Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  Mind you, with a vocabulary of more than sixty thousand, Churchill could play any shot he liked, and he was skilled at mixing the short with the flowery, the punchy with the bombastic. Chinese-indentured labour in the Transvaal, he famously said in 1906, could not be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word, without some risk of terminological inexactitude. Which was soon taken up as a delightful parliamentary euphemism for a lie.

  He mobilised the English language, said John F. Kennedy (trying to make up for his father), and sent it into battle. In 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize—not for “peace,” the traditional gong for politicians, but for Literature: “for his mastery of historical and biographical descriptions, as well as for his brilliant oratory in defending exalted values.” Whatever you may think of the taste of the judges (who passed over the claims of W. H. Auden, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Ezra Pound and so on), that seems to be an achievement unlikely to be equalled, in the near future, by any other British politician.

  His character is still so talismanic in British politics that almost any foible or course of action can be justified if it can be shown to be “Churchillian.” Newspapers once teased the gentle figure of Bob McLennan, MP, after he was seen to shed a tear on being deprived of the leadership of the Social and Liberal Democrats, a now defunct centrist party. He explained that he had a “Churchillian” tendency to weep. If people are saying you are getting a bit long in the tooth for frontline politics, you can always point out that Churchill was sixty-five when he first became Prime Minister. If you get drunk before lunchtime, you can point to Churchill’s vast potations of champagne, whisky and brandy. If you must smoke, you reply to your critics that Churchill was hardly ever seen without a cigar. If someone tells you that you can’t combine writing and politics, you can remind them that Churchill wrote journalism throughout his career, and—for heaven’s sake!—he continued to write the History of the English-Speaking Peoples after Hitler had invaded Poland and he was in charge of the entire British navy.

  If you make a terrific goof, you can point to Churchill’s recovery from the debacle of Gallipoli. If you are making a speech and suddenly lose your place and freeze, there is always the example of Churchill, who once dried up so badly in the House of Commons that he simply sat down and put his head in his hands. If people have a tendency to make jokes about you, don’t forget the politician and historian Roy Jenkins’s insight about Churchill (and also, of course, about Roy Jenkins), that all truly great men have an element of comicality about them. If you were a flop at school, and you couldn’t handle math, let alone Latin, Churchill is your model. He is the perpetual Chancellor of the University of Life.

  He remains uniquely popular with all voters not just because he led a wartime coalition, but because his political identity was so protean. There is something there for almost everyone. Take the eternal debate on “Europe.” A British Euro-sceptic can point to his 1930 speech, in which he insisted that Britain, like the Shunammite woman, would always dwell apart from the rest of Europe. A Euro-enthusiast, on the other hand, has plenty of shimmering postwar rhapsody about the need to create a United States of Europe. He invokes God (I am ready to meet my maker; whether the Almighty is ready for the ordeal of meeting me is another question), and yet he could hardly be called a Christian.

  His judgments swoop and veer. He began the 1930s by saying that Mussolini was “the Roman genius . . . the greatest lawgiver among men.” Which was not exactly the stuff to give the troops in the 1940s. He hated Soviet communism as much as he hated fascism, and once said that he had tried to strangle the Soviet Union at birth. But at a summit in Moscow he toasted Stalin in the following emetic terms: “I walk through this world with greater courage and hope, when I find myself in a relationship of friendship and intimacy with that great man, whose fame has gone out not only over all Russia but the world.” He straddles political divides, with complete incorrigibility and lack of embarrassment.

  If you go into the lobby of the House of Commons, you can see one of Oscar Nemon’s great statues of Churchill, in the act of straddling, and you will notice something about the left toe. While the rest of the statue is a dark brownish black, the toe has been buffed and polished to a golden brilliance. That is because Winston Churchill’s left toe is like the shiny bosses on the Gates to the Heavenly City in Tiananmen Square, or the much-rubbed rock underneath the altar of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It is a sacred object, which politicians of all parties have got into the habit of caressing, with trailing fingers, as they make their way into the Chamber. It is as if they hope that some of that astral genius will flow through the toe end and up their arms, fortifying them for their statement about the Educational Maintenance Allowance, or Housing Benefit, or whatever it happens to be.

  The Serjeant at Arms has asked MPs to stop the habit because the bronze is wearing thin. But still they frot and rub, MPs of all parties. Liberals claim him because in 1904 he defected from the Tory party, announcing, “I hate the Tory party, their men, their words and their methods, and I feel no sort of sympathy with them.” Tories can obviously claim him, because he then re-ratted and became a rather too-purist Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s. He led the nation as a Tory and died a Tory. Margaret Thatcher was so keen to demonstrate an affinity with him that she once referred to him familiarly as “Winston,” though there is no evidence that they ever met.

  Labour has traditionally claimed that he was put in power with Labour votes in 1940, and that they can therefore boast paternity of his wartime premiership. Roy Jenkins says that this is a myth, and that Attlee would equally have settled for Halifax—who might well have been tempted to make some sort of accommodation with Hitler. What is certainly true is that Churchill’s politics—imperialist, quixotic, traditionalist but basically softhearted—were not as much at variance with Attlee’s socialism as is sometimes supposed.

