by John Kelly
I have quoted certain words of Oliver Cromwell. I will quote certain other words. I do it with great reluctance because I am speaking of those who are old friends and associates of mine, but they are words which, I think, are applicable to the present situation. This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation.
You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the Name of God, go.
During the final hours of the debate, Cromwell’s words—powerful, contemptuous, unanswerable—resonated through the House, making everything that came after them sound anticlimactic. At about midnight, the debate over, the House emptied out into the warm May night. The government had sustained a potentially mortal blow, and the Chamberlain men knew it. In seven hours or so, “In the Name of God, go,” and “Missed the bus!” would be bold-faced headlines in a hundred morning papers, and by the next evening they would be the punch lines to a dozen pub jokes. Henry Channon went to bed “most uneasy about tomorrow,” and the next morning John Colville awoke in a “nadir of gloom.” A week before, the junior whips who had descended on the departing MPs on the evening of May 7 might have extinguished a backbench revolt with an “Iron Man defense” of threats, bribes, and promises of cabinet changes. But, emboldened by Amery’s speech, the dissidents now would settle for nothing less than Chamberlain’s head. “The efficacy of the Government depend[s] on the character of the Prime Minister, and the [present] Prime Minister’s character ha[s] not proved sufficient,” Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that night. In Downing Street, Chief Whip Margesson warned a group of government supporters that compromises, unthinkable a few days earlier, might now be necessary to save Chamberlain.
Impressed by the strength of anti-Chamberlain sentiment in the Conservative backbenches, Clement Attlee agreed to file a motion for a confidence vote. The government would win, Attlee knew; the large Conservative majority in the House ensured that. But Chamberlain needed more than a numerical majority to survive. If a significant minority of Conservative MPs defected to the opposition, the government would suffer a moral defeat and the prime minister would have to resign.
The next afternoon, the Strangers’ Gallery and backbenches were abuzz with gossip when Herbert Morrison rose to speak a little after 4:00 p.m. Rumor had it that Morrison, a senior Labour politician, would introduce the confidence motion, and rumor proved correct. As Morrison was concluding—“I ask that the vote . . .”—Chamberlain suddenly sprang to his feet and approached the dispatch box. Almost for the first time since the Whitsun debate began, the House was perfectly quiet.
“I do not seek to evade criticism but I say this to my friends—and I have friends in the House.” Here, Chamberlain paused and turned to the Conservative backbenches. He seemed to be expecting a show of support; none was forthcoming. The House’s silence, previously respectful, now became embarrassing. “Anyhow,” the prime minister resumed, “I have friends in this House . . . I accept the challenge. I welcome it indeed.”
A brief burst of cheers from the Conservative backbenches produced a nod of appreciation from the prime minister, but when he returned to his seat on the front bench, the smile was gone and he looked old and tired and wounded. “Little Neville,” Henry Channon thought. “[He seems] heartbroken and shriveled.”
The speeches that followed retraced the pattern of the previous night. Battalion after battalion of government “yes men” rushed into the breach to defend the prime minister, and anti-Chamberlainite MPs continued to exclude Churchill from their criticism of the government. When the first lord rose to protest the exemption, Lloyd George gave the House a master class in needle threading. “The right honorable gentleman must not allow himself to be converted into an air raid shelter to prevent the splinters from hitting his colleagues.”
Delivering the government’s closing statement on Norway, Churchill attempted to thread the needle himself. For an hour he interspersed a factual account of the campaign with lamentations about Labour’s decision to ask for a vote of confidence. He called on Conservative dissidents to end “prewar feuds,” and he defended Chamberlain’s right to appeal to his friends. Arguably, what Churchill left out of his speech was more significant than what he put in. He did not defend the prime minister’s conduct of the war or praise his fellow ministers. Indeed, almost the only person he did praise was himself. “Let me remind the House . . . when I, with some friends, was pressing [for rearmament], it was not only the government that objected but the opposition parties.”
