The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (64 page)

The prime minister tut-tutted and looked away. Most of the time he ignored Churchill, but sometimes he was drawn. What galled him most was the knowledge that while the wounding slurs of other MPs arose from the heat of battle, Churchill coldly honed and barbed his insults each evening in Mount Street. It was premeditated, ungentlemanly. Once he deeply angered Balfour. In tones dripping with malice Churchill said, “We have been told
ad nauseam
of the sacrifices which the Prime Minister makes. I do not deny there have been sacrifices. The House ought not to underrate or deny those sacrifices.” He ticked them off: “sacrifices of leisure,” “sacrifices of dignity,” “the sacrifice of reputation.” He quoted the prime minister’s supporters as saying that he stood “between pride and duty.” Winston sarcastically commented: “Pride says ‘go’ but duty says ‘stay.’ The Right Honourable Gentleman always observes the maxim of a certain writer that whenever an Englishman takes or keeps anything he wants, it is always from a high sense of duty.” AJB rose, shaking, and accused him of poor taste. He said: “It is not, on the whole, desirable to come down to this House with invective which is both prepared and violent. The House will tolerate, and very rightly tolerate, almost anything within the rule of order which evidently springs from genuine indignation aroused by the collision of debate; but to come down with these prepared phrases is not usually successful, and at all events, I do not think it was very successful on the present occasion. If there is preparation there should be more finish, and if there is so much violence there should certainly be more veracity of feeling.”
²⁹

Churchill did not hang his head. “I fear I am still in disgrace,” he cheerfully wrote Jennie, and, in a letter to Cockran, predicted more “stormy times ahead.” Margot Asquith thought his problem was a lack of empathy, that he tended “to ignore the need to feel his way about other minds,” but he didn’t think he had a problem at all. He was releasing his inner aggression and enjoying it enormously. He later said: “I did not exactly, either by my movement or my manner, invite any great continuing affection.” He didn’t want it. Earl Winterton recalled: “Churchill made no attempt to dispel the suspicion and dislike with which he was regarded by the majority of the House of Commons. He seemed to enjoy causing resentment. He appeared to have, in modern parlance, a ‘chip on his shoulder,’ when in the Chamber itself or in the Lobbies.” Winston jovially told a reporter, “Politics are almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous.” The newsman asked, “Even with the new rifle?” Churchill replied, “Well, in war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.”
³⁰

Though he was to prove that repeatedly, expressions of his unpopularity in the spring of 1904 were uglier and more strident than anything his father had endured. Shouted down by his own party, he was called “wickedly hypocritical,” the “Blenheim Rat,” and a “Blackleg Blueblood.” In a rare affront, the Hurlingham Polo Club blackballed his application for membership. He seemed unrepentant. And he offended men who might have befriended him. One contemporary noted in his diary on March 5: “Went to the Speaker’s Levée… Winston Churchill was there in a cavalry uniform with a long row of medals. He is a most astounding person. His speeches in the House this session have been very fine.” But in a fortnight the diarist changed his mind; Churchill, he had decided, was “a most infernal nuisance.”
Punch
reported: “His special enmity for Chamberlain and all his works is hereditary…. Winston is a convinced Free Trader. But he enters with lighter, more fully gladdened heart into the conflict, since Protection is championed by his father’s ancient adversary.” Earl Winterton thought him “too eager to hunt down his father’s old enemies.” MacCallum Scott, another contemporary, wrote that “the followers of Mr Chamberlain repaid his [Winston’s] hostility with a passionate personal hatred over which they vainly endeavoured to throw a mask of contempt. There was no better hated man in the House of Commons.” He was shunned. Only Tories who felt absolutely secure dared be seen with him. On Good Friday, Linky Cecil suggested that “the town council of Oldham give Winston Churchill the freedom of the borough as a mark of his independence and public spirit. As he is not going to stand for Oldham again it could not be mixed up with local party politics and it would be a fitting rebuke to ill-mannered persons in the House. He is I think being abominably treated. For he is very honest and very good-hearted.” But Linky was Lord Salisbury’s son. Had this come from an MP less well connected, it could have been a note of political suicide.
³¹

