Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

“Edward?”

  “I'm sorry, Neville, but how could I have spoken up? They know 'm your most loyal colleague. They would have discounted anything I said, seen it as self-serving, wanton.” Chamberlain regarded his Foreign Secretary, uncertain of what he saw. A friend? A loyal lieutenant? But how far did such things stretch, what were the limits of his loyalty? They would soon discover.

  But Halifax had already read his mind. “I don't want it, Neville, not in these circumstances. I don't want to step into your shoes.”

  They were sipping tea and eating a sandwich lunch in the garden. It was the most glorious of spring days, the bulbs and buds bursting forth in a competition of many colors. How ironic, Chamberlain thought, that the English sun came out only to illuminate disasters.

  “Why not? Why don't you want it?” he demanded peremptorily.

  “I'm not sure. Doesn't feel right. Don't think I deserve it.”

  “Deserve? It's not a prize, Edward! Not some little trinket to be handed out on sports day, for God's sake. It's a damned duty. Your damned duty!”

  “That's what the King said.”

  “It's going to come to you, whether you like it or not.”

  “Not Winston?”

  “How can I recommend Winston?” He banged his cup and saucer down on the table. “Even if I were forced to make way for him, how long do you think he would last? How long before he tested his liver or the patience of his colleagues to the very limits of destruction? Within a few months at most we'd be back at the starting point, looking for a new Prime Minister. Which sooner or later must be you, Edward.”

  “Then let it be later.”

  “Now! Today! I'm afraid the gods of war insist.”

  “Even so, let it be later,” he repeated. “Let Winston make war. Let him exhaust himself. If I am to take over, how much better it would be if Winston had already failed and had stopped tilting at every windmill.”

  “And how much damage would he have done in the meantime while he turns the whole of Europe into some rerun of the horrors of Gallipoli? No, there has to be a better way—is a better way, Edward. You. As Prime Minister. Winston can still make war, serving under you, while you plan the peace—a peace that must come, whether this war is won or lost.” Halifax offered no response, busying himself with his cup. Chamberlain forged ahead.

  “Ambition is a foul condition in an Englishman, Edward, and Winston has suffered from it ever since he could crawl. Never been a party man, it's not in his nature. A would-be tyrant who totters from one crisis to the next. My God, at times I fear him almost as much as I do Hitler.”

  Still Halifax remained silent.

  “Ambition. And avarice, too. He has his hands in so many pies, and somehow they always seem to emerge soiled and clutching money. Listen to me, Edward, I can't tell you the details—don't know them all myself, not yet—but Winston can't be trusted. With power or with money. You know that.”

  And Halifax's silence screamed consent.

  Chamberlain's mouth had run dry with passion and he very much wanted his tea, but he feared his hand would tremble too much and betray him.

  “I have already made an appointment to visit the Palace, Edward.”

  Halifax looked up sharply. “So soon? Are there no decencies?”

  “Six o'clock. In less than five hours I shall hand in my seals of office. It's not what I want, but it seems I have no choice. When a rabbit like Kingsley Wood turns weasel, you know the world has begun turning too fast. I have only one duty left, and that is to offer the King my advice about who should be my successor. It must be you. In Downing Street by tonight.”

  “But I keep asking myself, am I up to it?”

  Chamberlain stretched forward, taut as elastic. “There are only two men who don't want you as Prime Minister. One is Winston Churchill, the other Adolf Hitler. It's in your hands, Edward. Will you leave the fate of our country to them?”

  Slowly, as though weighed down by blocks of stone, Halifax began shaking his head, but so stiffly it wasn't clear whether he was indicating rejection or consent.

  “Edward, I shall be there for you,” Chamberlain urged. “We've guided this country of ours together, you and I. A team. Always a team. Prime Minister and closest of colleagues. You in the Lords, me in the Commons. Never on our own. We can still make it so.”

  Halifax let forth the most miserable of sighs, which ended in what was little more than a mumble.

  “Very well.”