  Let us go back to that chaotic event at the dog track, on the eve of his electoral humiliation, in July 1945. Churchill has been booed about housing and food production, and he tries to rescue the occasion by making his central pitch against Labour and socialism. “All these plans will be nullified by foolish faction fights about idiotic ideologies and philosophical dreams about absurd Utopian worlds which will never be seen except by great improvements of the human heart and the human head.” There was a roar of laughter, reported Time magazine, and Churchill said, “I am sorry if that hurts.”

  It isn’t clear from the report what they were laughing at. Perhaps it was his Tory supporters showing their relief and pleasure at hearing the old alliterative whoosh and whack of his rhetoric. Perhaps they liked to hear him give the lefties a kicking. Or perhaps there were some who were laughing at him, who thought he sounded frankly parodic and out of touch. There were people in that crowd who remembered the unemployment of the 1930s, and who were willing to give Labour a go at building a Utopian world, whether or not Churchill said the project was absurd.

  Churchill’s attack on Labour was a variant of his ill-fated “Gestapo” broadcast of about a month earlier. The gist of his criticism (and it is a point that continues to be made to this day) is that Labour has an unrealistic interpretation of human nature, and will require all sorts of bureaucracy for the government to enforce its will. In other words, it is the old “nanny state” argument; and it was a bit rich, frankly, coming from Churchill.

  He had just spent the last five years in the biggest exercise in top-down government the country had ever seen, with himself on top. In a famous cartoon by David Low, serried ranks of men line up behind Churchill, rolling up their sleeves and marching in step; the caption reads, “All behind you, Winston.” It wasn’t just a question of “let us go forward together, with our united strength.” It was turn off those lights, melt down those railings, give up your books to be pulped and, no, we have no bananas.

  A. J. P. Taylor begins his wonderful history of Brita
in between 1914 and 1945 with the remark that before 1914 a sensible law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman. By 1945 Londoners had got used to a world where they were told what they should wear, what they should eat, how they should cook it and what sort of things they should talk about in public. When in 1944 the first V2 rocket landed in Chiswick, the government tried to pretend it was a gas explosion.

  Some have tried to maintain that Churchill was somehow estranged from this expansion in the functions of the state, and they cite his merry boozing, or his Falstaffian memo to Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food. Woolton was trying to deal with the meat shortage by persuading people that they might enjoy a kind of meatless pasty known as the Woolton pie. “Almost all the food faddists I have known have died young after a long period of senile decay,” Churchill wrote. “The British soldier is far more likely to be right than the scientists. All he cares about is beef. I do not understand why there should be these serious difficulties about food, considering the tonnages we are importing. The way to lose the war is to try to force the British public into a diet of milk, oatmeal, potatoes, etc, washed down on gala occasions with a little lime juice.”

  This is all good knockabout stuff: but it was surely nanny who prevailed in the coalition government. It has suited both sides of the argument—Labour and Tory—to pretend over the years that the coalition was a yoking together of opposites, or that Churchill was the flamboyant bellicose frontman for a left-wing domestic administration, a camp Conservative carapace for a socialist mollusc. This does not do justice to Churchill’s instincts and record. It was Attlee’s view that he had “sympathy, incredibly wide sympathy, for ordinary people all over the world.” Indeed it is the view of Andrew Roberts, the most eminent of modern Churchillians, that “he was unremittingly left-liberal all his life.”

  In 1908 he was one of the first British politicians to call for a minimum wage. In 1910 he refused to allow troops to be deployed against coal miners in the Tonypandy rioters. In 1911 he wanted a referendum (of male voters, naturally) on the issue of female suffrage, and was turned down by Prime Minister Asquith. Above all, it is just not right to imagine that Churchill was somehow ignorant of or uninvolved in the wartime genesis of the welfare state. He gave a broadcast on 21 March 1943, called “After the War,” in which he foresaw a four-year plan of postwar reconstruction, “to cover five or six large measures of a practical character.”

  These were to include “national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave”; the abolition of unemployment by government policies, “which would exercise a balancing influence upon development which can be turned on and off as circumstances require”; “a broadening field for state ownership and enterprise”; new housing; major reforms to education; largely expanded health and welfare services.

  There is Churchill, in the middle of the war, mapping out the very shape of the New Jerusalem that Attlee and Co. were to try to create, up to and including greater nationalisation. No wonder people were disappointed, in the General Election campaign, by his prophecies of a socialist “Gestapo,” with vast bureaucracies of civil servants who were no longer servants and no longer civil. It seemed so inconsistent with his own key selling point, that he was capable of uniting people in a great national effort. He seemed to be desperately exaggerating the threat of state control in order to create a greater sense of difference between himself and Labour.

  His attacks misfired because he sounded like a party hack when people had been used to hearing him speak as the pater patriae and the saviour of his country. Which, by the way, he certainly was. Churchill’s enduring grip on the imaginations of today’s public and politicians can be attributed to two vast and interconnected achievements.