Harold Nicolson thought the speech masterful. “Winston [sounded] absolutely loyal” while at the same time signaling that “he really has nothing to do with this confused and timid gang.” Other listeners were less impressed. John Peck, one of Churchill’s Admiralty aides, thought his performance “did not ring entirely true.” Violet Bonhom Carter, the daughter of former prime minister Herbert Asquith and a leading figure in the Liberal Party, also detected a note of inauthenticity in the speech. In particular, Bonhom Carter thought Churchill’s summation sounded “forced.” Dingle Foot, another Liberal politician, called the speech “the least impressive of [Churchill’s] career.” Like many Chamberlain supporters, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe suspected there was a reason why Churchill, usually a sublime orator, had sounded so flat. She also found his reaction to Lloyd George’s air raid shelter quip revealing. “Winston [looked] like a fat baby swinging his legs on the front bench trying not to laugh” while the other ministers sat “stone faced.”
After Churchill finished, shouts of “Clear the lobbies!” and “Division!” filled the air, and the ancient rhythms of parliamentary life asserted themselves. MPs rose from their seats, walked to the back of the House, and divided. Chamberlain’s supporters joined the line in front of the government lobby, opponents joined the line in front of the opposition lobby. (The lobbies were long corridors.) Normally, divisions are decorous affairs, but not that night. Too much was at stake. Taunts of “Missed the bus!” and “Yes men!” “Get out! Go! In the Name of God, go!” and “Rats!” flew between the two lines.
For the Labour MPs, that night was about Chamberlain and his conduct of the war, but it was also about the hunger marches of the 1920s and the doles of the 1930s. It was about billy clubs and blood-drenched strikers and hatreds and resentments that had accumulated over seventeen years of mostly Conservative rule, the last three under Neville Chamberlain. For the dissident Tory MPs, it had the character of a family tragedy. In background, outlook, and belief, the members of the House Conservative caucus were similar. They had gone to the same schools, served in the same regiments, attended one another’s weddings. They had watched one another’s children be baptized, had buried one another’s parents, and, except for Neville Chamberlain and his government, they had believed in the same things: in England, in Crown and Empire, in patriotism, loyalty, duty, and the Conservative Party, the party of their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. If betraying one’s country was the worst thing a man could do, then, for many of the dissident Tories standing in the opposition line, betraying one’s party with a cabal of socialists was a very close second. It was especially so when David Margesson would be waiting to greet you at the other end of the opposition lobby, his face screwed up into an “expression of implacable resentment.” Approaching the passage to the lobby, Edward Spears found himself thinking, “How many men have faced [this entrance] wondering whether they were doing the right thing, whether in four steps they had ruined their political careers?”
The outcome of the division was never in doubt. The large Conservative majority in the Commons ensured a Chamberlain victory. What mattered was the margin of victory, and here the tellers [the vote counters] had a surprise: the prime minister’s customary majority, 200 to 250 votes, had shrunk to 81. The House erupted. “Go! Go!” “Resign! Resign!” “Missed the bus!” Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister, and Joshua Wedgewood, a Labour MP, st
ood up and sang an off-key version of “Rule Britannia.” Chamberlain endured the taunts for as long as he could, then “pick[ed] his way over the protruding feet of his colleagues” and left. Watching him walk out, “following in the wake of all his dead hopes and fruitless efforts,” Spears “was surprised to find himself feeling intensely sorry for him.”
* * *
When Clem Davies met Joe Kennedy later that night, the prime minister’s supporters were already putting it about in London clubland that Chamberlain planned to remain in office. Davies and Kennedy discussed the political situation for a while with their host, the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook. Then Kennedy said that President Roosevelt would want to be briefed on the debate, and disappeared into another room to place a transatlantic call. When Kennedy returned, he looked “haggard and shaken”—Roosevelt said Holland had been invaded, Rotterdam was in flames, and German parachute troops had seized control of all the main bridges in the Netherlands. Davies immediately placed a call to Churchill, then to Sam Hoare, the air minister. Neither man had heard anything about an invasion. Nor had the Dutch ambassador, who fainted when Davies told him the news. An hour later, the Dutch government announced that the rumor was false, and the Dutch ambassador went back to bed and slept the sleep of the saved. Joe Kennedy had a more turbulent night. The evening’s events had confirmed his fears that Britain was unready to meet the real war that he was sure was imminent. “There is a very definite undercurrent of despair because of the hopelessness of the whole task for England.”
