by Andrew Marr
Much later Macmillan finally decides he too must retire. He has had great pain and difficulty pissing and wrongly thinks it might be cancer. Another small room: sitting in his hospital bed wearing pale blue pyjamas, with a silk shirt and cardigan (but without a bird on his head) he tells the Queen. Later, he suggests she should summon Alec Douglas-Home to replace him. There are literally dozens of similar examples of how political life was carried on among the top Tories during this period. Of course, there have been many Labour cabals, from the paranoid huddles in Harold Wilson’s Downing Street to the notorious Blair and Brown deal at Granita restaurant in Islington in 1994. But nothing quite matched the tight little world of the Churchill and Macmillan era. If they were not dining in the Commons or a handful of gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s – Macmillan belonged to five clubs – they were shooting grouse together or meeting in villas in the south of France. It is sometimes said that Churchill’s government, stuffed with old friends and relatives, was unusual. But of Macmillan’s all-male cabinet, a mere two out of sixteen had not been to a grand public school, with Eton the most heavily represented. Astonishingly, within months of his becoming Prime Minister, Macmillan was leading a government in which thirty-five ministers out of eighty-five, including seven in the cabinet, were related to him by marriage.
There were outsiders too, including Powell, Heath and later Margaret Thatcher. Ernie Marples, a former sergeant-major and building contractor who would help create Britain’s first motorways, was another self-made man in the government; so was Reggie Bevins of Liverpool. Most of them felt awkward and ill-at-ease, not quite officer class in the Conservative hierarchy of the fifties. The social make-up of the Tory administrations contributed to their weakness and eventually the collapse of their authority. The charmed circle of intermarried grandees were so much the country’s traditional ruling order that their natural instinct was to play down crisis. Not in front of the servants, children or voters seemed to be their private motto. Because all was not well, this would fatally destroy their authority. In the ‘satire boom’, rule by toffs would be discredited. Their silent struggles for power would eventually spill into the public domain, giving us political catchphrases like ‘Establishment’ and ‘magic circle’. Sex scandals and spying scandals would persuade people that there really was something rotten in the old order. Rather as New Labour connived with the press in the 1990s to mock John Major’s administration to death, so Harold Wilson and old Labour would join hands with Private Eye and playwrights to despatch the last government of grandees.
29
Churchill in Old Age
When Churchill returned to power in 1951, all this was still far ahead. The old order seemed to have re-established itself far more quickly than the smashing defeat of six years earlier implied. And it was an old order. Churchill was undisputedly the greatest Englishman alive. Yet he was now fighting time. Two years into his last premiership, just after giving a speech to visiting Italians in Downing Street – always history-obsessed, he had been lecturing them on the Roman legions in England – he slumped down with a major stroke. Hurried to bed, he nevertheless recovered enough to hold a cabinet meeting the following day, though saying little. But he then deteriorated so fast his doctor thought he would die. He lost the use of his left arm, spoke only in a slurred mumble, and was unable to stand. He was hurried to his home at Chartwell. There, over two months, he recovered. It is an astonishing story in several ways. First there is the spectacle of Churchill’s amazing willpower and stamina, bringing him from near death to a position where he could make a major speech to the Tory conference and then engage in full Commons exchanges within a few months. Even more astonishing, the country did not know at the time what had happened. There were vague rumours but the Prime Minister’s grave illness was kept secret to all outside a very close circle. In the end he broke the secret himself, mentioning it a couple of years later in Parliament, by which time it no longer mattered much.
Before this stroke, and indeed after it, other ministers found the old lion entirely exasperating. He had brilliant moments, both in set-piece speeches and in conversation. But he was a speaking memorial to his own greatness and therefore naturally inclined to ramble on. He was described as ‘senile’, ‘past it’ and ‘gaga’ in the memoirs of other members of the cabinet. They wrote of their hatred for him as well as their love. Sometimes he let his private secretary write a speech for him. Sometimes he forgot what he was going to say half-way through a sentence. Sometimes even foreign leaders such as the US President, Harry Truman, expressed boredom at his long-windedness. But the person most angered, hurt and frustrated was Anthony Eden who felt that after ten years of waiting, and half a lifetime at the top of the Tory tree, it was his turn to govern. Prime ministers always find it hard to give up. Churchill resisted Eden by frequent promises that he was likely to go at some time in the future, always then putting it off. He would reshuffle his ministers, offer Eden unsuitable alternative jobs, row with him, then raise his hopes only to dash them again.
Had the pair of them not been the most powerful men in Britain, and had it not been rather cruel, it would have been almost funny. Churchill had become increasingly doubtful as to whether Eden would be any good as Prime Minister, lecturing him about the importance of keeping in with the Americans, snapping at his suggestions and complaining to friends that he didn’t think ‘Anthony can do it’. If all else failed Churchill, as ever, used jokes. When the death was announced of a minister’s father, Churchill greeted yet another delegation sent to urge his retirement with a mournful reference to the deceased, ‘Quite young, too. Only 90.’ Age and illness would be a big theme of the Tory years, as they had been in the latter stage of Attlee’s government. Eden was frequently ill with a biliary duct problem made worse by botched surgery. By the time he finally got the top job halfway through the decade, he was physically depleted. Macmillan later said of him that he was like a racehorse who had been trained to win the Derby in 1938 but was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955. So why did Churchill carry on for so long? Undoubtedly, part of the reason was that he simply could not bear to let go. But there was a nobler reason. The old man did have a cause.
