In his final Leicester speech he damned tariffs and the capital levy. Churchill, never comfortable on the defensive, kept trying to make the issue, not himself, but Tory protectionism and Baldwin’s claim that he had called this election to avoid breaking Bonar Law’s election promise. Winston cried: “Who is Mr Baldwin to acclaim himself such a singularly honest man? He is a man whom we only know in the last few months through the eulogies of the newspapers. He has no achievements to his record. He is an unknown man.” Unfortunately Labour, too, was against tariffs. And Labour now had a firm grip on this constituency. Pethick-Lawrence trounced Churchill, 13,634 to 9,236; the Tory, running third, polled 7,696. In Parliament the balance had shifted once more; Baldwin’s Conservative strength had been reduced by 87 seats. The Tories now held 258, as against Labour’s 191 and the Liberals’ 158. Lloyd George deferred to Asquith, who declared that under no circumstances would he unite with the Tories to exclude Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s leader, from office. Alarmed, Churchill wrote Violet Asquith that her father’s position meant that there was “no possibility of averting the great misfortune of a Socialist Government being formed.” On January 17, 1924, he issued a statement predicting that “strife and tumults, deepening and darkening, will be the only consequence of minority Socialist rule.”139 That was hardly fair, since Labour’s chief objective at the time, the defense of Free Trade, was also his. His warning was unheeded anyhow; four days later, when Baldwin lost a motion of confidence, Asquith threw his support to MacDonald, who thereby rode off to the palace to become Labour’s first prime minister. Beaverbrook had been right. The alliance was too unstable to last, but Winston felt betrayed by his party. Resuming his rightward march, he resigned from it, and the National Liberal Club put his portrait back in its basement.
Less than five weeks after MacDonald moved into No. 10, Churchill dined with Beaverbrook and Rothermere, Britain’s two greatest press lords. They offered him, as he wrote Clementine the following day, their “full support” should he contest an imminent by-election in the Abbey division of Westminster. Westminster, the Conservatives’ choicest preserve, included the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the homes of at least a hundred MPs, the greatest concentration of celebrities in England, and, as he reminded her, Pall Mall, the Victoria Palace, “Drury Lane theatre & Covent Garden!” There was a distinct possibility that the Conservative Association might endorse him. His wife, again wary, wrote back: “Do not… let the Tories get you too cheap. They have treated you so badly in the past & they ought to be made to pay.” It seemed unlikely. After his Leicester defeat Austen Chamberlain had written him: “I am very sorry you are still out of Parl,” but welcoming him back into the Conservative party was another matter; according to Beaverbrook, Austen was now “very frigid and said he would not support Churchill for Westminster until he repented in sackcloth and ashes for his Liberal past, and joined the Tories openly as a penitent convert.” That, of course, was even unlikelier. In the end the association backed Captain Otho Nicholson, a nephew of the previous member. The Evening Standard found strong sentiment in the district for Winston to run as an independent, however, and on March 4 he announced that he would do just that, though he expanded his label to “independent Anti-Socialist.” Significantly, he declared: “My candidature is in no way hostile to the Conservative Party and its leaders. On the contrary, I recognize that the party must now become the main rallying ground for opponents of the Socialist Party.” Sir Philip Sassoon wrote him: “I am so glad you are standing. You are BOUND to get in.” Others were less pleased. Leo Amery declared: “The menace of Socialism is not to be fought by negatives, however brilliantly phrased.” And Labour could not be counted out, even here. Its candidate charged that as war minister “Mr Churchill did all he could to maintain militarism in Europe and to march armies against Russia. He wasted £100,000,000 of the taxpayers’ money of this country—money sorely needed to deal with unemployment, housing etc—in mad, stupid, wicked and suicidal adventures.”140
