Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The front page of the Daily Mirror had gone to bed as well, with the most emphatic declaration of all. ‘Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, is almost certain to become the new Prime Minister.’

  Whatever his private reservations, to the world beyond Westminster it looked as though the Master of the Middleton Hounds was set to replace Chamberlain, and that Halifax’s immediate task would be to lead the country into battle with a German ‘fern-a-tic’, as Chamberlain viewed Hitler, whom he had once mistaken for a footman.100

  Wednesday 8 May was a significant day not only in Parliament, but in the history of Europe. While Members were debating the Norway Campaign, Hitler set the final date for Operation ‘Gelb’. The invasion of Western Europe was to begin at 5.35 a.m. on Friday 10 May under the code word ‘Danzig’.

  The absolute silence on the German border with Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg was a cause for nervous concern. Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with each of these countries. Rumours throughout the week about a German attack on the Western Front rose to the boil at a small party which convened at Max Beaverbrook’s house immediately after the division.

  Bumping into a ‘dog-tired’ Clement Davies in the street, on his way to the Reform Club to get some sleep, Beaverbrook had persuaded the leading light of the revolt to walk on with him to Stornoway House, just off Pall Mall. There, around midnight, they found Joseph Kennedy: the American Ambassador had come to get Beaverbrook’s ‘slant on the situation’.101 Both Beaverbrook and Davies had concluded that Chamberlain would have to resign, which Beaverbrook ‘accordingly telephoned to the Express’. Kennedy then telephoned President Roosevelt from Beaverbrook’s study, but Kennedy’s report on the turbulence in Westminster was cast into shadow by Roosevelt’s news, obtained from a leak in the German General Staff. ‘The President told me he was very much upset as he had just heard that Germany had delivered an ultimatum to Holland.’102

  It was 2 a.m. when Kennedy telephoned Colville at No. 10. He next called Churchill, who responded: ‘A terrible world this is getting to be.’103 Kennedy then rang Hoare, who was equally despondent. ‘There really doesn’t seem to be much hope anywhere, does there?’

  Kennedy concurred. ‘There is a very definite undercurrent of despair because of the hopelessness of the whole task for England.’

  Clement Davies meanwhile had hurried off to report the news of Germany’s ultimatum to the Dutch Ambassador, a contact of Davies’s through his work for Unilever, who, barely awake and still in pyjamas, was so shocked that he collapsed in his arms.

  19

  THE OBVIOUS MAN

  ‘Do you happen to know any gentleman of your acquaintance, Mr. Taper, who refuses Secretaryships of State so easily?’

  BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Coningsby

  In his sixth-floor suite at the Dorchester, Halifax read the headlines on 9 May and experienced what he described to Baba Metcalfe on another occasion as a bad ‘pit of the stomach feeling’.1 With the exception of the Daily Mail, which had come out for Lloyd George, the morning papers regarded a Halifax premiership as the likeliest outcome following the startling vote in Parliament.

  Outside, it was another beautiful spring day, the tulips almost at their best as Halifax walked through the Buckingham Palace gardens to the Foreign Office. Awaiting him on his desk was Rab Butler’s letter saying that Labour were willing to serve under Halifax – ‘Dalton said there was no other choice than you’ – plus the news that Butler had spoken after the division to Herbert Morrison, ‘who said that the idea of Labour joining the Govt. was “coming along well”’.2, 3

  When at 10 a.m. Chamberlain asked the Foreign Secretary to come and see him, Halifax could have had no doubt what he wished to discuss.

  Their talk lasted forty-five minutes. The Prime Minister’s agenda was simple: to harness his skills as a chairman in order to make Halifax reconsider his unenthusiastic stance of the day before. Chamberlain later explained to Joseph Kennedy that he and Halifax ‘never had a disagreement.4 Except little things as between men.’ His objective this morning, and again in the afternoon, was to persuade Halifax to agree to the largest thing in politics. Chamberlain was by now well acquainted with the habit that had marked Halifax’s political life, of raising an obstacle in the expectation that it would be knocked down. He had interpreted Halifax’s earlier reluctance as par for the course.