Churchill’s life had been dominated by war. He came from a grand military family, brought up surrounded by the stories and mementoes of battles won. He went to fight for the Empire in the Sudan then saw the Boer War at first hand as a war correspondent who was captured and escaped. In the First World War he was a highly controversial First Lord of the Admiralty, then a colonel in France. After it, as War Secretary, he tried to strangle the Bolshevik revolution with an entirely unsuccessful Western war in support of the Whites against Lenin. His great years were as Britain’s war leader in the world fight against Fascism. Many of his critics, from socialists who remembered him sending tanks against trade union strikers to Little Englanders, reviled him as a natural warmonger. So it is interesting that his last great crusade was an attempt to stop a war, this time a nuclear one. Whether it was the wisdom of age or vanity about his unique role as global statesman, Winston Spencer Churchill became the world’s leading peacenik. His speeches resounded with dark warnings of the catastrophe just ahead. As early as the 1950 election campaign, speaking in Edinburgh, he had coined the modern use of ‘summit’ when calling for a leaders’ parley with the Russians. The arrival of the hydrogen bomb increased the sense of world panic and Churchill worried in particular about an American atom bomb strike against the Chinese in North Korea (as indeed did the Chinese).
He was struggling with a new world, understanding the nuclear threat but also thinking in a highly traditional way. As soon as he returned to power in 1951 Churchill had fired off worried requests for information about the ease with which Russian paratroopers could seize strategic locations in London, and the carnage that would be caused by different kinds of surprise nuclear attack. Above all, he thought that if the atom bomb menace existed, Britain had better be as menacing as she could manage. In Decemb
er 1951 he had authorized Britain’s first nuclear test and at the Monte Bello islands off Australia, HMS Plym, one of the war-surplus frigates which had escaped being broken up or mothballed, was instead vaporized by Britain’s first nuclear bomb. Then in 1954 he gave the go-ahead, with weary resignation, for work on a British hydrogen bomb as ‘the price we pay to sit at the top table’. He told his cabinet, ‘If the United States were tempted to undertake a forestalling war, we could not hope to remain neutral…We must avoid any action which would weaken our power to influence United States policy.’ Britain would only have a voice in restraining America if it was itself a player: ‘the fact must be faced that, unless we possessed thermo-nuclear weapons, we should lose our influence and standing in world affairs.’ But for Churchill it was precautionary despair; his real campaign was for a new settlement between capitalist West and Marxist East.
London and Washington did not see eye to eye on nuclear matters, as we have seen. Britain had been abruptly cut off from American nuclear secrets and in the early fifties Britain was more immediately threatened. Russian bombers could not yet reach the United States so American bases in Britain, and RAF ones, would make this country the first Soviet nuclear target. Dreadful estimates of the carnage were circulated through Whitehall. Yet for the Americans, nuclear war was still something that happened abroad. Churchill saw the death of Stalin as a heaven-sent opportunity to reopen friendlier relations with Moscow. Though as passionately anti-Communist as ever he was worried that the US President, his wartime comrade Dwight Eisenhower, was too rigidly anti-Russian. Churchill frankly thought ‘Ike’ stupid and unable to comprehend that nuclear weapons were far more than the latest military technology. This reflected an accurate gulf of perception. Eisenhower believed nuclear weapons were a mere extension of ordinary weaponry and would soon be regarded as conventional. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State Dulles in turn feared that in his dotage Churchill had become an appeaser; though Churchill always used the term ‘easement’ or ‘settlement’ of East-West relations as his preferred description. Again and again he tried to persuade Eisenhower of the virtues of a superpower summit, and offered to go to Moscow himself alone – at a time when the Americans would not dream of setting foot on Soviet territory – to clear the way. Dulles was strongly hostile. Churchill bitterly called him ‘that bastard’. At last, having got an insincere half-promise from Eisenhower that he could at least contact the Soviets about some meeting on neutral ground, he fired off the invitation too early, became embroiled in a white-hot cabinet row, and had to watch his vision crumble. At the top of the rival powers, no one but him really wanted to make peace just then. Everybody was too busy preparing the next generation of nuclear devices, thinking more like generals, less like statesmen. Churchill was arguing for détente twenty years before it happened. Perhaps he had been doing it with a selfish tremor, hoping for a final triumph, but as visions go it was quite something for an eighty-year-old.
Churchill’s other overseas initiatives were less impressive. He was losing the battle about the Empire and knew it, even as he wrapped himself in mystical prose about the new young Queen and the coming Elizabethan age. If the real conflict was with the Soviet Union and her allies, what price Britain’s other post-imperial commitments? What price trying to hang onto control in Palestine, where desperate refugees were determined to settle, and where Jewish terrorists were killing British soldiers? What price Britain’s piggy-in-the-middle role in Greece, trying to protect an unpopular monarchy against a communist insurgency? A little later on, trying to hold on in Egypt, or Iran, would prompt the same question. The private thinking of Whitehall was laid out in a fascinating memo from top officials to a cabinet committee shortly after the Americans had upped the ante in the nuclear race by exploding their first H-bombs. The British cabinet paper was frank about the overall position: ‘It is clear that ever since the end of the war we have tried to do too much – with the result that we have only rarely been free from the danger of economic crisis.’
