Churchill’s primary task was to make arrangements for supervising Britain’s growing territorial portfolio between the Sinai Desert and the Persian Gulf. His first major step was to tour the region, appointing Middle Eastern allies through whom Britain would rule its new Arab domains. The centerpiece of Churchill’s visit was a meeting of imperial and indigenous potentates in Cairo. This durbar cum conference, held in March 1921, had considerable significance for the entire Middle East and displayed Churchill’s mastery of detail. Egyptian nationalists timed public demonstrations to coincide with Churchill’s arrival, demanding that Britain leave their homeland. Security was a key concern, as Churchill’s life was at risk: his party was stoned on arrival in the Egyptian capital, and his bodyguard remained constantly on the alert and needed occasionally to use his fists. After the murder of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson by the IRA in London in June 1922, Churchill was deemed to require the protection of three detectives while visiting the high commissioner, Lord Allenby, King Faud, and various RAF stations.
The future of Iraq was uppermost in Churchill’s mind, and the upshot of his visit was that Feisal was appointed king, with Britain retaining significant base rights in the former Ottoman province. This guaranteed Britain control, at a knockdown price, of the land bridge linking Europe and Asia, as well as securing its oil riches. It was a move designed to secure influence and cut costs. As he wrote, “We are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having—except, of course, for the oil.”11 Churchill’s view of what Britain was building in Iraq is revealing, for it contains within it a statement of the aims of both sides—influence in a sensitive strategic region for the British, independence for the Iraqis—competing aims that were to prove ultimately irreconcilable, as in Ireland and South Africa and many other parts of the world as the twentieth century progressed. “Our object and our policy,” he told the Commons in June 1921, “is to set up an Arab Government, and to make it take the responsibility, with our aid and our guidance and with an effective measure of our support, until they are strong enough to stand alone, and so to foster the development of their independence as to permit the steady and speedy diminution of our burden.”12 The trouble with such arrangements was that the extent of external involvement, and the timing of its withdrawal, was always disputed by the external power and internal political leaders aspiring to greater measures of control themselves.
Churchill’s visit to the Middle East meant that the government’s policy for the region was clearly enunciated for the benefit of all interested parties, whether they agreed with it or not. In attempting to resolve the thorny problems associated with Palestine, Churchill left Cairo for Jerusalem, where he met High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel. Churchill, a pro-Zionist, reiterated Britain’s wartime promise of a national home for the Jews and saw at first hand Arab hostility toward them. He negotiated with Emir Abdullah, soon to be installed as Hashemite ruler of the former Ottoman province of Trans-Jordan. The major objective of his policy in the region was to create the infrastructure of indirect rule that would allow Britain to cut its commitments there while retaining its influence and protecting its interests. Whatever criticisms may be directed at Churchill’s policy in the Middle East, it proved extremely durable, given the region’s political volatility, and formed the basis of Britain’s position in the region until long after the Second World War. In reaching a settlement in the Middle East, Churchill made good use of his experts. Though his urge to go to the region and hold court attracted the usual criticism, the failures of the Cairo conference were collective and reflected British policy, not Churchillian diktat. The intractable problems of the region—of Iraq and Palestine, for example—form pinheads on which statesmen continue to dance.
In June 1920, Lloyd George had appointed Churchill as chairman of a Cabinet committee on Ireland, and this involved him in the birth of an independent Ireland for the first time since English expansion under the Tudors and Stuarts. With the war over, it was clear that the situation in Ireland was no closer to being resolved. Increasingly militarizing the problem did not appeal to Lloyd George, though he did choose to increase the size and power of the police as a robust response to IRA activity, leading to the deployment of the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans. It soon became clear that martial law was not improving the situation, and Churchill was convinced that this path could not be continued. His involvement with Irish affairs, which had started before the First World War, drew him closer to the heart of the coalition government than he had ever been, particularly as Ireland was returning to the center of the political agenda. His wife pressed him to work toward a settlement, exhorting him to “use your influence now for some sort of moderation or at any rate justice in Ireland.” Once it had been decided to negotiate, he was prepared to use force as a last resort but urged both sides to make concessions.
For many decades, Ireland had been Britain’s most intractable colonial issue, a thorn in the side of Westminster politicians, given the salience of the Home Rule issue since the mid-nineteenth century and the presence of large number of Irish MPs in the Commons. As Churchill had been the public face of Asquith’s prewar Irish policy, so he was to the fore in Lloyd George’s, and this meant dealing with a new and much more ferocious political enemy—Sinn Fein and its military wing, the Irish Republican Army. There was a dramatic turnaround in Britain’s policy toward Ireland in 1921, when Lloyd George switched from suppressing the IRA to a policy of reconciliation, moving toward a truce that came into effect in July 1921. Churchill maintained a steely tolerance of the more unpleasant aspects of war and prepared to meet the IRA’s challenge with uncompromising force. In this way, Churchill helped provide the political nerve needed to deal ruthlessly with the IRA and to force its leaders to the negotiating table.
