The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  When the House of Commons adjourned in December for the winter holidays, it did so from its rebuilt chamber, where it first met in late October. It had been almost ten years since a German bomb had obliterated the old chamber. Clement Attlee generously named a surviving stone arch the Churchill Arch. The new chamber was built to hold only two-thirds of the members, a design Churchill had suggested, such that if only half the members showed up, the room would appear almost full. The decision to build the chamber so, Churchill told the House, confused many around the world who “cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.” He offered, “I am a child of the House of Commons and have been here I believe longer than anyone. I was much upset when I was violently thrown out of my collective cradle. I certainly wanted to get back to it as soon as possible.” Five years after V-E day, the House of Commons had been restored to its prewar splendor, but Britain had not been, and the Empire never would be.146

  In London that December, the weather turned depressing, and snow and ice and low temperatures persisted through the New Year. This was Churchill’s travel season. He left mid-month for five weeks in Marrakech, where Clementine was to join him in early January. On Christmas Day he wrote his wife a short note from the Hotel La Mamounia, where he spent his days painting and his evenings dining on champagne and Marennes oysters. He asked after all the animals at Chartwell—the golden orfes, the Black Mollies, the black swans, and Rufus. He had no distractions, and was hard at work on the sixth and final volume of his memoirs. Of Korea, he wrote: “Much depends on the coming battle.”147

  In London, there was talk of an Eastern Munich. Harold Nicolson now regretted his switch to the Labour Party and its failing socialist experiment. On New Year’s Eve Nicolson told his diary: “So ends a horrible year with worse to come…. We are all oppressed by a terrible sense of weakness and foreboding…. The year closes in a mist of anxiety. We shall be lucky if we get through 1951 without a war…. It is sad to become old amid such darkness.”148

  Harold Macmillan began expressing similar sentiments to his diary and continued to do so well into the late summer. In January: “The British Govt has almost ceased to function. The P.M. doodles or talks platitudes; the Foreign Secretary has pneumonia; there are no rearmament plans, no economic plan, and now—no coal!” As in 1947, Britons stoked their fires and pulled on another sweater in anticipation of a long, cold, lonely winter. On January 22 Macmillan wrote: “It is tragic that at such a moment we should have Attlee and Bevin…. Churchill is still painting in Marrakesh!”149

  He was. But if he was to fight his final battle against Attlee and for the premiership, he needed his rest and his strength, which he nourished over eight days with numerous picnics, long evening meals on his veranda, and painting. Still, he managed to proof eight chapters of volume 6 of his war memoirs as well as work on the final draft of the U.S. Book-of-the-Month Club edition of volume 5. He daubed, dictated, and dined until January 20. He returned to London by way of Paris, where on the twenty-second he dined with Madame Odette Pol-Roger, the beautiful socialite whose company and champagne he thoroughly enjoyed (he later named one of his racehorses for her). Churchill arrived in London on the twenty-third, and set to work to bring down the Attlee government.

  Britain by then was losing prestige along with the Empire. It could not mediate the Kashmir border dispute. It could not protect Malayan rubber plantations from roving bands of Communist guerrillas. The news from Korea only worsened. In April, the 1st battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment was surrounded by Chinese forces and annihilated—704 of 750 men were killed or captured. The news from the Middle East became increasingly worrisome. The Egyptian government denied passage through the Suez Canal to British oil tankers bound for the refinery at Haifa, this in abrogation of international agreements.

  Then, in late April, the Iranian parliament elected Mohammad Mosaddegh—Churchill called him Mousy Duck—prime minister. The Shah, whom the British and Americans had put on the Peacock Throne a decade earlier, appointed Mosaddegh premier. On May 1, Mosaddegh nationalized the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, including its refineries at Abadan. The Attlee government pledged to not abandon the Abadan complex, but failed to explain whether it would meet that pledge through force or negotiation. It resorted to neither.