A wealthy friend, James Rankin, converted his London home into Churchill’s headquarters, and presently eminent canvassers were seen hurrying in and out: Sir Philip, Lord Darling, Sir Eric Geddes, Lord Rothermere’s sole surviving son—the other two had been killed in France—and Winston’s cousin the duke. Sunny went into Westminster’s shabbier neighborhoods, unselfconsciously tapping on dilapidated doors with his gold-headed stick. Bracken solicited support in nightclubs and brokers’ offices, and even recruited campaigners among the girls at the Gaiety. Presently, as Churchill recalled afterward, “I began to receive all kinds of support. Dukes, jockeys, prize-fighters, courtiers, actors and businessmen, all developed a keen partisanship. The chorus girls of Daly’s Theatre sat up all night addressing the envelopes and despatching the election address.” Arthur Balfour told Baldwin (who remained sphinxlike throughout the campaign) that he thought Amery’s intervention had been unsportsmanlike. Balfour himself was seriously considering an endorsement of Churchill. H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post, still Winston’s sworn enemy, heard of this and rushed to Baldwin, urging him to forbid support of Churchill by ex-ministers—to be “strong and ruthless, if necessary.” That enraged Balfour, who promptly wrote Winston an open letter expressing his “strong desire” to see him win and use his “brilliant gifts” in Parliament. “Your absence from the House of Commons,” he concluded, “is greatly to be deplored.” Two dozen other Tories then declared for Winston. Inevitably, all this drew fire from the socialists, with the odd result that the Tory favorite in a Tory district was largely ignored. Fenner Brockway, the Labour aspirant, concentrated all his fire on Churchill, who, he said, had “previously charged Labour with setting class against class. It is he who is now the chief exponent of a class war. He raised the bogy of Socialism, and seeks to combine all the selfish and vested interests who fear the onward march of Labour…. Of all the politicians Mr Churchill has shown himself most unfit for the responsibility of government. His forte is to be a disturber of the peace, whether at home or abroad. He is a political adventurer, with a genius for acts of mischievous irresponsibility. He is militant to his finger-tips…. Mr Churchill’s record shows him to be a public danger and a menace to the peace of the world.” But as a polemicist Brockway was no match for Winston, who scorned Ramsay MacDonald’s indifference toward the Dominions, particularly his proposal to abandon Singapore, which Australia and New Zealand regarded as essential to their defense, while dealing generously with the Russians. Churchill cried: “Our bread for the Bolshevik serpent; our aid for foreigners of every country; our favours for Socialists all over the world who have no country; but for our own daughter States across the oceans, on whom the future of the British island and nation depends, only the cold stones of indifference, aversion, and neglect. That is the policy with which the Socialist Government confronts us, and against that policy we will strive to marshal the unconquerable might of Britain.”141
Churchill’s public appearances were marked by the usual commotion. Winifred Holtby, a critical observer who had never seen him before, wrote a friend of how he dealt with it. His solution was confrontation: “He really and truly points an accusatory finger at the crowd, and cries in sepulchral tones, ‘I say that if another war is fought, civilization will perish.’ (Laughter. A sweeping gesture.) ‘A man laughs,’ (out goes the finger). ‘That man dares to laugh. He dares to think the destruction of civilization a matter for humour!’ Indeed, he is such a preposterous little fellow, with his folded arms and tufted forelock and his Lyceum Theatre voice, that if one did not detest him one might love him from sheer perversity.” Set speeches, however, were a greater problem. Here, as when he had been challenged by prewar suffragettes, he was vulnerable. During his final address, in Victoria Palace, The Times reported that “the candidate was subjected to much interruption, the main burden of which consisted of remarks on Gallipoli and taunts by women about ‘murder in Ireland.’ ”142
Churchill closed on an elegiac note, describing how
the British Empire, “so powerful and splendid but a few years ago,” was now, under a Labour government, “almost ready to apologize for our very existence, ready to lay down our burden in any one of the great Oriental countries if a stick be shaken by any irresponsible chatterbox.” The constituency voted the following day, March 10. After the first hurried tally someone shouted to Winston: “You’re in by a hundred.” His followers cheered. But the shouter was premature. The official results gave him 8,114 against Nicholson’s 8,187—a difference of exactly 73—with Brockway a close third. The Labour candidate was watching Churchill at this moment of chagrin. “He began to tramp the length of the hall,” Brockway later wrote in Inside the Left, “head down, body lurching, like a despairing animal.”143