  Two words. But they were enough for Chamberlain. He knew that in a few hours' time a van would draw up at the rear of Downing Street and begin loading all of his personal effects. It would be cruel enough, creeping out of the back door, without the thought that Winston was at the front door kicking it down. A Churchill taking over from a Chamberlain. It could not be. This wasn't simply personal, it was family, generations of it, a matter of honor.

  But there was more. What if Halifax succeeded him? Respectable, competent Edward. Yet vulnerable. His empire was the House of Lords, isolated from the center of events. He would have Chamberlain as an elder statesman, of course, yet Halifax would also get Winston, who would fight him to a standstill just as he had fought every one of the Prime Ministers he had served, not so much because he chose to but simply because he knew no other way, driven by that most foul of conditions—ambition. And when the two of them, Halifax and Churchill, lay exhausted and unable to continue, who would there be with the experience and background to restore the country's shattered purpose in its hour of need? Why, none other than Neville Chamberlain.

  He shook Halifax's hand. This game wasn't over yet.

  Attlee rapped his pen on the table to call the meeting to order. He was a small, dapper man from an elitist background who was, without argument, even from his mother, the least charismatic leader in the history of the party, yet he was a master at steering his comrades through the procedural chicanes of Standing Orders and getting things done. They had much to do. They heard Attlee's insistent rapping, and gradually fell to silence.

  The members of the National Executive Committee had gathered in the smoke-filled basement of the Tollard Royal Hotel in Bournemouth in order to resolve two outstanding questions. Would they serve in a coalition under Chamberlain? If not, would they serve under anyone else?

  They dealt with the first question in the most summary of fashions, using language which would more naturally have been heard in the washroom of a Welsh coalpit after the pipes had frozen. Neville Chamberlain was a man who had treated them with disdain and who had taken meticulous pleasure in taunting them across the Dispatch Box. What was more, he was also a manufacturer, practically a Victorian mill-owner, an arch-Tory who had sat back while the forces of Fascism plundered Spain and who now had contrived to bring war and suffering to their own front door. And the bastard wanted their help.

  There were some on the NEC who took an intellectual approach to their Socialism. Some others had it bred into them, while more than a few had had it beaten into them by the troops and mercenaries who had broken up the General Strike. Yet from whatever point they traveled, they all arrived at the same conclusion.

  Sod him.

  Yet it wasn't as easy as that. There was also other business to conduct. There was a war going on, a hideous, headline-grabbing war which was about to flatten Belgium and make their conference ridiculous. The agenda was a fantasy of aspiration and idealism that called for, amongst many other things, an immediate negotiated peace with the Germans, yet Hitler's panzers had turned everything on its head. What yesterday had seemed inspirational and idealistic now seemed simply asinine. So the motions set down for debate had to be buried along with the Prime Minister but, according to the rule book, each burial ceremony required a separate vote.

  It was almost two o'clock before they'd finished the interment proceedings, and still they hadn't dealt with Chamberlain's second question. It was getting stuffy; Attlee called a short break.

  The comrades repaired to the bar upstairs where they discove
red Driberg. The man from the Express was not in the best of conditions. The fresh outpourings of violence just across the Channel had terrified him, and he was not a brave man, not when he had no newspaper to hide behind. So he had responded as he had always done, by spending the night trying to obliterate himself. He had returned to his hotel well after breakfast time to be greeted by a telephone call from Burgess. Driberg's head was thick, his throat raw from the night air, his chilled back killing him, and he couldn't for the life of him understand why Burgess was so agitated about a meeting of the bloody National Executive.

  “I don't get it, Guy. Why's what the bloody Labour Party says suddenly so important?”

  “Because there's a war on at last, a proper one, and now the Government needs the Labour Party inside the tent. So they're allowed to set the terms for crawling inside the tent.”

  “Sure. Chamberlain or not Chamberlain. They'll tell Chamberlain to go jump without his parachute, and we'll get some other bloody Tory.”

  “Not some other bloody Tory, you fool. It'll be either Halifax or Churchill. Can you imagine Halifax? That armless idiot? How long would it be before he throws in the towel? Does a deal? Invites the Wehrmacht to stroll up the Strand and stick a bayonet halfway up your arse?”