The beginning of the end came on March 29, 1904. At 5:00
P.M.
Churchill rose to follow Lloyd George in debate. At that point Balfour left his seat and met Austen Chamberlain, Joe’s son and chancellor of the Exchequer, beyond the glass door behind the Speaker’s chair. Winston, offended, objected to the prime minister’s departure just as he was about to speak; he called it an astonishing “lack of deference and respect.” At that, the cabinet rose from the Treasury Bench and walked out to the smoking room, followed by almost all the back-benchers, who paused at the door to jeer and count the number of Tories left. There were fewer than a dozen, all Free Traders. One, Sir John Gorst, who had belonged to Randolph’s Fourth Party, denounced his fellow Conservatives for treating Winston “with the most marked discourtesy which I think I have ever seen.” That merely put Gorst, too, in Coventry. The morning edition of the
Daily Mail
carried the headlines:
CHILLING REBUKE. UNIONISTS REFUSE TO HEAR MR CHURCHILL. STRANGE SCENE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
. The
Mail
reported: “The merry jest, the sparkling epigram and the ironical sally departed… from Mr Churchill’s oration. He never speaks unless there is a full house. The full house had melted away under his spell. It was a chilling rebuke, crushing, unanswerable. He complained bitterly at the slight, and murmured some phrases about shifty policy and evasion. There were only the crowded benches of the Liberals to cheer. Behind him was silence and desolation.” He was not yet the Winston Churchill of the 1930s; the strain of his solitary struggle had begun to tell; he was vulnerable to sudden, uncontrollable attacks of depression and had not yet learned to hide them until alone. Next day the
Pall Mall Gazette
told its readers that “in appearance there is nothing of ‘the Boy’ left in the white, nervous, washed-out face of the Member for Oldham. He walks with a stoop, his head thrust forward. His mouth expresses bitterness, the light eyes strained watchfulness. It is a tired face, white, worn, harassed…. There is, indeed, little of youth left to the Member for Oldham.” He was going through the political equivalent of a divorce suit, and approaching the brink of a breakdown.
³²

On Friday, April 22, he went over the brink. He had read Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s
Poverty: A Study of Town Life
on Morley’s recommendation. The book impressed him immensely, and marked the beginning of his radical period. Trade unions, he decided, must be recognized and their rights defined. This message—“Radicalism of the reddest type,” the
Daily Mail
called it—was the burden of his remarks for forty-five minutes that Friday, and he was approaching his peroration when calamity struck. He was speaking with his customary fire, and was about to strike his right fist into his left palm, clinching his argument, when his mind went completely blank. He had just said: “It lies with the Government to satisfy the working classes that there is no justification…” His voice trailed off. He groped. The studied phrases, laboriously composed and learned by heart, had fled from his memory. He began again: “It lies with them…. What?” he asked, as though someone had suggested a cue. He hesitated, frowned, looked confused, and fumbled in the pockets of his frock coat, as though looking for notes. There were none; until now he hadn’t carried any. The MP beside him picked some paper scraps from the floor; there was nothing on them. Winston made one more try: “It lies with them to satisfy the electors…” Some members cheered encouragingly, but it was no good. He sat down abruptly, buried his face in his hands, and muttered: “I thank honourable members for having listened to me.” The next day a headline read:
MR CHURCHILL BREAKS DOWN, DRAMATIC SCENE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
.
³³

One name was on the lips of upper-class London:
Lord Randolph.
Less than ten years earlier Winston’s father, occupying the same seat, had broken down in the same way, signaling his slide down into oblivion and death. To his family and friends the parallel was appalling. The next day Shane Leslie called at Mount Street and found his cousin huddling with his brother, Jack, and Sir Alfred Harmsworth. Winston asked Leslie to make inquiries about Pelmanism, the memory training system. It was unnecessary. His memory had been, and would again be, phenomenal; he had merely suffered a temporary lapse. In the future he would seldom speak without a text, but he rarely seemed to glance at it. Over the weekend his spirits, and his confidence, rebounded. He had passed the crisis of party renunciation. A correspondent in the Press Gallery noted the return of his “unmistakably schoolboy grin” in House shouting matches, “not the assumed smile so often seen in Parliament, but the real grin of one who is alive to all the fun of things.” On May 16 he delivered his last speech as a Tory, envisioning the fall of the Conservative government: “Extravagant finance was written on the head of their indictment, and it will be written on the head of their tombstone.” The Boer War had been an “immense public disaster.” He was partly to blame, “tarred” in a small way “with responsibility,” but the heavier guilt fell upon Chamberlain and his “New Imperialism… that bastard Imperialism which was ground out by a party machine and was convenient for placing a particular set of gentlemen in power.” The
Manchester Guardian
reported that “his neighbours melted away till scarcely a Protectionist was left in the House.” This time he beamed at their retreating backs.
³⁴