In writing of Jellicoe’s three lost opportunities to destroy the German fleet at Jutland, Churchill said: “Three times is a lot.” That is equally true of three lost elections. At The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, later to become an archpriest of appeasement, sourly wrote of Winston’s Westminster checkmate: “The features of his late campaign that attracted legitimate criticism were his ill-timed insistence on sheer anti-Socialism as the paramount claim on the electors at this moment, and the impulse that drove him, holding these views, to jeopardize a seat which without him was at least anti-Socialist. It is no new thing, after all, to discover that judgment is not the most conspicuous of Mr Churchill’s remarkable gifts.” House wags talked of organizing a dinner for the MPs who had beaten him at the polls. He had lacked a seat for nearly a year and a half now. His principal achievement had been the alienation of the socialists, in whose eyes, according to Shinwell, his “crowning sin was the fatuous declaration that Labour was unfit to govern, an accusation that gave the greatest offense to members of the Labour party.”144
Churchill’s refusal to accept the socialists as legitimate heirs to the fading Liberals was undoubtedly crippling; so was his scorn for the second-rate politicians, led by Baldwin, who had seized the leadership of the Conservative party. Yet in neither case could he have done otherwise and remained true to himself. He had always despised socialism, supporting welfare legislation which would deprive Labour candidates of social issues, and he would do so again. On a more profound level, as the tribune of excellence he was baffled by the hostility to brilliance which was, perhaps, the most striking feature of Britain’s public life between the two world wars. How, he wondered, could the House endure year after year of what he called Baldwin’s “very mediocre intellect”? He could not grasp how lesser men were mollified, comforted, and flattered by Baldwin’s bland manner and tolerance of conduct which any other prime minister would have regarded as inexcusable. If you voted for Baldwin’s legislation, nothing else you did would offend him. After an MP had delivered an unforgivable personal attack on him, Amery later wrote, “S.B. would meet him presently in the Lobby and would greet him genially with, ‘Well, old chap, I expect you feel better after that.’ ” Beaverbrook observed that Churchill “resents an assault on his public policy as much as Lloyd George does an attack on his private life.” Baldwin, a political placebo, resented neither. He was content to squat on the Treasury Bench as a benign abacist, counting votes and beaming at the results.145
Yet Churchill, for whom no accommodation with Labour was possible, slowly came to realize that he would have to come to terms with this insipid man. Winston’s position was stronger than it seemed. At the time, his setback in Westminster was generally regarded as a blunder, another example of his impetuosity. Actually, for reasons he could not have anticipated, it advanced his prospects. Had he routed the Tories’ candidate, they would have found it hard to forgive him. As it was, his impressive showing as an independent, with neither a local organization nor a following in the district, was a remarkable demonstration of his personal appeal and skill as a campaigner. After the vote, Monteith Erskin, an influential Conservative, wrote Baldwin: “My conviction was and is that Winston Churchill would have done more to strengthen the Conservative Party than would his opponent. It seems a pity that the best interests of the country should often be at the mercy of a local Association divided in its own Councils…. The 25 or 30 MPs who came out in the open for Winston in no way measure the actual feeling in the House. Any number told me they wanted him to win & were quietly working for his return.” The following day Lord Londonderry, a Churchill cousin who had been among his campaigners in Westminster, urged him to rejoin the Tories, writing: “Please Winston reflect—a half way house is no use to anyone, least of all to you.” Sunny advised caution: “I personally think you are wise to preserve a detached position from the Tory party—till you can command your terms, and get hold of the title deeds.” Eight days later, however, Churchill received a “unanimous invitation” from the Liverpool Conservatives, asking him to address their annual convention early in the following month. Now he had to decide. He hesitated. Once before he had switched parties, and he still bore scars of the wounds inflicted then. Abuse would be unavoidable. He wondered if he could survive with his credibility intact. “Anyone can rat,” he told a friend, “but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”146
Austen Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, and Churchill in 1924