  In February, Labour won a no-confidence vote by a majority of 9. A vote on steel nationalization went to Labour by 10 votes. Remarkably, almost the entire House showed up for these sessions, and divided strictly along party lines, with the Liberals sometimes splitting their few votes. The Times speculated that if an influenza outbreak that was then spreading through the land kept enough Labourites from appearing in the Commons, the government might fall. Macmillan told his diary he hadn’t seen such attendance—and such partisanship—since the General Strike of 1926. On the day following the steel vote, Labour won a referendum on meat rationing by eight votes. Macmillan scribbled in his diary: “The people do not go into little shops every weekend to buy a piece of steel. But they do grumble every weekend about their minute portion of meat.”150

  The Attlee government hung on, but just. When Labour came to power in 1945, the party was led by the Big Five: Attlee, Ernest Bevin (Foreign Office), Herbert Morrison (leader of the House), Sir Stafford Cripps (Board of Trade), and Hugh Dalton (Exchequer). By the end of 1947, Dalton was out, having been driven from the Exchequer for the egregious offense of leaking vital parts of HMG’s budget to a reporter, before the House saw the budget and while the stock market was still open. Cripps took over at the Exchequer, where he raised taxes and forced a reduction in consumer spending, in order, he hoped, to raise exports. He failed. Morrison, who according to Colville “was not short of ambition,” sought to maneuver Attlee out of the party chairmanship and himself in. Bevin, a bitter enemy of Morrison, refused to accede to that notion. After five years of marshaling nationalization schemes through the House, Morrison took over the Foreign Office when Bevin finally resigned due to ill health in March 1951. He was dead a month later. Bevin had always been on the opposite side of the House from Churchill, but like Churchill he was a great English patriot. Attlee, who was in the hospital with a duodenal ulcer, could not even pay tribute to Bevin in the House.

  Cripps, too, had departed the scene. Plagued by severe digestive distress that his vegetarian diet failed to ameliorate, he resigned from Parliament and the cabinet in 1950, and took himself off to a Swiss sanatorium. He died two years later. Hugh Gaitskell, who also had his eye on the party leadership, succeeded him at the Exchequer in October 1950. When in early April 1951 Gaitskell announced plans to reel in costs associated with Aneurin Bevan’s National Health Service by forcing Britons to pay half of their of eye care and dental expenses, and to contribute one shilling (about twenty-five cents) to their prescription costs, Bevan resigned in protest. Two days later, the head of the Board of Trade resigned. When Harold Macmillan heard the news, he told his diary, “If this is true, the Government must fall, and a general election follow.”151

  By the summer of 1951, in contrast to the fractious and disputatious Labour leadership, the Conservatives, led by Churchill, in harness with Eden, Lord Woolton, Oliver Lyttelton, Rab Butler, Duncan Sandys, and Harold Macmillan, presented a unified opposition front, with Churchill firmly in the role of party leader.

  By then, House debates, sometimes lasting all night, regularly descended into bitter shouting matches, with Churchill often being the object of the invective. But he gave as good as he got. When the minister of defence, Emanuel Shinwell, muttered his disagreement over re-arming Germany, Churchill shot back, “Oh shut up. Go and talk to the Italians; that’s all you’re fit for.” That outburst resulted in one hundred Labour MPs signing and sending an apology to the Italian government, which in turn demanded an apology from Churchill, who gave one. During a May debate
on the matter of the Attlee government continuing to sell Malay rubber and other raw materials to China over the strident objection of the United States (Churchill opposed the sales), a member shouted, “Do not write down [criticize] your country all the time.” Churchill replied: “Will the honourable Member yell it out again?” The member did just that. “Sit down!” “Untrue!” “Get out!” and “Give way!” were regularly yelled from both benches. When Churchill once averred that he only wanted to do what was best for Britain, a member called out, “Resign!” An extraordinary exchange took place during a July debate on the handling of the Suez and Iranian crises, when Herbert Morrison, recently elevated to foreign secretary, interrupted Churchill with “They are laughing at the right honourable Gentleman behind him.” Churchill replied, “I expect that the right honourable Gentleman wishes that he had such cordial relations with his own back-benchers.” But Churchill could not leave it there, for Morrison had recently told an audience of coal miners that Churchill and the Tories sought war in both Egypt and Iran. Morrison, Churchill declared, “shows to all the world that his main thought in life is to be a caucus boss and a bitter party electioneer.” Churchill added, “It is tragic indeed that at this time his distorted, twisted and malevolent mind should be the one to which our Foreign Affairs are confided.”152

