The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Churchill planned to spend the first few weeks of 1950 at Reid’s Hotel in Madeira. Clementine made the trip, as did Diana. Two secretaries and Bill Deakin accompanied Churchill; it was to be a working holiday. But in early January, Attlee called for a general election on February 23. Churchill packed his kit and returned to Chartwell to chart the Conservative campaign. Clementine stayed on in Madeira for a few days before returning to 28 Hyde Park Gate, where on January 19 she received a letter from her husband: “I have not thought of anything since I returned except politics.” He and the Tory hierarchy had spent long days at Chartwell planning their manifesto. The problem, he told Clementine, was “not what to do” but “what to say to our poor and puzzled people.” He noted that Gallup polls showed the Tory lead over Labour had fallen from nine to three points, but that four hundred Liberal candidates (running as spoilers and not expected to win many seats) would invariably skewer the final results. “How many seats the Liberal ‘splits’ will cause us cannot be measured.” He thought that “at the outside” the Liberals might win seven seats. He closed with “I am much depressed about the country because for whoever wins there will be nothing but bitterness and strife, like men fighting savagely on a small raft which is breaking up. ‘May God save you all’ is my prayer.”121

  By the arrival of the new decade, his arteries had further hardened and he was going deaf. His ear, nose, and throat specialist told him he’d soon not be able to hear “the twittering of birds and children’s piping voices.” Churchill’s walking stick no longer served as a fashion statement but served a practical purpose. Before the election campaign even got under way, Churchill summoned his doctor, Lord Moran. Everything had suddenly “gone misty,” Churchill told Moran, and he asked, “Am I going to have another stroke?” Moran tried to reassure him by offering that he was likely experiencing “arterial spasms” when very tired. The patient looked up sharply and said, “You mustn’t frighten me.” It was Moran who was frightened, telling his diary, “This is a grim start to the racket of a General Election.”122

  Roy Jenkins, at the time the youngest MP—the Baby of the House—later wrote that Churchill conducted a more restrained campaign than in 1945. Churchill had the good sense to make no mention of a socialist Gestapo. And although he harangued the Labour Party and its cabal of intellectuals on their nationalization schemes, such topics as coal, steel, and railroads do not lend themselves to flights of oratorical fancy. On the foreign policy front, Churchill was more or less in agreement with Attlee and Bevin, who championed closer ties to the United States, the re-armament of Germany, and a containment policy toward the Soviets. Ignoring his doctor’s advice to not stump the country, Churchill delivered eleven campaign speeches in cities and towns throughout the island, including Cardiff, Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds, and three in his constituency of Woodford. The election was a family affair: Duncan Sandys, Christopher Soames, and Randolph were standing for office as well, and the Old Man campaigned for them. He kept bile out of his message, and instead reverted to humor and metaphor to skewer Labour. It was during this campaign that he coined the term “Queuetopia.” In Cardiff on February 8 he reduced Labour’s stultifying jargon to silliness:

  I hope you have all mastered the official Socialist jargon which our masters, as they call themselves, wish us to learn. You must not use the word “poor”; they are described as the “lower income group.” When it comes to a question of freezing a workman’s wages the Chancellor of the Exchequer speaks of “arresting increases in personal income.”… There is a lovely one about houses and homes. They are in future to be called “accommodation units.” I don’t know how we are to sing our old song “Home Sweet Home.” “Accommodation Unit, Sweet Accommodation Unit, there’s no place like our Accommodation Unit.” I hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips.123

  In Edinburgh on February 14, he told the audience that “by one broad heave of the British national shoulders the whole gimcrack structure of Socialist jargon and malice may be cast in splinters to the ground.” In his second campaign broadcast, delivered in London on the seventeenth, he again advised his countrymen to free themselves with one heave of their shoulders, and warned that they might not get a second chance to do so. Then he offered the parable of the Spanish prisoner who, after years of bondage, “pushed the door of his cell—and it was open. It had always been open. He walked out free into the broad light of day.”124