In the autumn of that year Churchill turned fifty, and he looked it: portly, bald, stooped, his face lined with wrinkles accumulated during countless crises, any one of which would have aged most men overnight. Yet the overall effect was pleasant. He had begun to resemble the cartoonist’s conception of John Bull, hearty and prosperous, with an ovoid torso and a low center of gravity, good-humored if you let him have his way but stubborn and even refractory if you didn’t. His height was just under five feet, seven inches, which would have surprised those who knew him only through newspaper photographs, because his massive shoulders led one to expect a taller man. His manner was always forthright, never devious; no one ever called him enigmatic. As unsubtle as the rare roast beef he (and John Bull) loved, his expression invariably reflected his mood. He beamed, looked puckish, frowned, wept, or brooded, but of the thousands of Churchill photographs, none shows him bored. When with him it was impossible to forget one was in the presence of a great original. By now his props—the cigar, the blue polka-dot bow tie, the elegant malacca gold-topped walking stick he had inherited when Clementine’s brother Bill committed suicide in a Paris hotel room—were familiar throughout England. Controversy accompanied him everywhere. Had George Gallup been conducting his polls then, and had Britons been asked their judgment of Churchill, there would have been very few No Opinions. Nearly everyone had decided views about him, which he relished, though he was ever alert to the possibilities of slander and libel. On December 10, 1923, he appeared in the Old Bailey to testify against Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s faithless lover. This noisome peer had distributed 30,000 pamphlets accusing Churchill of having accepted a £40,000 bribe to issue a false communiqué about the battle of Jutland, thereby enabling “a group of Jewish financiers” to manipulate the stock market.* Had he chosen to take civil action, Winston would have won a large reward, but he believed scandalmongers belonged behind bars. He put this one there; a jury took just eight minutes to find Douglas guilty of criminal libel, and he was sentenced to six months in prison. Douglas’s performance was inexcusable, but it is barely possible that he had been confused by the fact that Winston did pick up sums in the City from time to time when out of office; in 1923 he earned £5,000 as a lobbyist for Royal Dutch Shell and the Burmah Oil Company.
Though no longer in Parliament, he was always busy, always doing something. He had abandoned a second attempt to master flying after a postwar crash at Croydon—dusting himself off, he presided at a dinner honoring General Pershing two hours later, although, Lord Riddell noted in his diary, “Winston’s forehead was scratched and his legs were black and blue”—and he was seen less often on polo fields, particularly after two bad falls, the first at Eaton Hall, the Duke of Westminster’s home near Chester, and the second at Hurlingham, where he broke his
collarbone. He was reluctant to give up the game altogether, however. “I do dumbbells every day,” he had written the Prince of Wales, “trying to get my elbow right for next year: not many more polo years at 47!” In fact, he was the star of a game between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. (The Commons won.) As a private citizen he followed public affairs as closely as he had in the cabinet, and was in the public eye almost as often, rebuking the French for their occupation of the Ruhr, criticizing the Harding administration (“so many hard things are said about us over there and… they are wringing the last penny out of their unfortunate allies”), and unveiling statues of wartime leaders, two of whom, Jellicoe and Beatty, had been appointed to their commands by him. Alone, he wrote, corrected galleys, carried on an enormous correspondence, and painted. Anything from his pen commanded an instant audience. The slightest of his articles is worth rereading today. In the early 1920s he wrote: “May there not be methods of using exploding energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate a force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?”147
Churchill playing polo with the Prince of Wales, 1924
Of all his roles, the warmest, and most endearing, was that of paterfamilias. Winston adored children, and saw to it that his own would never suffer the starvation for parental affection which had made his childhood, even now, a painful memory. He built them hideouts in the woods; played “Bear,” “Gorilla,” charades, and other games; read to them, spun them yarns at the fireside, gave them new nicknames. In 1921 Diana, “the gold-cream kitten,” was twelve; Randolph, “the Rabbit,” was ten (“He looks such a thin shrimp in trousers and Eton collar!” Clementine wrote Winston); and Sarah, “the Bumblebee,” seven. Marigold, a two-year-old, would never be three. Her birth had been difficult for her mother, but by the time she could talk she was a treasure, one of those irresistible little heartbreakers of fey charm and manic energy whose very presence in a room endows everyone there with a fresh joy. Her father called her “the Duckadilly.” She would race pell-mell around the dining room table while her parents entertained guests at lunch; her mother, afraid she might crack her head on one of the table’s sharp corners, padded them. The Duckadilly had “a sweet, true little voice,” as one member of the family later recalled, and her signature tune was the 1921 hit:148
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