Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Unease stirred as well in the Conservative camp. In Belgrave Square, Chips Channon leafed through the ‘storm of abuse’, and calculated that ‘Rothermere has come out against the Government: Kemsley is pro it: the “Telegraph” and Beaverbrook are mildly critical, but stay their hand.’112

  Lord Rothermere’s defection was a disappointment. Only two days earlier, Chamberlain had received a letter of endorsement from the Daily Mail’s proprietor. ‘Your endurance and courage under great difficulties will rally behind you all the women voters and most of the men voters in this country.113 They have not lost faith in their leader or belief in victory.’

  As he was to flattery, Chamberlain was sensitive to criticism: ‘Chamberlain hates criticism,’ said Brendan Bracken, ‘he can’t stand it, he gets hurt and angry at the sound of it.’114 All at once, Chamberlain felt ‘very down and depressed’ after digesting the newspapers and the results of the latest BIPO poll: 60 per cent of the population against him, in contrast to the BIPO survey on 26 April when 57 per cent had approved of him as Prime Minister.115

  It further riled him to read speculation about who might take over. Halifax and Lloyd George cropped up as candidates, but Churchill’s was the name which rankled. The government was having to take the rap over Norway for something that Chamberlain could not reveal to the public. As Chips Channon, one of Chamberlain’s most faithful supporters, put it: ‘Our failure in Norway is largely Winston’s fault, and yet he would profit by it.116 I am appalled.’

  Inevitably, when Chamberlain felt the need to unstitch, he turned to his sisters. His correspondence with Ida and Hilda was the closest that he came to a diary or autobiography. He relied on their unstinting support, keeping their replies in his jacket to bring out and reread when he was fishing or shooting. Once, he was staying with Alec Dunglass in Scotland when Dunglass pulled from Chamberlain’s pocket a letter from Ida ‘covered in blood and feathers’.117

  This weekend, Chamberlain was the quarry. He went into his study, and though he disliked using a fountain pen because of his nettle rash, he sat at his writing table and completed the long letter that he had begun on Saturday to Hilda, knowing that she would share it with Ida. His grandson says: ‘It was a massive security breach, and not very healthy – his sisters were completely uncritical – but he could say whatever he liked.’118

  A backlog had built up of the confidences which he wanted to share. Most sprang from his recent impasse with Churchill.

  In his unpretentious handwriting that was uniformly slanted at ten past two, Chamberlain revealed the full catalogue of Churchill’s shortcomings since the start of the Norway Campaign: how Churchill had changed his mind repeatedly over Trondheim, how he had bullied the Chiefs of Staff into agreeing with a course of which they disapproved, how Stanley and Hoare had said they would resign if Churchill was appointed Defence Minister, how Chamberlain had threatened to resign if they did, and how Churchill’s vacillations and alterations did not ‘square with the picture the gutter press & W.C.’s “friends” try to paint of the supreme War Lord’.119 Churchill was ‘too apt to look the other way while his friends exalt him as the War Genius & hint that if only he had not been thwarted things would have gone very differently.120 How thankful I must be that the good British public does not know that truth & persists in ideas which recall the Kitchener legend.’

  The First Lord had in point of fact given him ‘more trouble than all the rest of my colleagues put together.’121 So much so that Chamberlain had been mulling over whether to promote Churchill or sack him; or even step aside himself.

  The temperature on Sunday afternoon rose to 88 degrees Fahrenheit. At the Old Vic, John Gielgud had been playing since early April to a full house, standing room only, in a drama about an autocratic leader who finds it difficult to relinquish power. Geoffrey Dawson wrote in his diary after seeing Gielgud’s King Lear: ‘It was a shattering performance.’122

  Like Lear, Chamberlain had a ‘strong inclination to take my head out of the collar & let someone else do the donkey work’.123 But he resisted handing over his reins in the absence of an obvious replacement – and Churchill was not that; his behaviour had been such that the Service Ministers, whether right or wrong in their opinions, were often in the same state of open revolt as the rest of the War Cabinet. Chamberlain confided to the American Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, that ‘he didn’t think there was one man in his Cabinet who would vote for him for Prime Minister’.124

  A week after the outbreak of war, Chamberlain had estimated that ‘half a dozen people could take my place’.125 Now when he darted his eye about, ‘I don’t see that other to whom I could hand over with any confidence … who would be better than I.’126 In certain respects, he felt stronger than before, more in control; and it encouraged him to know that his political opponents believed this. A mournful Attlee reported that Chamberlain’s authority in Cabinet, which he continued only too easily to dominate, was absolute.