In October 1921, Lloyd George convened a meeting at Downing Street involving Sinn Fein leaders and members of the Cabinet. The main British demands were that Ireland must remain in the British Empire; that Irish ministers should swear allegiance to the Crown; and that the Royal Navy should retain the use of certain strategically positioned Irish ports. Tough face-to-face negotiations ensued, during the course of which Churchill developed a respect for the Irish leaders Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith and an understanding of the dynamics of their position. In particular, the relationship he forged with Collins helped lubricate the negotiations. After weeks of talking, an agreement was reached, spurred by Lloyd George’s threat to resume the war—his “take it or leave it” offer of December 5—and a new Dominion, the Irish Free State, was born.
As colonial secretary, it fell to Churchill to translate the agreement into practice, overseeing what was an early act of twentieth-century decolonization. Leading the government’s defense of the Irish treaty in the Commons, Churchill gave a masterly performance and subsequently did his best to see that the agreement worked, showing commendable restraint on several occasions. In the Commons, during the reading of the Irish Free State Bill in February 1922, Churchill memorably caricatured the place of Irish politics in British life. He began by summarizing the momentous, world-changing events of the First World War. But when the war ended, he continued:
As the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That says a lot for the persistency with which Irishmen on the one side or the other are able to pursue their controversies. It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange, to lay their hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics, and to hold, dominate, and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country.13
Churchill dealt skillfully with these issues, but his ambitious nature craved higher office. Upon his return to England from the Middle East i
n the spring of 1921, he had been disappointed not to secure the position of chancellor of the Exchequer when Lloyd George shuffled his Cabinet (a reshuffle that divested Churchill of responsibility for the Air Ministry). Remaining at the Colonial Office, with the pressing issues in Ireland and the Middle East under control for the time being, a lack of funds frustrated Churchill’s desire for economic development in imperial domains such as East Africa, mundane obstacles obscuring his visions of grandiose progress. Unable to write bold headlines, he found little glory in pronouncing on issues such as New Hebridean governance and the limitation of Indian immigration into Kenya.
The End of the Coalition and Return to the Tory Fold
The year 1922 saw a steady erosion of both the government’s reputation and the popularity of the prime minister. His handling of the Irish question and the Chanak crisis, his stance on Russia, and postwar economic difficulties sapped the Conservative support on which Lloyd George’s administration rested, while enhancing support for the Labour Party. As far as Churchill was concerned, while he supported the coalition, he was increasingly at odds with Lloyd George’s leadership, and the prime minister suspected that Churchill was working toward a right-wing coalition under Austen Chamberlain. Churchill was still vying for new ministerial appointments, at this time showing enthusiasm for the creation of a new Ministry of Defence to supersede the Admiralty, Air Ministry, and War Office. He also retained his interest in coalition, as opposed to single-party, government. Fearing the rise of the Labour Party, he was keen on the formation of a new coalition to fight it, believing that old-fashioned Conservative-Liberal political designations were redundant. “Liberalism,” he pronounced, “is the greatest form of Conservatism.” But the Conservatives withdrew from the coalition, Lloyd George resigned, and Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, became prime minister after a general election in November 1922. Churchill lost his seat in this election and was not to regain it for two years, leading to a very unsettled period in his life. Finishing fourth and having developed appendicitis, “I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix.” His illness had prevented him from campaigning, though he did make an appearance in Dundee on Armistice Day, wearing his eleven campaign medals.
The election weakened the Tories, but rather than boosting the waning Liberal Party, it brought ever closer the likelihood of the first Labour government in history, a prospect that Churchill deplored with all his instinctive fear of “socialism.” Without a seat for the first time in twenty-two years, Churchill was looking for the right moment at which to rejoin the Conservatives. The election had wiped out the Liberals as a party of government. He spent the winter on the Riviera and remained in the south of France painting, writing, and lobbying until May 1923. For six months after the election Churchill was out of the public eye as a politician, and his writing again came to the fore. In January 1923, he finished the proofs of the first volume of his book The World Crisis. “We have reached the moment when one must say, ‘As the tree falls, so shall it lie,’” he said as he delivered the final proof.14 Running to five volumes and nearly a million words, it was his record of the First World War: “A contribution to history,” he wrote, “strung upon a fairly strong thread of personal reminiscence.”15 Its style was superlative, and the work offered a vivid account of a war about which the public still knew little, at once intricately informed and constructed on a grand scale. He was also working on his autobiographical My Early Life. He would compose his works standing up at a sloping desk, or sometimes in bed. The Times serialized the first volume of The World Crisis, an event that caused the prime minister to complain that Churchill’s account breached his oath as a privy councillor, eliciting a vigorous defense from Churchill.
The new government didn’t last for long, and in May 1923 Bonar Law resigned. Coalitions were out of fashion, and the familiar pattern of party politics once again came to the fore as the two main political parties found a cause upon which to resume traditional party hostilities. Stanley Baldwin, the new Tory leader, announced his intention to introduce protective tariffs on manufactured imports as a remedy for unemployment. This led the Liberals to reunite under the banner of free trade. Churchill took up the free-trade cudgels and threw in his lot with the Asquithian Liberals but was beaten at a special election in Leicester West by a Labour candidate. Parliament was dissolved in November 1923 and an election held the following month. The Labour Party won, resulting in the first-ever Labour government, which took office under Ramsay MacDonald (a man with “the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought”) in January 1924.
