by John Kelly
A sharp-tongued, fading Southern beauty, Lady Astor had a titled, wealthy husband—Waldorf Astor; a history as an appeaser for which she had repented; and a history as an anti-Semite, for which she had half repented. For her saucy Scarlett O’Hara–like manner, Lady Astor had repented not at all. “You’re the kind of woman my mother warned me about,” one alarmed young man had said when she offered to give him a personal tour of Parliament. Lady Astor also had many influential friends, and on May 7, the first day of the Whitsun debate, she invited several of them to a luncheon at 4 St. James Place to vet Lloyd George. The guest of honor arrived a few minutes late—and, as always, perfectly turned out. His mane of snow-white hair was combed into a Prince Valiant bob; his suit and tie were impeccably matched. Lady Astor, who was famously blunt, asked her guest point-blank if he wanted to return to Downing Street—and Lloyd George, who was famously evasive, provided his vetters with an hour of incisive, witty, amusing, and occasionally nasty word portraits of Chamberlain, Churchill, Reynaud, Clemenceau, and Lord Liverpool. The interview “brought all his evasive techniques into play,” said one exasperated vetter, Tom Jones, a prominent civil servant and educator. Jones left the luncheon feeling that the guest of honor desired high office but “preferred to await his country’s summons a little longer and . . . he expected to receive it as the peril grew.” Jones was not far off the mark. Lloyd George had already decided what conditions he would and would not accept if he were offered Downing Street again; in the latter category was a mandate for victory. “I could not produce a decisive victory as I did last time,” he told his aide, A. J. Sylvester. “We have made so many mistakes that we are not in nearly so good a position.”
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The Whitsun debate was one of the most anticipated events of the spring. By 9:00 a.m. on May 7, six hours before the start of the debate, Parliament Square was already half full, and each arriving bus and car seemed to deposit a new group of spectators. Some of the early arrivals had brought along a newspaper to read; others passed the time in conversation or closed their eyes and turned their faces toward the morning sun. May had brought spectacularly good weather. Something about the slant of the light that spring, people said. Later in the month, when the news from France grew grave and the sky remained a flawless robin’s-egg blue, people would feel mocked by the beauty of the days. Not then, though, after the bitter winter of 1940—the corridors of light that flooded through the tired, war-weary May streets seemed like a miracle.
The early arrivals included a sprinkling of pensioners, off-duty civil servants and policemen, a handful of surplus women (in their fifties now and close to becoming Great War artifacts), a few soldiers too fresh-faced and unmarked to have served in Norway, a few Old Contemptibles, a smattering of housewives, some stockbrokers from the City, and pro- and antiwar advocates, easily distinguishable from one another by their dress. The former appeared smart in freshly pressed Irish linens; the latter affected the disheveled, proletarian look favored by radical academics and the members of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club.
The prime minister was scheduled to open the debate with a speech on the Norwegian campaign, and Churchill to close it the next evening with a defense of the government. But when the first group of MPs arrived in the House of Commons around noon, almost everything else about the debate remained unsettled, including who the other speakers would be and whether the debate would end with a vote of confidence. Clement Davies was still pressing Attlee and Greenwood to introduce a confidence motion, but the matter of victory or defeat would turn on how many Conservative backbenchers voted with the government, and on that point Attlee felt Chamberlain had reason to feel confident. On the morning of the Norway debate, the press was also predicting a government victory. The spirit of rebellion “does not run so deep [in the Conservative Party] that the Prime Minister will be embarrassed in the House of Commons today,” said the Daily Express. The Manchester Guardian took a similar line. “When it comes to a choice between accepting the present government or finding an alternative . . . even the most critical Tories, never mind the everlasting ‘Yes men,’ will pause.” The Daily Mail offered the most succinct and credible explanation of why the government would prevail: David Margesson. Nature had endowed the Conservative chief whip with the qualities of personality essential to the efficient conduct of a whip’s duties: a bullying manner; an encyclopedic memory for slights, double crosses, and wrong votes; and a bottomless supply of invective. “You utterly contemptible little piece of shit,” Margesson snarled at one young Tory MP who failed to vote as instructed, and the MP considered himself fortunate to have gotten off so lightly. The denial of patronage, of campaign funds, and of appointments to important parliamentary committees; insidious whispering campaigns: the chief whip had a cornucopia of political punishments, and he sprinkled them like fairy dust over the errant, the rebellious, and the careless. “Brave politicians have been known to quake before the Chief Whip,” said the Daily Mail.
One of the few journalists to express skepticism about the government’s prospects was a Guardian reporter whose weekend of man-on-the-street interviews had revealed an important change in public opinion. People were now personalizing Britain’s military setbacks. They “talk of Chamberlain—rather than the Government. They say, ‘Why did Chamberlain say this or that?’ [Or] it’s like Chamberlain to believe ‘this or that.’ Some of the phrases used by the Prime Minister have been so unfortunate . . . that they have stuck in the [public’s] mind.” In an editorial, the Guardian said, “Whatever happens today, it is unlikely that Mr. Chamberlain will remain in office much longer. He is losing ground.”