  The rumours about Chamberlain’s domination of the War Cabinet are easy to exaggerate. He was orderly, persuasive, open to consultation with individual ministers, seldom spoke early in the discussion, and allowed all the members to have their say. On the other hand, it is quite true that he kept a sharp watch over both colleagues and rivals.

  He was assisted in his scrutiny by the press. Despite his reputation for shyness and aloofness, and his distaste for the telephone, Chamberlain was a ruthless pioneer of the dark arts that we now take for granted. He held weekly meetings with leading journalists; he maintained intermittent contacts of a friendly kind with Beaverbrook; he had close relations with Camrose, Iliffe and others, not least in the provincial press. Inside the House of Commons, he counted on a small team to manipulate lobby correspondents and MPs with aggressive briefings. Chief among his henchmen were the ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘cadaverous-looking’ Horace Wilson, and the government Chief Whip, Captain David Margesson, who ruled the Whips’ Office, in the phrase of one Conservative backbencher, ‘like a teak-faced Red Indian and secured a very wide measure of subordination’.127, 128

  The press was not the Prime Minister’s sole lens. In maintaining a tighter surveillance of the Conservative Party and the Commons than is commonly realized, Chamberlain used methods that today seem modern. He told his sisters: ‘Our Secret Service doesn’t spend all its time looking out of the window.’129 In 1932, Chamberlain had been staying in Ottawa when he discovered that his conversation was being tapped by the Canadians. On becoming Prime Minister, Chamberlain adopted their practice of eavesdropping on political opponents; as Robert Vansittart noted, ‘he had a devious mind in this field’.130

  Two examples suffice from this period. On 7 March 1940, Gladwyn Jebb reported that the Claridge’s apartment of the American Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, who was on a visit to London, ‘had been fixed up with microphones’.131 Intelligence officer Guy Liddell in his diary for 9 March 1940 gave further proof of MI5’s monitoring habits. ‘The telephone check on Rickatson-Hatt, editor in chief of Reuters, shows that he is hard up, has many women friends, and that he talks indiscreetly on the telephone.’132

  Chamberlain depended for much of his snooping on a shadowy intermediary who was said to have taught him fly fishing: Sir Joseph Ball, head of the Conservative Research Department, and one of a handful of people outside the Clique with whom Chamberlain spent time – they were fishing together when Hitler invaded Prague.

  Born in Luton, a trained lawyer and a talented footballer, Ball had worked in MI5 during the First World War, and developed a substantial working knowledge of ‘the seamy side of life and the handling of crooks’ – according to the Conservative Party Chairman J. C. C. Davidson, who recruited Ball as director of publicity, and with whom he was soon running ‘a little intelligence service of our own, quite separate from the Party organisation’.133 An excellent judge of domestic politics, Ball inserted former Intelligence colleagues into the Labour Party headquarters, but also engaged them to spy on members of his own
party, like rebel Conservative MP Ronald Tree who all through the Norway Campaign hosted meetings with fellow dissidents at his house in Queen Anne’s Gate. Tree was incensed when Ball ‘had the gall to tell me that he himself had been responsible for having my phone tapped’.134 Tree anyway had grounds for suspicion. On 2 May, following Chamberlain’s statement on the evacuation from Norway, Tree wrote to Lord Cranborne that he was off to his country house, Ditchley Park. ‘Ring me there if you want to talk … but I am advised that one should be careful about telephone talks.’135

  In 1936, Ball increased his capacity to subvert and smear when he bought the weekly magazine Truth and deployed it to demolish the reputation of anyone who impeded Chamberlain’s path, such as Leslie Hore-Belisha, the pushy Minister of War who had got into a state of open friction with the commanders in the field. Samuel Hoare, the tight-lipped Air Minister known as ‘Slippery Sam’, was another victim – as Baba Metcalfe recorded in her diary. ‘Hoare’s star is definitely on the descendant, I think.136 The Truth articles seem to have done the trick.’ Ball’s besmirching hand was probably behind the story of how Hoare, a passionate ice skater, would invite colleagues in the Cabinet to watch him skating in black tights.