  Driberg shook his head in confusion. “But Attlee can't tell the Tory Party who their leader's going to be…”

  “Tom, if they can refuse to serve under Chamberlain they can refuse to serve under Halifax, too. Which'll leave the Tories with only one practical option. Winston. All the knives are out for Churchill right now, and the Labour Party might be the only friends he's got.”

  “Strange bloody bedfellows.”

  “It might be his only chance—our only chance. Everything might depend on this, even our lives. You've got to get them to decide, Tom. For Churchill.”

  So the befuddled Driberg set about his task in the bar of the Royal Tollard. Pinching elbows, whispering in ears, smiling and cajoling. They knew Driberg well, liked him, for behind the hard-faced veneer of a Beaverbrook apparatchik he was one of them. He had helped many of them, suppressing embarrassments, warning them of impending exposures, joining with relish in their cabals. They knew he was up to something—Driberg was always up to something—but they listened. And when, twenty minutes later, after they were called back to their posts in the basement and Driberg had fallen beneath the largest whiskey he had ever held, they remembered his words as they began to argue the merits of the case. About how they had a veto. About how that veto amounted to a decision. About how they could decide who was going to be the next Prime Minister.

  They chose Halifax.

  Burgess had been struggling all day to contain his growing sense of dread, but when he received the telephone call from Mac the last traces of resistance crumbled. Mac—calm, perceptive, ubiquitous Mac—had called to say he'd just been summoned to the Foreign Office. His Lordship wanted a trim. Straight away.

  “And?” Burgess demanded.

  “And what? What more did you want, Mr. Burgess? His Nibs wants a haircut in a hurry. What does that sound like to you? He's going to a wedding or a funeral? In my experience, men get buried in an old suit and nobody bothers much about the length of their hair.”

  “You sure? You sure about this, Mac?”

  “All I'm sure about, Mr. Burgess, is that if I don't get over there right now I lose my job. It's been nice talking to you.” Then the phone went dead.

  That's when Burgess began to lose the battle to prevent fear overwhelming him. It made him feel sick—then he was physically sick, and violently so. He seemed to have run out of options. He was going to be forced to make the most terrifying gamble of his life—to gamble with his life—on the basis of a bloody haircut. It seemed all too ludicrous, yet events were careening out of control like a runaway truck and he had no choice but to place himself in its path, to throw his body beneath its wheels in the desperate hope that he might divert it just sufficiently from its course. If only he could save Churchill…

  Now he knew why he hadn't gone to Spain. The thought of pain, of death, petrified him. He could feel tears falling from his cheeks. Coward's tears. Yet the thought of failure terrified him even more. He didn't even have time for a drink. “Oh, Mother, save me.”

  At almost the same moment, a blue file fell across Horace Wilson's desk. It was emblazoned “Top Secret” and “Immediate” and marked “Prime Minister Only.” In the peculiarly opaque language of the civil service, that meant Horace Wilson too. The file itself was slim, containing only a single sheet of paper, and was from Ball. It was the result of his investigation into the discrepancies between those persons signed into the Admiralty visitors' log and those names recorded in the First Lord's official diary.

  There were more names than Wilson had expected—almost two dozen. Most of them were entirely predictable—some of Clemmie's relatives and one or two of Churchill's own; several close personal friends of long standing; his son Randolph and his new wife; his tailor, an Italian who had called on three separate occasions (perhaps something there?); and Churchill's doctor. There was also a single entry for Guy Burgess.

  Ball wrote that it was unclear why Burgess had made a personal call on Churchill rather than going though official channels, and even less clear as to what might have been the purpose of the visit. Burgess was a journalist, a seeker after scraps and indiscretions. Although he was not known personally to Ball, he was a young man who appeared to be exceedingly well connected and to be developing something of a reputation for notoriety in his social life. A subject worth kicking about a bit. Along with the tailor.

  Which is what Ball had ordered from the security services. Most urgently.

  It was shortly after three when Attlee hurried away from the gathering of the NEC. The issues had been resolved, the decisions made, and the momentous consequences of those decisions would be played out in Westminster, not Bournemouth. He was anxious to get back. The Labour Party was an open book, congenitally incapable of retaining secrets for long, and they had already issued a press release declaring their willingness to join in a coalition Government, but an innate caution and sense of personal decency within Attlee insisted that they make no public announcement about the matter of the prime ministership until those involved had been informed. They should be the first to know; it was only decent. Told formally, confidentially, and in writing. Everything by the rules.

  So on his way to the railway station, Attlee instructed the taxi driver to stop at a post office. From there he sent a telegram to Downing Street. On the buff-colored form, he constructed a message in language that was intended to be understood only by its recipient.

  “TO + THE + FIRST + QUESTION + NO + STOP + TO + THE + SECOND + YES + UNDER + H + STOP + RETURNING + LONDON + IMMEDIATELY + ARRIVING + FIVE + FIFTEEN + STOP + ATTLEE”

  Economical, as was Attlee's habit. Less than two dozen words. He didn't refer to Churchill—it would have cost an extra penny a word, and some on the NEC didn't think Churchill was worth that. Attlee, on the other hand, was genuinely undecided. He sensed a trap. He knew the Tories, knew they couldn't be trusted, not until they were buried. He thought it better to leave the door ajar. Just in case. He handed across one shilling and seven pence, asked for a receipt, then hurried back to the taxi. He was anxious not to miss his train.

  Sue was startled. It wasn't every day that a famous man walked into her post office and asked to send a telegram to the Prime Minister. If she hadn't recognized the Labour leader's dark features and neatly trimmed moustache she might have thought it was a practical joke.

  When he had gone, doffing his cap and bidding her good-day, she settled down in a tiny, airless room to the rear of the shop which she reserved for valuable items. It was here she kept the safe with its store of stamps, postal orders, savings books, and the petty cash, and alongside it was a bookshelf stacked with the many manuals and circulars of post office procedure. It was also here that the Creed teleprinter had been installed. The teleprinte
r was a machine that translated its messages into perforations on a paper tape. The tape then passed through an automatic transmitter which directed the message to its intended destination, where it would be printed out, on more paper tape and pasted onto a telegram form. As Sue shuffled her chair closer to make herself comfortable in front of the keyboard, the teleprinter began to tremble into life. A telegram was coming through. As the tape and its message slowly stuttered forth, she realized with some surprise it was addressed to her. She bent over, passing the paper tape through her fingers and reading as the machine continued to chatter and produce its message word by word.

  “REGRET + TO + INFORM + YOU + THAT + SGT + J + WHITE + KOYLI + IS + REPORTED + BY + HIS + UNIT + AS + MISSING + BELIEVED + KILLED + IN + ACTION…”

  Her eyes stared unblinking, held immobile by the lengthening ribbon of paper, and what more it said she could no longer see. A paralysis began to move throughout her body, from her eyes to her neck, arms, fingers, legs, every muscle. She sat hunched over the machine, uncomprehending, unmoving.

  Some time later she was found. Two concerned customers discovered Sue Graham still bent over her machine. They could get no sense out of her, and with some difficulty moved her to her father's old smoking chair in the back parlor. They closed the door to the security room and locked the front door of the post office, then sat by her side sipping tea while they waited for the doctor to arrive.

  There are times when even a man of prodigious appetites, who has spent a lifetime swimming without a care on a tide of alcohol, relaxes his restraint and gets drunk. It has little to do with quantity, much more to do with deciding to let go and simply sink. Churchill had decided to let go. He no longer cared, content to drown amongst memories and a multitude of regrets. His companion at lunch was Bracken—loyal, dogged Bracken, who could be relied upon later to return his master to wherever was appropriate, no matter what his condition.

  They hadn't even made it through the first bottle of claret yet already the old man had run the gamut of his dark emotions. What was at first merely maudlin soon became misery, regret turned to recrimination, anger to outrage, until none of it made too much sense. He grew tearful, sobbing that he had failed. “I am a Churchill. I was born to fight this war, Brendan, to lead us through it, but it is lost. Lost! We shall be destroyed, a thousand years of English independence swept away.”