The next day the press was full of speculation about Churchill succeeding Chamberlain, but, oddly, there was very little discussion or analysis of how that change would alter Britain’s war aims. With Churchill in office, there would be no more talk of teaching Germany that aggression does not pay, or of inducing changes of heart and mind. Under a Churchill government, Britain’s war aim would be victory, complete and unambiguous, even if that meant a return to the total war of a generation earlier.
CHAPTER SIX
THE ROGUE ELEPHANT
May 9 was another day of melting beauty and black news. The British position in Norway continued to crumble, the rumors of a German offensive in the West continued to multiply, and the leadership crisis in Westminster continued to intensify. In the May Gallup poll, Chamberlain’s unfavorability rating rose to 67 percent. “That bastard Chamberlain; I can’t put into words what I think about him.” “Oh, Christ, he’s frightfully obstinate.” “He won’t see any point but his own.” The man-on-the-street interviews in Political Crisis, Mass Observation’s report on the Norway debate, spoke forcefully of what the report called “genuine . . . mass pressure to change the Prime Minister.” The morning-after coverage of the debate also spoke forcefully of the desire for change. Several major papers were administering last rites to Chamberlain on their front pages, and several others already had him dead and buried and had his political obituary on their front pages. The requiems were premature. A majority of the Conservative MPs in the House of Commons still supported the prime minister. So did the new young king, George VI, who knew something about public abuse himself.
In the spring of 1940, George VI was in the third year of his reign, just long enough to have become a favorite piñata of the chattering classes in London and Paris. “A very dull man,” said the British writer Nancy Mitford. “Another snipe from the Windsor Marshes,” said the MP Harold Nicolson. A “moron,” declared former French premier Édouard Daladier. Daladier’s remark was particularly uncharitable. It was true that George VI had placed sixty-eighth out of sixty-eight on his entrance exam for the naval college at Osborne, and sixty-first out of sixty-seven on his exam for the naval college at Dartmouth; but placed in context, the scores were not as bad as they looked. As one observer noted, the “average London club man” would not have done any better. It was also true that the king lacked personal glamour, but his older brother, Edward VIII, had possessed bucketfuls of glamour and no character—and look what that had wrought: Wallis Simpson and the yearlong abdication crisis. Devon, Dorset, Kent, Norfolk, and Suffolk were happy to have the earnest, stable, trustworthy, dull George VI and his strong-minded, porky little Scottish queen in Buckingham Palace.
The king’s friendship with Chamberlain had its roots in the abdication crisis. Then chancellor of the Exchequer, Chamberlain’s skillful handling of the financial side of abdication had impressed the new king, and in time respect led to trust and trust to “a bond” between the two men. Devoted to “duty and family,” the king and the prime minister had much in common, says British historian Andrew Roberts. “They were both intensely private individuals. Furthermore, both wanted to regard German claims in the best possible light, feeling as they did a deep dislike for Bolshevism.” Beyond that, both men were sensitive to the cry of Never Again! And, as king-emperor, George VI was particularly sensitive to warnings that a new German war could cost Britain its empire and its great power status. If 1914–18 had demonstrated anything, it was that the delicate architecture of the imperial state did not stand up well to the rigors of total war. In 1914 the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires had seemed as enduring as time; eight years later, the kaiser was a farmer in Holland, and the czar and Charles I (the ruler of Austro-Hungary) were dead. One day not long after the war began, a Foreign Office official found the king feeling “a little defeatist” after a talk with Ambassador Kennedy, who had given George VI a lecture on “the loss of prestige of the British Empire in the changed circumstances in which we live.”