Churchill believed that the Liberal Party was no longer capable of standing in the way of the rise of the Labour Party. An alliance with the Conservatives was, therefore, essential. “I am a Liberal, opposed to the official Liberal leaders on account of their putting socialists into power. I am a Liberal working shoulder to shoulder with the Conservatives in a national emergency.” In early 1924, Baldwin renounced his party’s protectionist pledge, thus removing for Churchill the last serious obstacle to rejoining the Tories. Moving ever further from the Liberal Party, Churchill stood for Parliament in a March 1924 special election in the Abbey division of Westminster, campaigning as an “independent anti-socialist.” He was assisted by the young Brendan Bracken and chorus girls from Daly’s Theatre, who addressed envelopes as Churchill inveighed against the perils of socialism. He failed to beat the Conservative candidate by a narrow margin of forty-three votes, his third electoral defeat in a row and one that had him tramping up and down the hall “head down, body lurching, like a despairing animal” as the results came in. Nevertheless, though he had opposed an official Conservative candidate in this special election, it moved him closer to the party that he was soon to rejoin.
Churchill was adopted as a “constitutionalist” candidate for Epping, where he fought the 1924 general election, campaigning with his usual vigor. His speeches were widely reported and welcomed by Baldwin, and he won by a majority of nearly ten thousand votes. Returning to the Conservative Party, he was predictably accused of opportunism but had been genuinely appalled at the Liberals’ weakness against the Labour government and the “socialism” he so hated. Throughout his career, Churchill was never afraid to change his mind: “A man who doesn’t change his mind with new evidence is no use,”16 as he told Lord Moran. This agility was tempered by many continuities and consistencies in the causes and policies he advocated throughout his lengthy parliamentary life. As soon as he had reentered the House of Commons, Churchill contemplated a return to high office, based upon his public performances and the fact that he represented many alienated Liberal voters who were now finding a home in Conservative circles.
When Neville Chamberlain turned down the Treasury, Churchill was offered this highest of Cabinet positions, an offer he accepted with tears in his eyes. Soon he was dusting down the robes his father had worn when he occupied the office, which had been wrapped in tissue paper and camphor for forty years. Churchill’s appointment was opposed by Tories such as Leopold Amery and numerous backbenchers. Over the next few years, however, many of these backbenchers came to look to him for leadership, and for the first time he began to attract a parliamentary following. This was a dramatic rebirth for Churchill, though one that reflected the fact that he was probably the ablest, and certainly the most experienced, politician of the day.
As chancellor, Churchill’s propensity to involve himself in the affairs of other government departments reached new heights. His colleagues dreaded his interdepartmental interrogations and initiatives. As Neville Chamberlain put it, “Winston is a very interesting but d––d uncomfortable bed fellow. You never get a moment’s rest and you never know at what point he’ll break out.”17 Haldane put it even more succinctly: working with Churchill was like arguing with a brass band. Churchill, rather remarkably, given the vagaries of his extraordinary career to date, was at one remove from the summit of
British politics. He was where he loved to be. As Clementine wrote, “You are having an anxious but thrilling & engrossing time with power & scope which is what the Pig likes.”18 “Pig” liked it so much, in fact, that he desired a metamorphosis, telling Clementine that he was “tired of being a ‘Pig’” and “wished to become a ‘Lion.’”
Gold and the Exchequer
So Churchill came to reside at Number 11 Downing Street. Here he would usually work in the later part of the mornings, having begun the working day from his bed at home. He saw a lot of Baldwin, because his custom was to leave Number 11 by way of Number 10. Churchill’s prestige with the prime minister made him a powerful force in the government, regardless of his recent defection from a rival political party. As chancellor, Churchill displayed no shyness despite the unfamiliar nature of the business, and he refused to unquestioningly accept the opinions of those with long-standing specialist knowledge. Other men would have been daunted; Churchill plunged in, a volcano spewing ideas and memoranda in all directions. He challenged Treasury orthodoxy and the advice of its officials and was prepared to fight at dinner parties and in committee meetings with those whose advice other chancellors would meekly have followed. He harried experts with lengthy counterarguments as policy was formulated—“Forgive me adding to your labours with these Sunday morning reflections,” he typically began an inquisitorial missive to one of them.
Churchill made his first Budget Day speech in 1925 and throughout his tenure at the Treasury reveled in the tradition and publicity surrounding the event. His Budget Day speeches were delivered with a sense of occasion and prepared with his customary meticulousness (the 1928 speech ran to over fifteen thousand words, hammered out at Chartwell). As he left 11 Downing Street in frock coat and top hat, showing the famous red dispatch case, he would walk with his family to Parliament, surrounded by the public and the press. His first speech, which lasted for two and a half hours, was a “masterly performance,” according to Neville Chamberlain. He announced tax reductions, a contributory scheme of pensions for widows and orphans, and the lowering of the pension age from seventy to sixty-five. As chancellor, Churchill was able to dominate the House with his oratory.
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