  The only first-hand account of their 10.15 a.m. meeting in Chamberlain’s office is provided by Halifax. Chamberlain began by saying that the position could not be left as it was by the division, and it was vital to restore confidence in the government. This could not be done, he thought, unless all parties were brought in. He asked Halifax for his view.

  Halifax wrote: ‘I told him I thought this was essential.5 He told me that Winston had been doubtful about it when he had spoken to him immediately after the Division last night.’ But Churchill’s antipathy to Labour was well known, and reciprocated in full.

  The two men next discussed the chances of Labour serving under Chamberlain. Both agreed that these were negligible. Halifax braced himself for the inevitable question: who should be Chamberlain’s successor? ‘He thought that it was clearly Winston, or myself, and appeared to suggest that if it were myself he might continue to serve in the Government.’

  For the second time in the space of a few hours, Halifax rehearsed his reservations to Chamberlain. He told Baba, with whom he had lunch shortly afterwards – and who may have been one of them herself – how he had put forward ‘the many difficulties of his position’.6

  It is a rare politician who turns down the chance to be Prime Minister. When Rab Butler asked Halifax later in the week why he had argued against accepting the leadership, Halifax snapped: ‘You know my reasons, it’s no use discussing that.’7 His main reason was commonly understood to be his peerage, which, Halifax had persistently argued, and not just to Baba, put him out of the running by placing him, as he now explained to Chamberlain, in ‘the difficult position of a Prime Minister unable to make contact with the centre of gravity in the House of Commons’.8 This, too, was the reason that Halifax gave six hours later to Churchill, who reported it to Anthony Eden at dinner. Eden immediately afterwards wrote in his diary: ‘Edward did not wish to succeed.9 Parliamentary position too difficult.’

  But how difficult was Halifax’s position?

  Seventeen years earlier, in May 1923, George V had rejected the then-favourite, Baba’s father, as his Prime Minister, because, according to Baba’s sister Irene, ‘the Labour Opposition were unrepresented in the House of Lords, and that therefore objections to him as a Peer were insuperable’.10 Actually, the principal reason was not Lord Curzon’s peerage so much as his temperamental unsuitability. Had Churchill himself been sitting in the Lords in May 1940, it is unlikely that he would have found ‘the H of L problem’ such an obstacle, as he had made clear in an essay on Curzon published in 1937.11 ‘The principle that a Prime Minister in the Lords is an anachronism,’ Churchill wrote then, ‘is a question which only Parliament can settle in the presence of the personalities and circumstances of the occasion.’12 Lord Vansittart’s observation that Curzon’s peerage was a convenient rather than an insuperable obstacle was more apposite of Halifax. As Harold Macmillan put it in a note: ‘No one objected to a Peer as Prime Minister on principle.’13

  The fact that Halifax sat in the House of Lords was indeed a genuine stumbling-block, because legislation would have been required to enable him to sit in the House of Commons, and he would then have had to find a seat and fight a by-election, all of which entailed a delay of at least a month. But these were extraordinary circumstances, and the urgency of the occasion permitted normal procedure to be suspended. At a moment when the national emergency demanded new leadership, Halifax’s peerage was an irrelevance to almost everyone but himself.

  Chamberlain replied to Halifax that he saw no problem about him sitting in the Lords, ‘arguing that ex-hypothesi in the new situation there would be comparatively littl
e opposition in the House of Commons’.14 Earlier in the year, ‘very secret soundings’ had taken place behind John Simon’s back to enable a bill that would allow a peer to be made a commoner – ‘dis-peered’ as Chamberlain put it – so that Lord Stamp could succeed Simon as Chancellor.15, 16 In the same explorative vein, as Chamberlain’s leadership came under pressure in March, George VI’s Private Secretary Alexander Hardinge had consulted four constitutional experts on the monarch’s right to summon a person to form an administration. Hardinge’s conclusion: the King need not ask the advice of the outgoing Prime Minister as to his successor, nor should the latter give such advice unless it was asked for. ‘The only person who could make the formal offer of the post of Prime Minister to any individual is the King himself.’17 Halifax’s peerage was never going to be a stumbling block for George VI – any more than it was for his daughter in 1963 when she invited Alec Dunglass (by then the Earl of Home) to become her Prime Minister. A day after Halifax’s meeting with Chamberlain, the King offered to put Halifax’s peerage into ‘abeyance’, because, he wrote in his diary, ‘I thought that H was the obvious man.’18