  That night Macmillan told his diary that Churchill’s performance was “one of his most devastating and polished efforts.” Under a mass of Labour “chaff and invective,” Churchill “thus established a complete ascendancy over the party and indeed over the House.” He had, but although he had recovered from his hernia operation and had experienced no minor strokes for two years, such exertions took an increasing toll on his health. House debates were trying, and sessions sometimes lasted until morning, an ordeal even for a younger man. Lord Moran told his diary that if Churchill “goes back to No. 10, I doubt whether he is up to the job… he has lost ground and has no longer the same grip on things and events.” And Moran, worried about Churchill’s mental health if he did not go back to No. 10, told his diary, “When the struggle for power is at an end, and his political life is over, Winston will feel there is no purpose in his existence. I dread what may happen then.”153

  All now expected Attlee to call for a general election, with polling likely to take place in October, after the late summer vacation season.

  Although Clementine wanted nothing more than to retire from political life, she did not discourage Winston in his quest for No. 10. Yet neither did she encourage him. She believed that his reputation could not be enhanced by another term at the top, and would most likely be damaged. She preferred that husband and wife live out their days at Chartwell, where she had finally found happiness. Their neighbors accepted the family now, whereas in the past they had considered Churchill something of an enfant terrible, and local merchants had considered the family a poor credit risk. All had changed, Mary later wrote. Neighbors were proud of having the Churchills in their midst, and the Churchills for their part became more outgoing and welcoming. Winston and Clementine now opened the Chartwell gardens four times each summer, admission was charged, and the proceeds donated to local charities.

  Clementine, though ten years her husband’s junior, lacked his energy and was easily exhausted—mentally and physically—by the strains of the political life. In May she had undergone a hysterectomy; in July she continued her convalescence near Biarritz, on the Bay of Biscay, in the company of Mary. In mid-August, with Parliament in summer recess, Churchill (and two secretaries, his valet, and Christopher Soames) set off for Paris to rendezvous with Clementine and Mary. From Paris the party traveled to the Rhone Alps region, where they planned to spend two weeks in the sun at Lake Annecy, near the Swiss border. But the sun failed to shine. Instead, a cold rain fell for a week, at which time Clementine and the Soameses returned to London, while Churchill prepared to take himself and his retinue off to Geneva by train, and from there to Venice, where he expected the bathing on the Lido would be more enjoyable. Told that the French train to Geneva did not stop at the Annecy station, Churchill instructed one of his secretaries to inform the stationmaster that Winston Churchill wishes that the train be stopped in order for Winston Churchill to board. The train was stopped. Churchill and party boarded, along with fifty-five suitcases and trunks and sixty-five smaller articles.154

  On September 20, a week after Churchill returned to London, Attlee sent him a short note: “My dear Churchill,” it read. “I have decided to have a general election in October.” He added that he would issue a formal declaration after that night’s nine o’clock news. The elections were set for October 25.155

  Churchill, at seventy-six, knew that this was his final chance to attain his lifelong goal of being sent to No. 10 Downing Street by a vote of the English people. Defeat would mean retirement to the Weald. In a Tory defeat he’d likely retain his Woodford seat, but he would very likely lose the party leadership to a younger man, most likely Anthony Eden. But Eden, at fifty-four, was no longer a young man, nor with his recurring stomach ailments was he a healthy man. The results of a Gallup poll had reached Churchill in Venice: a majority of Conservatives and Liberals favored Eden over Churchill for party leadership. This general election would be Churchill’s last as the Tory leader, win or lose. He had formed two governments, in 1940 and 1945, neither with a public mandate. Now, he would stake the reputation he had earned over fifty years on the final campaign. He had the nerve and sinew for the fight. Most of all he had the lion heart. All who knew him knew also that a loss would leave Churchill with little to hold on to.