  In Leeds he warned:

  Remember also that, as a Socialist Prime Minister working for the establishment of a Socialist State, Mr. Attlee and his party are alone in the English-speaking world. The United States at the head of the world today vehemently repudiate the Socialist doctrine. Canada repudiates it…. Remember also there is no Socialist Government in Europe outside the Iron Curtain and Scandinavia. It seems to me a very perilous path that we are asked to tread, and to tread alone among the free democracies of the West.125

  It was during the Edinburgh address that Churchill made his most important foreign policy statement of the campaign, and in so doing not only coined the term “summit meeting” but outlined a belief that would underlie his relations with both America and Russia for the remainder of his political life. First came a warning: “The Soviet Communist world has by far the greatest military force, but the United States have the atom bomb; and now, we are told that they have a thousand fold more terrible manifestation of this awful power.” Although the United States had lost its monopoly on atomic bombs, it had a great many in its arsenal. “When all is said and done it is my belief that the superiority [in numbers] in the atom bomb… in American hands is the surest guarantee of world peace tonight.” Then:

  Still I cannot help coming back to this idea of another talk with Soviet Russia upon the highest level. The idea appeals to me of a supreme effort to bridge the gulf between the two worlds, so that each can live their life, if not in friendship at least without the hatreds of the cold war. You must be careful to mark my words in these matters because I have not always been proved wrong. It is not easy to see how things could be worsened by a parley at the summit, if such a thing were possible. But that I cannot tell.126

  He repeated the theme a few days later during his London broadcast: “It is only by the agreement of the greatest Powers that security can be given to ordinary folk against an annihilating war with atomic or hydrogen bombs or bacteriological horrors. I cannot find it in my heart and conscience to close the door upon that hope.” This was his first mention of “hydrogen bombs.” In Edinburgh he had referred only to weapons a “thousand fold” more powerful than atomic bombs. Indeed, the power of thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs, or H-bombs) is reckoned in megatons versus kilotons for atomic bombs, and in this new calculus Churchill beheld the horrifying difference between the two weapons. One could destroy cities, the other civilization. Five years earlier he had seen the A-bomb as merely the biggest bomb in the arsenal. No more. The Americans were yet two years away from exploding an H-bomb, but in early 1950 Churchill saw—the first world leader to do so—that the enormity of that weapon must preclude its use. Churchill’s vivid imagination, not cold logic, drove his thinking on the matter. He had seen London burn once; he could now shut his eyes and behold the entire nation in flames, the entire world. The conclusion was obvious: world wars could still be fought, but could no longer be won.127

  On Election Day, February 23, Churchill told some Tory cronies that he’d drop into the Savoy later that evening to stand a round of drinks if the early returns showed promise. He never appeared, but rather closeted himself at Hyde Park Gate to listen as the BBC reported the early returns from the larger cities. Labour was holding its own. By late in the morning of the twenty-fourth, town and country returns evidenced a shift to the Tories. But it wasn’t enough. Labour saw its great majority of 1945 all but erased, a stunning turnaround and a defeat by any other name, but Attlee and his government survived, barely. The final results showed Labour held 315 seats (13,
331,000 votes); the Conservatives 298 seats (12,415,000 votes); and the Liberals 9 seats (mostly in Wales, 2,679,000 votes). That gave Labour an overall majority of six. Churchill, Christopher Soames, and Duncan Sandys fared well, but not Randolph, who for the fourth time in four contested elections was rejected by voters. In a sense, Labour had lost the election—certainly it had lost its mandate—but the Conservatives and Churchill had not won it.

