory loss either way. So his original Oldham sponsors fumed, impotent, while he continued to sit on the Conservative side of the House, savaging his leaders day after day.
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Not even the oldest MPs could remember a more brilliant, more acrimonious performance. The
Daily Mail
commented that since Sheffield “his speeches have been almost without exception directed against the policy of the Government. They have been clever, severe, biting in their sarcasm, full of sneers and scorn for Mr Balfour and his Ministers.” The Conservative party, Churchill said, had become “the slave of great interests.” The Tory flaw was “a yearning for mediocrity.” The party’s members were “ready to make great sacrifices for their opinions, but they have no opinions. They are ready to die for the truth, if only they knew what the truth is.” He cried: “To keep in office for a few more weeks and months there is no principle which the Government is not prepared to abandon, and no quantity of dust and filth they are not prepared to eat.” Balfour was guilty of “gross, unpardonable ignorance” and a “slipshod, slapdash, haphazard manner of doing business.” Winston said that “the dignity of a Prime Minister, like a lady’s virtue, is not susceptible of partial diminution.” Balfour, however, had “flouted the traditions of Parliament and dishonoured the service of the Crown.” When one of the prime minister’s supporters protested this outrageous language, Churchill wrote
The Times,
accusing the man of trying to gag him, and adding: “While Mr Balfour silences his followers in the House of Commons Mr Chamberlain is busy with their constituencies” disseminating “protectionist propaganda.” The prime minister was only a puppet, a fool; the real Tory leader was Chamberlain, and Winston described Joe’s vision of the party: “Over all, like a red robe flung about the shoulders of a sturdy beggar, an extravagant and aggressive militarism, and at the top, installed in splendour, a party leader, half German Chancellor, half American boss.” Chamberlain’s insistence that tariffs would enrich Britain was “a downright lie.” When another Free Trader resigned from the party, Tory MPs hissed his speech explaining why. Churchill shouted: “Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I am quite unable to hear what my honourable friend is saying owing to the vulgar clamour of the Conservative Party.” Sir Trout Bartley, a Balfour supporter, leapt up, pointed at Churchill, and shrieked: “The vulgarest expression came from this honourable gentleman!”
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