  He led Britain through the transformational experience of the Second World War, a time of agonising trial in which barriers of class and sex (and to some extent race) were broken down more effectively than in any previous epoch, and in which people could see the job-generating role the government had played. He is therefore one of the key makers of the modern epoch, and the outlines of the postwar settlement—the welfare state, the NHS, comprehensive education—can be clearly seen in his administration. Churchill helped to build our postwar existence, and more important still he helped to ensure that Britain had a postwar existence to enjoy. He helped ensure that Britain won the war. If Winston Churchill had not taken over in 1940, it really looks as if the outcome might have been different.

  It is easy to forget how bad things looked. Britain was alone. The Russians had behaved with nauseating cynicism, joining the Germans to carve up Poland and conspiring to supply Hitler’s war machine. France had folded with dizzying speed. So had Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium; in fact the whole of continental Europe was under the Nazi jackboot in one way or another, and some were positively licking the leather.

  The American ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, had made the cheering prediction that democracy in Britain was finished. The more Churchill learned about the military position in the summer of that year, the more desperate things seemed. According to his chiefs of staff, it all depended on the RAF, and if they lost control of the skies to the Luftwaffe, it was not at all clear that Britain could hang on.

  With the benefit of hindsight, it can appear to us now as if all Britain had to do was survive, stick it out until the Americans did the right thing in the end (having exhausted the available alternatives) and came in to pull our chestnuts out of the fire. No one could have known in the summer of 1940 that the Japanese would make the mistake of bombing Pearl Harbor, or that the Germans would simultaneously declare war on America, or that Hitler would be so deranged as to attack Russia. There were people in London who remembered the dreadful losses of the First World War, and argued that it might be possible to cut a deal with Hitler—perhaps using Mussolini as an intermediary. Perhaps British possessions in the Mediterranean and Africa could be traded for peace, it was hinted.

  Churchill was having none of it. There are still some historians who contend that his “finest hour” was in fact a disaster for Britain. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how that counterfactual world—in which, say, Halifax had sued for peace in 1940—would have been a total political and moral eclipse, a plunge into darkness, for this country and for the world.

  Yes, Britain might have hung on for longer to parts of the empire. But it is frankly hard to see why Gandhi and his supporters should have desisted in their campaign for independence in the face of a pusillanimous capitulation by Britain to Germany. More important, the European continent would have been lost to a barbaric Nazi system, and Britain would have been a pathetic bobbing offshore creature that depended on maintaining good trading relations with a revolting and racist regime. It was Churchill who saw that threat most clearly, and he had done so for years.

  He was right about rearmament in the 1930s, when the Labour Party was hopelessly pacifist. He was right to object to appeasement, when most of the Conservative Party supported it. It was not politically cost-free to take this stand, incidentally. There was a concerted move, led by some local toad, to deselect him from his seat.

  It was Churchill who found the words that emboldened the British people. When he spoke of fighting on to the end, they believed that he, Churchill, would fight on to the end. His courage was contagious, and it was important that insofar as people knew anything of his background, they knew that his life was littered with tales of spectacular derring-do. He first came under fire in Cuba in 1896, where he acquired his habits of cigars and siestas. In 1897 he repeatedly saw action on the North-West Frontier of India, riding his grey pony along the front line and almost getting killed. In 1898 he took part in the last cavalry charge launched by the British army, at Omdurman in the Sudan, writing afterwards to his mother, “I shot five men for certain and two doubtful. Nothing
touched me. I destroyed all those who molested me.”

  In 1899 we find him working as a newspaper correspondent in the Boer War—but he was a journalist determined to become the story. His train is derailed in an ambush; he heroically organises a counterattack; he is captured; he escapes from prison, jumps from a goods train, hides in a wood and is hailed by cheering crowds in Durban. In the run-up to the First World War he not only championed the airplane—when the thing had been barely invented, and must have seemed insanely dangerous—but went up 140 times himself and was on the verge of taking his pilot’s licence when he acceded to Clementine’s entreaties.

  After engendering the disaster of the Dardanelles, he atoned by leaving office and going out to the Western Front, to take personal charge of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers—and made more than a hundred expeditions to No Man’s Land, prowling around at night in the barbed wire and corpses. Throughout the Second World War there was something prodigious about the physical energy and recklessness of a man in his late sixties. He travelled more than 110,000 miles on his desperate missions of shuttle diplomacy between Stalin and Roosevelt and others, enduring jolting, freezing, cattle-class conditions. In 1943 he spent 173 days out of the country. Planes he had used were shot down; ships were sunk after he disembarked.

  As a veteran of the Western Front, he may have been nervous about the consequences of a full-frontal attack on Nazi-held Europe, but when D-Day came around, George VI himself had to write to him to beg him to abandon his plan to attend the landings in person. I suppose a psychologist might want to understand the origins of this volcanic appetite for risk taking and self-promotion. One might conjecture that he was compensating for some insecurity. There is that curious and malicious accusation (pursued by a fatuous Liberal MP and journalist named Henry Labouchere) that as a young officer he had buggered another subaltern.