  The general election campaign of 1951 was a Hobbesian affair—not brutish, but nasty and short. Churchill began his campaign in early October, delivering eight speeches and two broadcasts in the three weeks up to polling day, October 25. Churchill’s overall theme was the “melancholy story of inadvertence, incompetence, indecision and final collapse, which has… marked the policy of our Socialist rulers.”

  Foreign affairs offered him rich fields to plow. In late September, after Iranian prime minister Mosaddegh demanded that all British employees in Abadan leave Iran, Britain pulled its personnel out. Churchill, having negotiated the Persian oil concessions in 1914, once again, as during the war, saw events in the Middle East as not only threats to British national security but also personal affronts. During one House debate on the Iranian crisis, he managed to denigrate both the Attlee and the Iranian governments in the same sentence:

  If I may digress for a moment, it would seem that the Government have an advantage in their task in Persia in having so much in common with the Persian Government. They, like them, are holding on to office by the skin of their teeth and, like them, they are persevering in a policy of nationalization without the slightest regard for national interests.156

  Thus, the campaign’s first week found Attlee acceding to Mosaddegh’s demand that the British leave Abadan. Mosaddegh, known for fits of public weeping and the occasional swoon, had actually rattled his saber. And Attlee had stood down, leading Churchill to tell a Liverpool audience that Britain had “fled the field” and had “been ejected” from Iran after “fifty years of British enterprise and management.” He added a charge of appeasement: “Mr. Morrison, the Foreign Secretary, and his party associates no doubt hope to cover up their failure by saying that the Tories want war, while they are for peace at any price.”157

  Indeed, painting the Tories as warmongers, Churchill foremost among them, formed the core of Labour’s strategy. Labour did not fight the election on the merits of socialism, Macmillan told his diary, but on fear—fear of unemployment, reduced wages, fewer social benefits, and, the greatest fear of all, war. During the first week of the campaign, the socialist Daily Mirror, with a circulation of four million, introduced a slogan that encapsulated the message: “Whose finger do you want on the trigger, Churchill’s or Attlee’s?” Churchill pointed out that the finger might be American, or Russian, but it could not be British, as Britain had no atomic bom
b because its “influence in the world is not what it was in bygone days.” All knew that to be true; and all asked, how does Churchill intend to reclaim that influence? By war, answered Labour.158

  On the domestic front, Churchill let the Labour record speak for itself. He had stated his case for months, with feeling, but with little exaggeration. Britain’s plight would have been hard to exaggerate. The country was stumbling toward financial disaster. Labour had imposed the highest tax rates in the free world. During that fourth quarter of 1951, Britain was hemorrhaging from its gold and dollar reserves at a pace never before seen in its history. At the current rate, the reserves would disappear sometime around mid-1952. The Iranian crisis meant that future oil purchases might have to be made in American dollars, a further drain of three hundred million on Britain’s dollar balances. The pound had lost one-third of its value since the war ended. Internal inflation had been creeping up for six years, and was now accelerating as the Attlee government undertook to re-arm, a policy Churchill agreed with. Now, with America beginning its second year on a re-armament spending binge, worldwide commodity prices were spiraling upward, and Britain’s finances were out of control. Britain was still the world’s second-wealthiest country, a distant second behind the United States, but it clung to that status only because the economies of France, Germany, and Japan were just climbing out of the ruins of war. Churchill could not know it then, but that year’s inflationary spike (12.5 percent) would reverse itself within months as the world’s largest economies settled into the new order of the consumer society. America’s new economic model, based on ever-increasing defense and consumer spending, soon begin to lift Britain from its economic mire, as a rising tide lifts all boats. It was a process that neither Attlee nor Churchill had much control over.159