  Churchill was seventy-five. He complained to his doctor of tightness in his shoulders and he feared another stroke. Time was now the enemy. But in one regard time was also his ally. Turmoil among the leadership of the Labour party, any internal Labour dissent on matters of budgets, banking, or defense, would lead to a vote of no confidence. In America Churchill would have had to wait four years before another shot at the top, but in Britain—especially in Attlee’s Britain, that year—another general election might be called within months. Although Anthony Eden, Rab Butler, and Harold Macmillan each aspired to higher status within the party leadership (and ultimately the leadership itself), Churchill’s position as leader was secure. Under his command, the Conservatives had retrieved 85 of the seats they had lost in 1945, and Labour had lost 78. Those Tories who had wanted Churchill to take a long rest in 1945 would have to wait their turn. They could not throw over the man who had brought them this far, in war and in peace. Churchill, therefore, though disappointed by the election results, was not shattered. He believed that his day would yet come. He returned to Chartwell to continue work on his memoirs—only two volumes remained. He prepared, too, for the new Parliament and the battles sure to be fought there. Late one night not long after the election, while dictating a section of his memoir, he turned to Jane Portal and announced, “I know I’m going to be Prime Minister again. I know it.”128

  One among the family was not shattered in the least by the election results: Clementine. Chartwell was her safe haven; the guest list included children and grandchildren and old friends. In 1945 she believed Winston should have retired, and she believed so still. Increasingly afflicted with neuritis, streptococcal infections, and by a bout of lumbago later in the year, she was ready for a pacific retirement at Chartwell. It was not to be.

  On March 6, the new Parliament opened with the traditional Gracious Speech, the King’s message to the Houses of Lords and Commons. The next day, March 7, the first day of debate, Churchill made clear his intent to press his attacks on the socialist experiment: “The basic fact before us is that the electors by a majority of 1,750,000 have voted against the advance to a Socialist State, and, in particular, against the nationalization of steel and other industries which were threatened. The Government, therefore, have no mandate.” He moved that a full debate of all issues “be accorded us in the next fortnight or so.” Hansard transcripts record the following exchange:

  Mr. H. Morrison [Speaker of the House] indicated dissent.

  Mr. Churchill: It will take more than the oscillation of the Lord President’s head in this Parliament necessarily to convince us that our desires must be put aside; I ask for a full Debate.129

  He pressed his attacks for the next twenty months. Debates (and Questions) in the House of Commons are far livelier affairs than business conducted in either the Senate or House of the United States, where long and often boring statements are read into the Congressional Record by members (often to an empty chamber), and where oral interruptions are considered breaches of decorum. In the British House of Commons “Rubbish” and “Nonsense” are oft-heard rejoinders. Laughter—and its cousin the snicker—is a weapon. Members mumble and rustle papers in shows of displeasure at an opponent’s words (or mumble and rustle papers in agreement with their party colleagues). Churchill came to do battle. His political nemesis Aneurin Bevan described Churchill’s approach to the House thus: “He had to wheel himself up to battle like an enormous gun.” When Churchill fired a salvo, his opponents knew it.130

  Labour MPs once jeered Churchill as he was leaving the chamber; he turned and blew them kisses. No barb could go unanswered. When Churchill castigated Labour for the fiscal hardships Britons lived with, a Labour MP called out, “Why don’t you sell your horse?” Churchill looked up, and replied, “I was strongly tempted to sell the horse, but I am doing my best to fight against the profit motive.” A nod of dissent, a derisive grunt, were gauntlets thrown down. When a member mumbled, “Rubbish,” to one Churchill pronouncement, the Old Man replied, “That may be what the right honourable and learned Gentleman has in his head, but it does not carry conviction.” When a member called out, “Rubbish,” after Churchill claimed Czechoslovakia had become a pawn of Moscow, the Old Man replied: “The right honourable Gentleman seems to have nothing in his head but rubbish.” Interrupted during one debate on Moscow’s geopolitical intentions, Churchill shot back, “I think the Communist Members and fellow travelers have a pretty good run in this House.” Here was an incendiary claim that even the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, would not make on the U.S. Senate floor. But Churchill could toss out such a retort without causing an uproar, because all knew he was without guile. As well, wrote Tory MP Earl Winterton (who in 1950 was the Father of the House, its longest-serving member), Churchill could read the mood of the House: “Winston Churchill is steeped in its atmosphere and traditions; he is familiar with all its varying moods… he has an instinctive understanding of what it will accept and what it will not accept.” The British House of Commons was populated by agile minds and quick wits, and after almost fifty years, Winston Churchill was still one of the most agile and quick-witted. Indeed, at about that time, Winterton called him “the greatest living parliamentarian.”131