The morning cabinet meeting on May 7 helped the prime minister put his political concerns into perspective. A new intelligence report indicated that the Chiefs of Staff had gotten it seriously wrong in Review of the Strategical Situation. The report warned of an imminent German offensive in the West, perhaps as imminent as the next day or the day after. Such warnings had become almost routine since Hoenmanns’s plane crash in January, but the Dutch, who expected to be attacked first, found the new report sufficiently convincing to suspend all army, navy, and air force leaves and to cancel all outgoing and incoming calls to the Netherlands. How should Britain respond if the report were to be proved true? the ministers were asked.
Sam Hoare, the new secretary of state for air and usually a reliable “wet” on matters of national security, took an unexpectedly aggressive stance. “If we fail to take immediate advantage of the German invasion of Holland to launch our air attack on Germany, an opportunity so favorable to us might never recur.” Churchill, who spoke next, also sounded out of character. The first lord urged restraint. “It would be very dangerous and undesirable to take the initiative in opening unrestricted warfare at a time when we possessed only a quarter of the striking power of the German air force.”
Kingsley Wood, the minister without portfolio, raised another objection to a British first strike. In response to a request from President Roosevelt the previous autumn, Britain had pledged not to wage an unrestricted air war unless Germany did. “We [should] scrupulously observe the rules until they have been broken by the enemy,” Wood said. After some discussion, the cabinet agreed that the decision about a British response should be postponed until the matter was studied further. Then the ministers dispersed, some worrying about the next day and the day after that; some worrying about that afternoon.
Just before three, Henry Channon ran into the prime minister in the Commons. “We chatted for a moment,” Channon wrote in his diary that night, “but it was he who made the conversation, as I was suddenly stilled by my affection for him.” Channon’s affection was the last bit of human warmth Chamberlain would experience that day.
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At 3:48 p.m., the prime minister rose from his seat and approached the dispatch box, the traditional forum for ministerial speeches. Normally at such moments Chamberlain was a supremely commanding figure. But that afternoon there was a tentat
iveness to him. The gleam of self-satisfaction was missing from his smile, conviction from his voice. Standing at the box, surveying the raucous House, he looked like a matador who had lost his nerve; and the House, always quick to sense vulnerability in a minister, pounced. Jeers and sneers rippled through the backbenches; the Speaker gaveled the session to order and Chamberlain began.
He “spoke haltingly and . . . fumbled his words and seemed tired and embarrassed,” said Channon, who was sitting almost directly behind the prime minister. A tribute to the “magnificent gallantry” of the troops brought a brief burst of “Hear! Hear!”s, but by the time Chamberlain reached the third paragraph of his speech the House had had enough of him. His observation that “our withdrawal from Norway created a profound shock both in this House and in this country” produced angry shouts of “And abroad!” and “And all over the world!” Chamberlain navigated through the next few sentences without incident; then he made a fatal error: he retreated into self-pity. “Ministers, of course, must be expected to be blamed for everything.”
“Missed the bus! Missed the bus! Missed the bus!” the House chanted.
Chamberlain tried to talk through the taunts, which only made the taunters shout louder. The Speaker banged his gavel again: “Honorable Members are anxious to hear the prime minister.” No one believed that.
“Missed the bus! Missed the bus! Missed the bus!”
“I will not allow it!” The Speaker banged his gavel a third time.
By the time Chamberlain reached the tenth paragraph of his speech, the Egyptian ambassador had fallen asleep, Henry Channon was close to tears, and the opposition MPs had concluded that the only lessons the prime minister had learned from Norway were lessons he should have learned in 1935. Mocking cheers greeted Chamberlain’s observations on the devastating effect of airpower and on the mobility of the “vast and well-equipped German armies.” It took a while for the prime minister to realize that he was being mocked. When one MP shouted, “What about production?” he replied earnestly, “Yes, production in materiel, planes, guns, everything.” Only when another MP shouted, “We said that five years ago!” did Chamberlain finally get the joke.
Realizing the damage he had done himself, a younger Chamberlain might have ended with a promise to make major changes in the war cabinet. But, now seventy-one, the prime minister’s political instincts had so atrophied that he had no idea his stubbornness on the cabinet issue had become a metaphor for everything that was wrong with his leadership. The day after the debate, the Manchester Guardian would note that it was a sign of how out of touch Chamberlain had become that he had failed to foresee that his one concession to demands for the cabinet change—the appointment of Churchill as a kind of ersatz minister of defense—would backfire and produce a lot of noisy speculation about how the prime minister was trying to subvert a popular rival by burdening him with an impossible job. “The earlier Chamberlain would have done it much more adroitly,” the Guardian noted.
Clement Attlee spoke next, but this was not the Clement Attlee of history, the architect of the British welfare state. That Attlee was still a war and half a decade away. The Attlee of the Whitsun debate was a journeyman politician with a clerk’s mustache, a constituency in Stepney, and an unruly prostate that was threatening his leadership of the Labour Party. Behind Attlee’s back there were growing complaints about his frequent absences for convalescence. A prosaic speaker, Attlee had nothing particularly memorable to say, but his care in balancing criticism of Churchill with praise was the first indication that the House was going to try to salvage Churchill from the wreckage of Norway.