  Yet another target was Churchill. On 23 July 1939, Chamberlain noted gleefully that ‘Winston himself is very depressed and … distressed by a couple of witty articles making fun of the suggestion that he would help matters in the Cabinet which appeared in Truth.’137

  Joseph Ball burnt all his papers, and a convincing account of the exact nature of his relationship with MI5 or MI6 is still to be written, but few public figures exchanged confidences beyond the range of his telephone tap – and these did not include former kings. One of Baba Metcalfe’s suitors at this time, Walter Monckton, was the Duke of Windsor’s solicitor. Writing to the Duke in Paris in November 1939, about his wish to fly over to London by plane and have an interview with his younger brother, George VI, Monckton warned: ‘It is very difficult to discuss this matter on the telephone where we are overheard.’138 In his reply, the Duke enclosed a note typed out in red: ‘To WHOMSOEVER steams this letter open! I hope you are as edified at the contents of this letter as I am over having to write them!!’ Monckton clarified his own position on surveillance in a secret memorandum that he wrote when he became Director General of the Ministry of Information in May 1940.139 ‘What we really want is an English variation of Herr Himmler.140 MI5, MI6 and possibly also the Special Branch of Scotland Yard should be brought together and a responsible head given proper executive powers … They should be allowed to develop on a large scale the two obvious methods of finding out what a person is doing, namely to read his correspondence and to listen to what he says on the telephone in such a way that he does not know that it is being done.’

  The Prime Minister had known what Churchill was doing since the time of the Munich Debate. On 9 October 1938, Chamberlain complained of Churchill ‘carrying on a regular conspiracy against me with the aid of Masaryk the Czech Minister.141 They of course are totally unaware of my knowledge of their proceedings. I had continual information of their doings and sayings.’ But Churchill may have suspected as much when he speculated in the House the following April ‘whether there is not some hand which intervenes and filters down or withholds intelligence from Ministers’.142

  Another filterer was Colville’s predecessor as Chamberlain’s Junior Private Secretary: Jasper Rootham, a civil-servant-cum-Intelligence-agent who had worked in Downing Street as a French and German interpreter. Rootham admitted to Andrew Roberts that Chamberlain regularly taped Churchill’s private conversations after Munich, ‘and that his job was to take transcripts of the tapes to the Prime Minister’.143 There is no reason to suppose that this practice stopped when Churchill joined the Cabinet in September.144 Or that Churchill would have been exempt from the type of surveillance to which MI5 had recently subjected one of Churchill’s oldest friends: the leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Archie Sinclair.

  Tall, handsome, charming, with Churchill’s slight stammer, Sinclair was one more protégé, like Giles Romilly and Peter Fleming, whom Churchill had treated almost as a son. Before the First World War, Sinclair was considered a suitable husband for Romilly’s mother, Nellie. During it, he had served as Churchill’s adjutant; they had arrived together on black chargers at the regiment’s HQ in Moolemacher, hours before a German shell passed through their shared bedroom. Churchill wrote to him: ‘You have been a great comfort to me and I shall always be on the qui vive where your interests are concerned.’ After the war, Sinclair worked as Churchill’s personal secretary at the Colonial Office, enjoying the same close contact with him as Chamberlain had with Dunglass and Colville, and causing Churchill to say of Sinclair: ‘Archie knows or guesses what I feel.’145 In 1935, Sinclair became leader of the Liberals, a party of seventeen MPs on the edge of extinction, as he himself sometimes could appear. One MP who had known Sinclair at Eton said that he ‘used to play football with his hands in his pockets.146 The fellow was always a complete skug.’ In Colville’s opinion, Sinclair’s feelings were more powerful than his brains, and he was ‘blinded by prejudiced hatred’ of Chamberlain.147

  Sinclair had made a critical speech in Edinburgh on 30 April, cautioning Chamberlain not to ‘scuttle away’ from Norway.148 A livid Chamberlain summoned Sinclair the following afternoon, suspecting him of disclosing secret information gained in his capacity as a Privy Counsellor. He then revealed that Sinclair’s telephone at his home in Caithness was tapped, and that his conversations with the political journalist Harcourt Johnstone had been recorded. The Liberal Chief Whip Percy Harris accompanied Sinclair to the interview. ‘We had the impression that the P.M. had read the notes.’149