The relationship between Chamberlain and the king also had a political dimension. Under British law, a sovereign’s political powers are severely circumscribed; but even in the twentieth century, royal prestige could make a wink, a nod, and a word from the palace go a long way; and George VI, reticent in other spheres of life, was less reticent about employing this unofficial source of power and influence. Britons who cheered the king, the queen, and Chamberlain on the palace balcony after the Munich Conference were left in no doubt about where the Crown stood on appeasement; and guests within earshot of the queen and Chamberlain at a dinner party in July 1939 were left in no doubt about the Crown’s dim view of Churchill. During the Norway debate, the king pushed his unofficial powers a step further. Knowing that Chamberlain’s political survival rested on convincing a reluctant Labour Party to join a national government under him, during an audience after the first day of debate, the king asked Chamberlain, “Would it help if I spoke to Attlee . . . and say that I hoped they [the Labour Party] would realize that they must pull their weight and join a national government?” The prime minister said he wanted to think on the matter, and as he was thinking on it his luck appeared to take a turn for the better.
On May 9, a sizable number of the Conservative MPs who had voted no or had abstained on the confidence motion awoke with a severe case of morning-after guilt. Heartened by the sudden shower of mea culpas raining down on the Conservative Central Office, the Tory whips prepared a package of promises, including a pledge to form a national government and to increase Churchill’s powers and offer perks, such as choice committee assignments and better constituency services. Then they invited the penitent, the mournful, and the self-seeking into the office for a talk. The third element in what became known as the prime minister’s “Iron Man defense” was a whispering campaign against Churchill. Just before lunch on the ninth, Harold Nicolson heard that “the Whips are putting it about that the whole business [the confidence vote] was a snap vote cunningly engineered by Duff Cooper and Amery.” For his unexpected turn of good luck on May 9 Chamberlain also owed a debt of gratitude to his opponents.
Almost to a man, the rebel Tories who voted no on the confidence motion stood under the flag of Churchill, and, almost to a man, the Labour MPs who voted no disliked Churchill as much as, and in some cases more than, they disliked Chamberlain. In many Labour homes, the name Churchill was synonymous with the name Tonypandy. In Labour Party legend, when miners in the Welsh town we
nt on strike in 1910, Home Secretary Churchill sent the army in to break the strike; in reality, Churchill sent the army in to protect the miners from the local police. But over the years, the Tonypandy legend acquired—as legends often do—the power of truth. In Labour households, a generation of children absorbed it with their mother’s milk. If Labour was going to serve under a Conservative prime minister in a national government, then Attlee, Greenwood, Hugh Dalton, and the other senior party leaders wanted that Conservative PM to be Lord Halifax. Steady of temperament and sound of judgment, the word that most naturally attached itself to the name of Edward Halifax was “blameless.” Accordingly, the foreign secretary was also the first choice of the king, who was “bitterly opposed to Winston succeeding Chamberlain,” and of the queen, who shared the king’s feelings about Churchill.
Fearing a divisive fight over the succession question, on the morning of the ninth the leading opposition groups agreed to put aside that question for now and to focus their energies on bringing down Chamberlain.
* * *
“Don’t agree and don’t say anything.”
It was the lunch hour on the ninth, and Anthony Eden and Churchill were sitting in a London restaurant with Kingsley Wood. Perhaps because the whips had been offering Wood’s head to dissident Tories all morning, the lord privy seal was in an indiscreet mood. “Neville ha[s] decided to go and wants Halifax to succeed him, and you to endorse the choice,” Wood said, then offered Churchill a piece of advice. The prime minister had called an afternoon meeting to discuss the leadership question. When he raises the succession issue, “don’t agree and don’t say anything.” Eden was “shocked” by Wood’s indiscretion. He was a Chamberlain man, and here he was, casually betraying years of loyalty and friendship over lunch in a noisy London restaurant. Still, Wood’s advice was “good,” so Eden “seconded it.”