Early in April, over Easter weekend, he had been adopted by northeast Manchester as its Liberal candidate in the next election. On the last day of May he crossed the floor. It was low-key; there was no ceremony.
Punch
reported: “House resumed to-day after Whitsun holidays. Attendance small; benches mostly empty. Winston, entering with all the world before him where to choose, strides down to his father’s old quarters on the front bench below the gangway to the left of the Speaker, and sits among the ghosts of the old Fourth Party.” It was here, when the Tories were in opposition, that Randolph had stood in 1885, waving his handkerchief to cheer the downfall of Gladstone. The seat beside it was now occupied by Lloyd George, who gripped Winston’s hand. Rosebery and Grey also welcomed him, none of them, of course, mentioning the invective he had once poured on their party, calling them “prigs, prudes, and faddists,” describing liberalism as “hiding from the public view like a toad in a hole,” and predicting that “when it stands forth in all its hideousness the Tories will have to hew the filthy object limb from limb.”
³⁵

His former colleagues on the other side of the House hadn’t forgotten, however. They had agreed with him then, and now regarded him as the filthiest of toads. Henry Lucy, “Toby, MP” of
Punch
(like the
New Republic
’s later TRB), wrote in his diary: “Winston Churchill may be safely counted upon to make himself quite as disagreeable on the Liberal side as he did on the Unionist. But he will be handicapped by the aversion that always pertains to a man who, in whatever honourable circumstances, has turned his coat.” However, Lucy had no control over another
Punch
correspondent, who wrote: “ ‘He’s gone over at last, and good riddance,’ say honest hacks munching their corn in well-padded stalls of Government stables. They don’t like young horses that kick out and cannot be safely counted upon to run in double harness. ‘Winston’s gone over at last,’ they repeat, whinnying with decorous delight.”
³⁶

Afterward they had long second thoughts. Chamberlain confided to Margot Asquith: “He was the cleverest of all the young men. The mistake Arthur made was in letting him go.” F. E. Smith, the brilliant young Conservative who became Churchill’s closest friend, wrote: “ ‘He can wait’ has always been the Tory formula which has chilled the hopes of young and able men…. And so chance after chance of modest promotion went by… Winston characteristically jumped the whole fence.” Winston himself, of course, denied that ambition had played any role in his decision. “Some men change their party for the sake of their principles,” he said; “others their principles for the sake of their party.” He quoted Pope: “Sworn to no master, of no sect am I / As drives the storm, at any door I knock.”
³⁷

But he knew that in switching parties he was joining the future. For a generation the Liberal party had carried the cross of Home Rule. Now, in part due to him, Free Trade had replaced it as the central issue before the country. And Joe Chamberlain’s exhortations to working-and middle-class audiences, his pleas to “think imperially,” had failed. He was booed, or addressed empty halls. That debacle, public disillusionment with the Boer War, and scandalous reports that Chinese coolies were being treated as slave labor in South African mines—charges also laid at the former colonial secretary’s door—had shifted England’s balance of political power. The historian D. C. Somervell has concluded that “from 1903 onwards, it seemed certain, and not only to those who wished it, that Balfour’s Government would be defeated at the next election.” On December 12 of that year Churchill wrote Cockran: “I believe that Chamberlain will be defeated at the General Election by an overwhelming majority.”
³⁸
And so he was. After the votes had been counted, Joe suffered a paralytic stroke and lived out his life a tragic invalid. His children carried on the family’s parliamentary tradition. In subsequent governments the elder boy, Austen, went on to become foreign secretary, chancellor of the Exchequer, and first lord of the Admiralty. The other son, Austen’s half brother, was Neville Chamberlain.