  With Labour’s endorsement confirmed, Halifax’s peerage was even less of a barrier in the quarters where the harshest protests might have been most anticipated. Butler in his letter to Halifax delivered earlier that morning had emphasised that Attlee and Dalton ‘saw no objection in the Lords difficulty’.19 Not only that, but Dalton had given an assurance which seemed to welcome Halifax’s peerage: ‘In time of war I was not concerned with the fact that he was in the Lords.20 Indeed, this had some advantages in relieving the strain upon him.’ Significantly, on its front page that day the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror had no difficulty in promoting a Halifax premiership either. ‘The constitutional problem of permitting a peer to sit in both Houses is likely to be overcome by means of a special emergency session of both Houses.’

  Whatever the nature of Halifax’s misgivings, the fact that he was a peer was, out of all his excuses, the least convincing.

  So why at the height was Halifax ready to decline?

  It is most unusual for a potential Minister to pass up a promotion. Chamberlain turned down the Treasury in 1924 in order to pursue his cousin Norman’s social policies, which alone allowed Churchill to survive and come in as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1916, Bonar Law refused the premiership on Asquith’s resignation, believing that Lloyd George would be the more effective war leader. In 1855, Lord Derby declined Queen Victoria’s offer to form a government, hoping to return in a stronger position. Such examples are few.

  To be fair to Halifax, his avowed reluctance to take power had a history. Meeting him in St James’s Park in March 1938 after Halifax had been appointed Foreign Secretary, a friend asked: ‘Edward, may I congratulate you?’

  ‘No,’ Halifax replied, ‘you certainly may not!’21

  ‘May I condole with you?’

  ‘Yes, you may.’

  Another friend wrote to John Buchan in May 1939 after taking a long walk with Halifax. ‘How wise and calm he is.22 He tells me that he absolutely refuses to contemplate the idea of being P.M. He is the only person at the moment who would be acceptable to the country at all.’

  Halifax’s refusals were less adamantine in practice, though. When Stuart Hodgson began researching his biography during these months, he noted how one of the curiosities of Halifax’s career was the way in which all the great offices which he had filled one after the other seemed to have been thrust upon him against his will. Halifax’s most recent biographer has well observed how Halifax used his opening refusal to reinforce the public image of an inherently modest man who was uninterested in high office, ‘but dragged there by friends for his country’s good’.23 Scrupulous never to rule out anything altogether, Halifax noted of himself that he was ‘not one to burn the house down, because he would continue to hope that he might later get it back again’.24

  Halifax hid his ambitious side as he hid his deformed left hand. When an MP, he had appeared to be quite lacking in ‘push’, and had no regrets at leaving the House of Commons – ‘for me it never held any great appeal’.25 The type of politician Halifax professed to admire was Lord Derby, with whom he had served in Bonar Law’s government in 1922, and who ‘took the opportunity of a change of Government to get back to his natural work in Lancashire which he always felt to have first claim on him’.26 A contemporary noted in 1936 that it was widely known that Halifax was only too anxious to retire from public life ‘as he invariably tells everyone that his one object is to give up politics and go back and live at his home’.27 This was not flim-flam. Halifax admired self-abnegation. His first book was on John Keble (1792–1866), the most distinguished man of his time in Oxford, who had abandoned his university career to bury himself in a small curacy in Gloucestershire. In January 1942, Halifax envisaged to Baba Metcalfe being sacked by Churchill. ‘What then? Casual political employment, interspersed with Little Compton and Garrowby.’28 Such a combination, ‘with us all together’, was ‘a dream which keeps me alive & sane. When will this be?’