  Another colleague, Sir Alan Herbert, the Independent MP for Oxford University, called Churchill “the greatest living British humorist.” When giving lectures on the topic of humor, Herbert cited the usual suspects: P. G. Wodehouse, Noël Coward, Nat Gubbins, even Aneurin Bevan. But Herbert’s top choice was “Winston Churchill, who, at any time, in any conditions, in any company, on any subject, with never a fault of taste or tact, can make laughter when he wills.”132

  Not all agreed. Roy Jenkins believed Churchill’s humor was sometimes “not… wise… or gracious” as a result of “one of Churchill’s narrownesses”—his hostility to left-wing intellectuals. Churchill believed incorrectly that Labour’s leading lights were all products of Winchester College, which he considered a breeding ground of the casuistry he saw and detested in certain intellectuals. Indeed, Hugh Gaitskell and Stafford Cripps, among several other Labour leaders, had come out of Winchester. As a result, Jenkins wrote, Churchill made “constant not very funny anti-Wykehamical [anti-Winchester] jokes in the House.” He did, but one’s man’s humor is another man’s poison. Churchill, responding to a Labour claim: “We suffer from the fallacy, deus ex machina, which, for the benefit of any Wykehamists who may be present, is ‘A god out of the machine.’ ” On another occasion: “I do not know whether they learn French at Winchester.” And during a June 27, 1950, debate on British participation in a European coal and steel community, Churchill tossed out: “In this Debate we have had the usual jargon about ‘the infrastructure of a supra-national authority.’ The original authorship is obscure; but it may well be that these words ‘infra’ and ‘supra’ have been introduced into our current political parlance by the band of intellectual highbrows who are naturally anxious to impress British labour with the fact that they learned Latin at Winchester.” In fact, the word “infrastructure,” a perfectly good Latin-derived word, had come out of France, but Churchill never missed a chance to ridicule his political enemies.133

  The “supranational authority” under discussion was known as the Schuman Plan, proposed on May 9 by French foreign minister Robert Schuman, who called on European nations to join together in a community dedicated to shedding tariffs and sharing resources—coal and steel, to start with—in order to regain a competitive edge in the international marketplace and, most significant, to eliminate the resource monopo
lization that inevitably ended in European wars. Schuman called for talks in Paris. The Attlee government refused to participate, a decision Churchill denounced as “a squalid attitude at a time of present stress.” He was not advising a blanket acceptance of the Schuman Plan, but merely a willingness to discuss it. He added that if asked, would he “agree to a supra-national authority which has the power to tell Great Britain not to cut any more coal or make any more steel, but to grow tomatoes instead?’ I should say, without hesitation, the answer is ‘No.’ ” What he opposed, he said, “is State ownership and management—or mismanagement as it has proved so far—of the industry.” He pointed out that under Schuman’s proposal, private ownership of industry remained unaffected, adding, “We see no reason why the problems of the British steel industry should not be discussed in common with the problems of the other European steel industries.”

  And he pointed out the ultimate beauty of the plan: it would bring France and Germany together in mutually beneficial enterprises. It would be “an effective step,” Churchill told a meeting of Scottish Unionists, “in preventing another war between France and Germany and lay at last to rest that quarrel of 1,000 years between Gaul and Teuton. Now France has taken the initiative in a manner beyond my hopes.” He told the House during the debate of June 27 that to reach this day was why Britain had refused to quit in 1940: