by Walter Reid
Butler was a good observer, always slightly detached, amused by ironies. A tolerantly retained man of Munich himself, he summed up the government’s strength (and weakness), ‘If intrigue or attacks on the government grow to any great extent all we have to do is to pull the string of the toy dog of the 1922 Committee and make it bark. After a few staccato utterances it becomes clear that the government depends upon the Tory squires for its majority’.5 That may have been satisfactory for Butler and the traditionalists, but the very source of Tory support spelled out the threat to Churchill: the backwoodsmen of the shires might have been prepared to rally round the government, but they would not necessarily rally round Churchill.
There was an example of the tensions even among ostensible loyalists on 17 June 1940 when Amery, Boothby, Macmillan and Lord Lloyd met to discuss their dissatisfaction with the way the war was being waged. Chamberlain got wind of what was happening and told Churchill. His response was that ‘If there is any more of this nonsense they will go’ and he told that to Amery. But his position was not as powerful as he was pretending.
There was no more loyalty among his more prominent colleagues. They still tended to regard their chief as Chamberlain, who remained the leader of the Conservative Party. Churchill was well aware of this: he wrote to Chamberlain on the day he succeeded him, ‘To a large extent I am in yr hands’.6 Chamberlain only renounced the hope of resuming the premiership after he developed cancer in October 1940 and until then remained leader of his party. He had discussed standing down in favour of Churchill in May 1940, but the new PM referred to his role as leader of a broad coalition and said that he should not lead any one political party.7 After his illness Chamberlain wrote in his diary on 9 September 1940 that he had to ‘adjust myself to the new life of a partially crippled man which is what I am. Any ideas of another Premiership after the war have gone. I know that is out of the question.’8
In understanding Churchill’s weakness in the Conservative Party and in Parliament it helps to remember that when this question of the succession to the leadership of the Party arose, it was far from certain that the PM would even be a candidate. He was urged to take the position by Lieutenant-Colonel G.S. Harvie-Watt, an MP and government whip, when he met the Prime Minister at the Anti-Aircraft Battalion which he commanded near Redhill at the beginning of October 1940. Harvie-Watt advised him that ‘it would be fatal if he did not lead the Conservative Party, as the bulk of the party was anxious that he should be Leader now we are at war [my emphasis].’ Churchill was however still suspicious about the party and remembered how they had regarded him before the war. Harvie-Watt sought to reassure him that hostile views were now confined to a minority and that ‘the mass of the party was with him. My strongest argument, however, and I felt this very much, was that it was essential for the PM to have his own party – a strong one with allies attracted from the main groups and especially the Opposition parties. But essentially he must have a majority and I was sure this majority could only come from the Conservative Party.’ Harvie-Watt thought his advice had done his own career no good, but he became the PM’s PPS nine months later and remained in that position until the end of the war.
Churchill was not just worried about his weakness in Parliament: he was concerned also about his weakness vis-à-vis Ministers, and he took the opportunity to sound Harvie-Watt out about this. The latter’s advice was that with ‘a strong army of MPs under you, Ministers would be won over or crushed.’9
When the leadership of the party finally fell vacant Churchill realised that he must seize it if he were not to be in the position of Lloyd George in coalition. Clementine took a different view: she argued that he would diminish his position as a national leader by accepting it. Clementine’s advice was, as so often, ignored, but she urged her case vehemently. She hated the Conservatives, and her daughter recalled that that on this issue ‘her latent hostility toward the Tory Party boiled over; there were several good ding-dong arguments between them’.10
Churchill himself was not a natural Tory. Long ago, in 1903, he had written to Lord Hugh Cecil, ‘I hate the Tory Party, their men, their words & their methods’, and thirty-six years later, just eighteen months before he became the party’s leader, he wrote to Clementine of ‘these dirty Tory hacks who would like to drive me out of the Party’.11
Although he became the leader of the Conservative Party at the end of 1940, he remained the prisoner of the rank and file for the following two years. Things only changed when he delivered victories. Then the Party became his prisoner, and so it remained until he resigned in 1955.
In the period before the victories started to flow Churchill had to face a great deal of criticism in the House. He was too much of a Commons man to find it demeaning, but he was very far from the Olympian leader that Roosevelt could be – and very different from the Axis warlords. From time to time he did resent the criticism that he faced when the margin between victory and defeat was very fine and he was working almost on a day-to-day basis to hold the line. He sometimes said, and he may well have meant it, that he had not realised how much time Parliament would take. He said to J.A. Spender in July 1941, ‘You must remember that unlike the President I have to appear continuously before the legislature. Indeed I have had to give much more time to the House of Commons than I bargained for when the Ministry was formed.’12
Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, never overawed by Churchill (or indeed any politician), sometimes complained in his diary that the Prime Minister was absent from meetings because ‘Winston is still working on his speech’. But, quite apart form the fact that an enduring part of the corpus of English literature was in the process of composition, and that public morale was being sustained, as a civil servant he overlooked the political importance of these speeches. They mattered in the House. The political observers like Channon, Duff Cooper and Nicolson, not all of them committed Churchillians, testify to the extent to which the speeches frequently turned the mood of the House and brought semi-detached back-benchers behind the government.
The great set speeches were not the only hurdles that Churchill had to surmount in the House. He also had to take part in debate, and in 1940 he had succeeded Chamberlain not only as Prime Minister, but also as Leader of the House. This combination of offices was usual, but not inevitable, until 1942. Then Churchill gave up the Leadership, and no Prime Minister has held the office since. But while he remained Leader he was obliged to attend the House and to submit to detailed questioning much more than he would have done simply as Prime Minister. Routine announcements on the business of the House opened the way for discussion of matters of procedure and convention that touched on the conduct of the war.
In addition to the brooding Municheers on the Tory Right, there was a bunch of busy backbenchers of both parties who made life difficult. Some were critical to an extent that suggested straightforward ill will – Bevan may have been an example – but others acted from particular deeply held convictions, or sometimes just in response to bees in their bonnets. When Sir Roger Keyes was no longer on active service he came into the last category. He had been a great friend of Churchill and probably remained a devoted supporter, but he could be a nuisance, for example in the Secret Session after the loss of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Emmanuel Shinwell was constantly critical, but – from his perspective if not Churchill’s – with constructive intent. There was a hard core of those who sought throughout the early years to replace Churchill at the centre of war direction with a supreme council of some sort. Their motivation lay in the fact that they continued to believe that he simply could not be trusted. The Earl of Winterton and Edgar Granville, a Liberal appeaser, were among those who regularly argued for change, and Geoffrey Mander, a Liberal, later Labour, was also vociferous until he became Sir Archibald Sinclair’s PPS in 1942. Leslie Hore-Belisha, a National Liberal then Independent, who had been Secretary of State for War from 1937 to 1940, and a member of the War Cabi
net until that year, never got over his removal. There were numerous others who joined with those men in making life difficult for Churchill when it was already difficult enough.
In debate and when dealing with ordinary business he was closely questioned not just on the large issues of the war, a legitimate subject of enquiry, but also on the niceties of paltry issues of alleged unconstitutional procedure, the powers of Ministers of State, the number of Ministers, and above all the constitution of the War Cabinet.
On 9 July 1941, for instance, Churchill had to put up with a lot of questioning from Hore-Belisha on the definition of the duties of a Minister of State, and the propriety of making ministerial appointments without first making a statement in the House.13 Churchill was of course very adept at dealing with his critics, often contrasting what they said out of office with what they had said when in. He had been very good with Hore-Belisha a week earlier, when the former War Minister was querying the role of a Minister of State resident in the Middle East:
I am sure that the House will not accuse me of wanting in respect or deference in every effort to serve them, but if the right hon. Gentleman wishes to make a criticism of what is widely accepted as a highly useful and important step in the appointment of a member of the War Cabinet to be resident at the seat of the Middle Eastern War, I daresay some Parliamentary opportunity will occur. I have no doubt that some answer will be made to him although whether the answer will satisfy his wide-ranging curiosity I cannot tell.14
It is hardly surprising that in a letter to Attlee and Lord Cranborne in December 1941 Churchill referred to the government’s critics in the House of Commons as the ‘snarlers and naggers’. It must have been a great relief when the snarlers and naggers and their tiresome questioning were followed in April 1941 by a sycophantic enquiry from his old Private Secretary, Commander Oliver Locker–Lampson: ‘Is it not much better to wait and trust the Prime Minister?’15
There were always potential rivals. Although Halifax did not wish to be Prime Minister in May 1940, he almost certainly hoped that he would have the opportunity of taking over in more congenial circumstances before long. Chamberlain, as has been seen, envisaged returning. Even Lloyd George, Churchill’s oldest parliamentary colleague and friend, hoped to displace him, telling his secretary on 3rd October 1940, ‘I shall wait until Winston is bust’.16
In these early months of the war, particularly, there was a significant dissident block of about thirty MPs and ten peers led by the Labour Member, Richard Stokes, which saw Lloyd George as its potential leader. At this point in the war, Lloyd George was still robust enough to be a credible leader of a much more significant body of opinion than Stokes’ followers, and certainly did not rule himself out of returning to save the nation once again.
5
Preparation
The fact that, despite everything, Churchill was where he was rested on the undeniable recognition that he was supremely well qualified to direct the war. He was fond of reminding people that he seen active service in four continents in the course of his military career. Thus, when he went to the Front in the First World War to an active command, he reported to Clementine that he had already met most of the Staff in the course of his ‘soldiering’. In 1909, after a field day with the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Yeomanry, in which he held a commission, he told Clementine that he thought he had more tactical vision than professional soldiers. ‘I am sure I have the root of the matter in me – but never I fear in this state of existence will it have chance of flowering – in bright red blossom’.1
Between 1909 and 1939 that root had been well tended. When he became Prime Minister, he had not only been intermittently a member of the Cabinet since 1908 but also, continuously a member of the Committee for Imperial Defence from 1909. He had discharged important responsibilities at the Board of Trade, as Home Secretary, as Colonial Secretary and as Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also had experience in areas directly related to the conduct of war: First Lord of the Admiralty (twice), Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air. Few Prime Ministers had a wider experience of both government and a greater grasp of the machinery, the business, of government. Much of his success in getting his own way against opposition from the civil service and the military chiefs derived from the fact that he knew so well how the system worked.
As Secretary of State for War during the First World War he was able to observe the defects of the archaic machinery of military command, which he criticised afterwards in The World Crisis for its unbalanced nature. His comments on the undeserved status accorded to generals and admirals by the popular press were strongly expressed, but perfectly reasonable:
A series of absurd conventions became established, perhaps inevitably, in the public mind. The first and most monstrous of these was that the Generals and Admirals were more competent to deal with the broad issues of the war than abler men in other spheres of life. The General no doubt was an expert on how to move his troops, and the Admiral on how to fight his ships … but outside this technical aspect they were helpless and misleading arbiters in problems in whose solution the aid of the statesman, the financier, the manufacturer, the inventor, the psychologist was equally required.2
These were views formed by daily observation of the naval and military leaders throughout the First World War, and they were views from which Lloyd George, for instance, would not have dissented. They were not views of course with which the admirals and the generals would agree. Admiral Jellicoe, for instance, referred to Churchill’s ‘entire inability to realise his own limitations as a civilian … quite ignorant of naval affairs’.3 But Generals and Admirals, like members of other closed professions, are conservative and resentful of interference from those who are in a position to give them directions without the same institutional background. During the First World War Churchill took a much more active role in running the naval war than any First Lord had previously done. Many ideas that the navy successfully adopted were his alone and there were innumerable technical advances which he pushed through in the face of resistance.
His remarks about the limitations of the military imagination must be kept in mind. They are at the heart of his relations with the generals and the general staff in the Second War. He thought he was at least as well qualified as the professionals to make judgements on professional issues. The professionals resented amateur interference, and their supporters still take that view. The truth is that war is far too important to be left to the generals, in the sense that no general in the Second World War at least had sufficient knowledge, let alone grasp, of the overall scene – military, economic, political – to be able to synthesise the issues. Of course Churchill made mistakes and got things wrong, sometimes at elementary levels, but while others might have been right on individual matters, they came partis pris with their own priorities and special interests. What is remarkable is that Churchill was so often so much more right than anyone else.
Fortunately in the perilous circumstances of the Second World War, he did not have to face the same criticism from the press that he and Lloyd George had faced in 1914–1918, when the great press barons often capriciously and irresponsibly chose to support military and naval figureheads against their political masters. Thus the Morning Post of 23 October 1914: ‘When Mr. Churchill became First Lord he set himself directly to undermine the power of the Board and to establish himself as Dictator … In plain language, Mr. Churchill has gathered the whole power of the Admiralty into his own hands and the Navy is governed no longer by a Board of experts, but by a brilliant and erratic amateur.’4
At regular intervals Churchill’s government was subjected to press criticism that limited his freedom of movement, weakened his authority and affected his policies, but he had cultivated the press barons between the wars and most of them were his close friends. Campaigns such as those that destabilised Asquith were not directed against him at a personal level – although attacks on the government in general occurred muc
h more frequently than the subsequent myth of a country united would suggest. Churchill found these attacks unwelcome: they created dissension in Parliament, and meant that he had to turn his attention from fighting the war to managing public opinion. When for instance the Daily Mail campaigned in June 1941 for a reorganisation of the War Cabinet, he was resentful and irritated, and told Beaverbrook that if he could not be allowed to direct the war himself, he would resign.5
Criticism of Churchill for constitutional abuse was also muted, although it certainly took place. Because of the new position he created for himself as Minister of Defence, his direct intercourse with the Chiefs of Staff was perfectly legitimate. It was also unprecedented and often resented, but it was essential and productive. Churchill brought with him in 1940 an extensive knowledge, in theory and in practice, of the conduct of war. He had never been to Staff College, and had no experience as a staff officer or indeed of any sort of senior command. But he had studied the conduct of warfare across the centuries; and through his times at the Admiralty, at the War Office and at the Air Ministry, together with his intimate involvement in the developments of aerial warfare through the 1930s, he had acquired a vast amount of technical knowledge.