  Halifax’s aversion to political power was rooted in his genuine preference for the country life of Garrowby over the turmoil of Westminster. He was also, as Stuart Hodgson’s 1941 biography diplomatically put it, ‘no friend to unnecessary activity’.29 His immediate reaction on being offered the position of Foreign Secretary in 1938 had been to prevaricate, according to the diplomat Oliver Harvey. ‘He said he was very lazy and disliked work.30 Could he hunt on Saturdays?’ His daughter-in-law Diana Holderness confirms: ‘He was lazy.31 He never went to bed after 10.30 p.m. At the Embassy in Washington, he’d have dinner early, 8 p.m. at the very latest. He’d get up: “I’ve got to see some papers,” or: “I’m going to my tower.” Sometimes he stupidly would leave the door open. And you’d see him lying in bed, reading. He didn’t want the nuisance.’ Being Prime Minister would have entailed a lot of work. He had told Baba only a few weeks earlier that he was too tired to start that racket again.

  It is important when trying to deduce his motives to recall that Halifax had already enjoyed power – he had ruled a fifth of the world’s population, even if he had been answerable to a Secretary of State. Diana Holderness says: ‘If you’ve been Viceroy, it’s really grander than being P.M. You were curtseyed to.’ Grand enough anyway in his own eyes, he did not need to be grander by becoming Prime Minister. Less than twelve months later, he revealed to Charles Peake what might have been his truer aspiration. ‘E. said that it was his real ambition in life to become a Duke.’32

  Yet the general assumption that only a sense of duty had driven Halifax into politics, and that he would rather have lived the life of a country squire, was not believed in every quarter. His critics suspected that Halifax’s holiness, like Gandhi’s, was a convenient foil for his politics. The prominent editor of the Daily Herald, Francis Williams, categorically disputed Halifax’s much vaunted deficiency of ambition. ‘No man climbs to the top in politics without a liking for power.33 Such liking was concealed in Halifax’s case – possibly even from himself – by an aloofness that appeared incapable of passion … It was as though his emotions, like his left arm, had become atrophied.’ There was no man more dangerous in politics, Williams went on, ‘than the man who is thought to be above them. Halifax came to be such a man.’ Chips Channon agreed: ‘A more ambitious man never lived.’34

  Moreover, as his letters to Baba bear out, Halifax was capable of passion.

  To some observers, Chamberlain possibly among them, Halifax appeared less like Lord Derby and more like Lord Rosebery, who in March 1894 exchanged the Foreign Office for the ‘dunghill’ of the premiership after displaying Halifax’s coquettish habit of declining positions that he had been offered, only then to take them.35 In this scenario, all that it required for Halifax to say yes to Chamberlain was to have someone he trusted to tell him that it was his plain duty to set aside his personal and private reasons, as his father had done in 1925 when advising
him to accept the Viceroyalty (‘I think you really have to go’); or else to be courted one further time, as Chamberlain did in 1938.36 The person who accepted the Foreign Secretaryship ‘with the greatest reluctance’ was the same man who revealed to Baba Metcalfe that he couldn’t help himself, and it was ‘the biggest thing to have a shot’; until that day arrived when Halifax was made a Duke, there was no bigger shot than the premiership.37

  Tellingly, Halifax said to Butler immediately after his conversation with Chamberlain on 9 May that ‘he felt he could do the job’.38 Cadogan went further, admitting later to Lord Killearn that Halifax ‘really wanted the job’.39 This was Eden’s opinion too.

  A more convincing explanation for Halifax’s resistance is suggested in a letter written five days later to Stanley Baldwin by J. C. C. Davidson, former chairman of the Conservative Party. Davidson recalled that Bonar Law had refused to become Prime Minister when Lloyd George formed his first coalition in 1916, ‘and I understand that Halifax refused for very much the same reason vis-à-vis Winston.40 Each would have been overshadowed by the Man of Destiny.’ This certainly was Baffy Dugdale’s immediate concern on hearing rumours of a Halifax administration with Churchill as War Minister. ‘I think he will be more the captive than the master.’41

  Nine months before, Chamberlain had explained to General Ironside his reluctance to include Churchill in government. Ironside wrote of their conversation: ‘He thinks that Winston might be so strong in a Cabinet that he would be prevented from acting.’42 The Norway Campaign had borne out many of Chamberlain’s fears. Only Halifax had the experience and character to challenge Churchill. As Halifax told Rab Butler minutes after his interview with Chamberlain: ‘Churchill needed a restraining influence.’43