About Europe, Churchill had long been inclined to make dramatic-sounding suggestions. He had offered to merge British and French citizenship during the darkest days of 1940. After the war he was not averse to a fully politically united Western Europe, though he assumed the British Empire could not be a full member. When he came back to power one of the most immediate issues was whether Britain would join early moves towards that united Western Europe. In 1950, the ailing Labour government had decided against, though after very little thought. When the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, announced that his country intended to share sovereignty over iron and coal with West Germany, so binding the two old enemies tightly together in their industrial effort, he gave the British government an ultimatum. Attlee was out of the country and Ernie Bevin was already very ill, describing himself with no exaggeration as ‘half-dead’. It was left to Herbert Morrison to give a hurried response. He had been at the theatre and was found by officials at the Ivy restaurant in London’s Covent Garden. The plan which would one day lead to the European Union was explained to Morrison in a back room, piled with chairs. He thought for a moment and shook his head. ‘It’s no good. We can’t do it. The Durham miners won’t wear it.’ For many Tories, watching from the sidelines, this was a disastrous mistake. Macmillan, who had been observing things from Strasbourg, where he was in Bevin’s vacated hotel room, thought the decision catastrophic, later telling his constituents it was ‘a black week for Britain’ and the country might pay a ‘catastrophic price’ for isolating itself under the socialists from Europe. So there was general expectation that Tory Britain would change tack.
There was already a strong case for doing so. The Empire was falling away. Relations with the Americans had already been damaged over the atom bomb, as well as disputes about Palestine and Greece. Here was a moment for the Tories to decide to ride another horse too, and join the young European club. Churchill declined to do so. Offered the chance to take up common European defence, he ridiculed the notion, to the despair of Macmillan and some of the younger Conservatives. He showed no interest in deeper involvement. He was the last imperialist whose rhetoric about the ‘English-speaking peoples’ was more heartfelt than his suggestions of anti-Communist alliances between Italians, Belgians and the French. Washington was pivotal to his world as Paris never could be, still less Brussels. He wanted summits on the H-bomb and a place on the world stage, not local deals with provincial nations half-desolated by war and invasion. The Foreign Office, where Eden was esconced, was also hostile to entanglements with the Europeans – not surprising, either, perhaps, since its grand embassies and worldwide reach made iron and steel deals near at hand seem parochial. The manner of Churchill’s decision-making on Europe, though, was worrying to his contemporaries. It was never properly discussed in cabinet. It was as much a shrug as a decision. It was never announced. It was never thrashed through. It might as well have been taken in the Ivy. Perhaps, as with nuclear peace-making, it was just too early for the decisive move. Yet there is an unmistakeable sense of anti-climax about Churchill’s last government. Outside the world was changing. New leaders were coming to prominence. Here, it seemed, Britain was being distracted by one moving curtain-call too many.
30
Strikes and Money: Jack Is All Right…
Conservatives of the fifties have had a particularly bad press for their willingness to stick with the Attlee consensus, allowing the country’s underlying economic weakness to worsen. There is much in this. Churchill had fought the 1951 election promising to defend the new Welfare State and was inclined to speak wistfully of the case for coalition government in peace as in war, a theme first heard in 1945. He felt warmly towards the small Liberal Party and had half promised to help them by introducing some kind of proportional voting, though this was quickly scuppered by the Conservative hierarchy. He railed against class war and deliberately appointed the moderate, appeasing lawyer Walter Monckton to deal with trade union and labour matters. Yet there was
one moment when Britain might have experienced a Thatcher-sized jolt, a British revolution thirty years early. It came on Churchill’s watch in 1952 when his young Chancellor, Rab Butler, proposed cutting the pound free from the system of fixed exchange rates agreed after the war at Bretton Woods. The scheme was called ROBOT. In detail it was fiendishly complicated, because of Britain’s network of obligations to so many other countries using sterling as their reserve. In essence, though, it was very simple. The pound would float partly free, or rather fall dramatically against the dollar, thus giving Britain’s struggling exporters a huge one-off boost. The government would be unable to fund its old obligations, the huge overseas defence establishment, and much of the new Welfare State. Grand housebuilding projects would be put on hold and unemployment would initially rise. But on the other hand, the bleeding of reserves and the periodic balance-of-payments crises would be a thing of the past. Britain would get the chance of a fresh start, not unlike post-war West Germany. Imports would be cut, exports would rise, sterling’s freedom in the world would be re-established and the alternative future of a genteel, endless decline might be averted. It was nothing less than a free-market national coup which would, among other things, infuriate the Americans. The historian Peter Hennessy has compared it to the desperation of the Suez war: ‘ROBOT was the desperate and risky response of frazzled yet clever men who had run out of both caution and alternative ideas.’