No speaker threaded this particular needle with more skill than Sir Roger Keyes, a retired admiral and the MP for North Portsmouth. “I have great admiration and affection for my right honorable friend, the first lord of the Admiralty,” Keyes said after delivering a withering critique of the Trondheim operation, without mentioning Churchill by name. However, threading the needle was not what made Keyes’s speech memorable. It was who he was, a war hero; and how he was dressed, in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet. Years later, people who had been in the House that night would still remember the uniform and the simple dignity of slight, jug-eared Keyes, who for a moment seemed to step outside himself and become a symbol of what Britain stood for in the world and what it was the House’s duty to see that it continued to stand for.
Keyes concluded his speech, to tumultuous applause, at seven thirty, and the House began to empty out for dinner. By eight, everyone was gone except Leo Amery (who was scheduled to speak next), a few sleepy diehards, and the Speaker of the House, an ally of the chief whip, David Margesson. The Speaker had scheduled Amery’s speech for the dinner hour to ensure that if he made trouble, no one but a few half-deaf octogenarians would know about it. As the Speaker waited for the House to empty out a little more, Amery contemplated the moral ambiguities of his position that evening; they were almost Shakespearean in dimension. Joe Chamberlain had given Amery his start in Birmingham politics, and that night Amery planned to publically humiliate Joe’s son Neville to help Winston Churchill, a lifelong rival and sometime enemy.
The Churchill-Amery relationship was a saga in itself. It began on a summer’s day a half century earlier, when a young Winston Churchill pushed a young Leo Amery into the swimming pool at Harrow. The rivalry that arose from that “rosebud” moment persisted through five decades, during which Amery and Churchill’s mutual antagonism always proved stronger than the things they shared: a devotion to King, Country, and Empire, and similar talents and interests. Gifted intellectually and ambitious politically, both men had served terms as first lord of the Admiralty and colonial secretary, and in the 1930s both had been banished to the political wilderness for opposing appeasement. Waiting for the Speaker’s signal, Amery could be forgiven for thinking that in a fairer world, this would be his moment, not Churchill’s.
At eight ten, the signal came; Amery rose from his seat and surveyed the House. There were barely a dozen members present, and in a chamber built for more than six hundred MPs, the twelve looked like six. Amery felt his nerve slipping. He planned to speak some hard but necessary truths about the prime minister that night, but he had to be careful. Without a chorus of supporters to give his speech a national cast, some of the things he planned to say could sound low and mean and very personal. Amery was debating whether to give a shorter, softer version of his speech when Clement Davies came up behind him and “murmured in [his] ear that [he] must at all costs state the whole case against the government.” Then Davies went off to the House smoking room and the House library to fetch an audience for Amery. Meanwhile, the guests in the Strangers’ Gallery (where visitors sit) began to fix their attention on the short, squat man standing in the Tory backbenches, reviewing his notes. He appeared to be in his midsixties and bore a slight resemblance to Churchill, but he was shorter and squatter than the first lord; he looked more like a beetle than a bulldog.
Amery began, as previous speakers had, with a critique of the Norwegian campaign, but then he took the debate in a new direction. Norway, he told the House, was only a symptom. The problem was Chamberlain.
The Right hon. Gentleman, the Prime Minister [says we have] . . . been catching up on Germany’s preparations. Believe me, that is far from the truth. While we may catch up on her presently . . . there is no doubt that during these eight months, due to Germany’s flying start and our slowness off the mark, the gap between German force and ours had widened enormously as far as troops . . . equipment, tanks, and all the paraphernalia of land war are concerned. It has widened in the air even, if we reckon in things which may accrue to us. . . .
We cannot go on as we are. There must be change.
Clement Davies had made good on his promise. The backbenches were filling up. Reassured by the growing “murmurs of approval and open applause,” Amery moved to the most provocative part of his speech.
Just as our peacetime system is unsuitable for war condition
s, so too does it breed peacetime statesmen who are not too well fitted for the conduct of war. . . . Somehow we must get into government men who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory. Some 300 years ago, when this House found that its troops were being beaten again and again by the dash and daring of the Cavaliers . . . Oliver Cromwell spoke to John Hampden. . . . [He told Hampden] Your troops are most of them old and decayed serving men and tapsters and such fellows. . . . You must get men of a spirit that are as likely to go as far as they will go, or you will be beat still.
Amery paused. This morning he had recalled another Cromwell quote. It compressed everything he wanted to say about the prime minister into a single biting epithet, but, if used, the epithet—cruel beyond measure—would become Chamberlain’s scarlet letter. It would be the first thing people thought of when they thought of Chamberlain. The epithet would follow him to the grave and beyond the grave into the pages of every biography written about him and into the mind of every schoolchild who came across his name. Did Amery want to do that to Joe Chamberlain’s son? The cheers were still rising, and Amery could feel his emotions rising with them. He looked across the House; Lloyd George was smiling at him. Swept up in the intoxicating “crescendo of applause,” Amery made his decision.