  Chamberlain was extremely suspicious of Sinclair’s ‘close relations’ with Churchill.150 He had taken an even keener interest in their activities since Chips Channon tipped him off that Churchill – ‘this brilliant, puffing old charlatan’ – had been intriguing again, with none other than Sinclair.151 ‘Chagrined by his failure at the Admiralty, he has now thrown off his mask, and is plotting against Neville, whom up to now he has served loyally; he wants to run the show himself.’152 To this end, Churchill ‘has had secret conversations and meetings with Archie Sinclair, A. V. Alexander and Mr Attlee and they are drawing up an alternative government, with the idea of succeeding at the first favourable moment’. That was on 25 April. Six days later, Channon stumbled upon the alleged conspirators a second time. ‘Tonight Churchill sat joking and drinking in the smoking room, surrounded by A. V. Alexander and Archie Sinclair, the new Shadow Cabinet.’153

  The rumour that Churchill was ‘playing politics’ reached the ears of A. J. Sylvester, who passed it on instantly to Lloyd George.154 ‘I am told that Winston met a number of The Old Guard in a private house somewhere at some time last night. Where it was I do not know. It is stated that Winston is double-crossing everybody.’

  Chamberlain reacted strongly to what he perceived as Churchill’s treachery. On 30 April, he complained to the King, who wrote in his diary: ‘Winston still seems to be causing a good deal of trouble … The P.M. is having another talk with W. tonight, laying down what he can & cannot do without the War Cabinet’s sanction.’155 George VI depended on a separate source, his Private Secretary Sir Alexander Hardinge, to advise him of the reason for Churchill’s behaviour. Hardinge had been told by Stanley and Hoare ‘that Winston’s attitude over all of them is part of an intrigue for him to oust Mr Chamberlain …’

  Chamberlain’s mood was unforgiving when he suspected that the opposition parties intended to support a Conservative revolt to install Churchill.156 He had told Churchill after the Munich Debate: ‘You cannot expect me to allow you to do all the hitting and never hit back.’157 Outraged and ‘full of fight still’, Chamberlain despatched Dunglass to sound out the feelings of Conservative MPs in preparation for a possible counter-strike.158 Chamberlain’s faithful bloodhound Chips Channon was ‘pumped’ by Dunglass.159 ‘Di
d I think that Winston, the man who has never been right, should be deflated, was the moment ripe to begin to sell him? Ought he to leave the Admiralty? Evidently these thoughts are in Neville’s head.’

  On 1 May, Chamberlain discussed Churchill’s ‘inflated’ reputation with his Information Minister John Reith, leaving Reith in ‘no doubt’ how he felt about Churchill.160 Still suspecting treachery, Chamberlain’s instinct was to hang the First Lord out to dry – and on his Norwegian petard. Cecil King learned on the same day that ‘there is a movement on foot to foist the blame for the failure in Norway onto Churchill’.161 The Conservative MP Paul Emrys-Evans was attending a dinner of the Watching Committee, a new group of Conservative critics of the government, when the Chief Whip David Margesson appeared unexpectedly. Emrys-Evans wrote: ‘The Government was obviously very unhappy about the Norwegian expedition, and it looked as if they were trying to throw the responsibility on Winston.’162 Harold Nicolson was told the same story, ‘that the whole Norwegian episode is due to Winston’.163 Gossip about Churchill that was ‘exceptionally slanderous, even for the intriguers’ circulated to Labour MP Emanuel Shinwell on the party’s Parliamentary Committee.164 ‘It was said that he drank too much; he was prematurely aged; he was the real culprit of the Norwegian catastrophe, which was a repetition of his ill-starred Gallipoli campaign; he could not be trusted …’

  Yet this smear campaign was no sooner launched than it was abruptly called off. Why? We still do not know all the reasons. But given the Prime Minister’s ‘devious mind’ and his track record in this area, it is reasonable to suppose that further intercepted conversations procured by Ball and Rootham had presented Chamberlain with a different picture of the First Lord’s behaviour, and revealed that Churchill, far from plotting against Chamberlain, was supporting the Prime Minister.