Cabinet's Finest Hour
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Meanwhile, a different but more important piece of history was being assembled on 16 July at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Senate Majority Leader and Chairman of the convention, Alben Barkley, ended a magnificent speech by referring at last with full authority to Roosevelt’s intentions: “He wishes in all earnestness and sincerity to make it clear that all the delegates to this convention are free to vote for any candidate.” As the convention, after a slight pause, gathered the full implication of the word ‘any’, the cry went up “we want Roosevelt.” So Roosevelt was nominated for a third term and until November there was no chance that the President would give the isolationists any comfort by giving the slightest hint that he would take America into the Europeans’ war. On 5 November Roosevelt won a third Presidential term, but though he defeated Wendell Willkie by five million votes, the electoral college margin had been close. All Roosevelt’s caution, so frustrating to Churchill and the people of Britain, was fully justified. Had he taken on the isolationists in the full frontal way which many in Britain believed he should have, it is very likely he would have lost and Willkie won. Churchill, despite pleasure at Roosevelt’s victory, knew he faced an even harder struggle to persuade the newly returned President for a third term to give help over military equipment at a faster pace, but at least he believed it would happen.
In addition to anxieties of securing military aid, Churchill had to sort out his own party and deal with the divisions that still rumbled on inside government, exacerbated by the publication of Guilty Men, as well as negotiate a substantial reshuffle to the Cabinet. Chamberlain had resigned on 29 September, suffering with cancer of the colon, and died on 9 November 1940, after declining the offer of a Knight of the Garter and an Earldom. Churchill became leader of the party upon Chamberlain’s death, attending a crowded meeting at Caxton Hall to be elected on 9 October and given a “tumultuous reception”.10 Significant additions were made to the War Cabinet; Churchill brought in Beaverbrook in August, and in October the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson became Lord President of the Council and a fully-fledged member of the War Cabinet, his role as Home Secretary assumed by Herbert Morrison. Ernest Bevin also became a member of the War Cabinet while remaining Minister of Labour, and was joined by Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood.
Two months after this reshuffle to the War Cabinet, prompted by the resignation and death of Chamberlain, Lord Lothian, British Ambassador to the United States, died suddenly in December and provided the opportunity for Churchill to bring in Eden as Foreign Secretary and remove Halifax, who was offered the newly vacant role of British Ambassador to the US. It was a position of undoubted importance, but somewhat diminished when Field Marshal Dill went to Washington in December 1941. Nicknamed ‘Dilly-Dally’ by Churchill, there was respect between them and Dill had established friendships with the US military, particularly with General George Marshall. Churchill, correctly seeing this was now the all-important relationship, moved him to become head of the Joint Staff Mission and chose General Alan Brooke to take Dill’s place as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and principal military adviser to the War Cabinet. Churchill knew that this tough-minded Northern Irishman was not going to be a pushover, nor was he. Throughout the war, Brooke resisted many of Churchill’s ideas but also Marshall’s. He was very cautious about invading France and even in 1944 had doubts about D-Day’s success. His unexpurgated diaries are the best of all the war diaries. Unvarnished, expressing his often brutal opinions, they have a ring of truth.
Churchill had fully lived up to Hilaire Belloc’s poem ‘Lord Lundy’ in his foreign postings, “My language fails! Go out and govern New South Wales”. He sent Hoare to Madrid, Malcolm MacDonald (Ramsay MacDonald’s son) to Ottawa, and Duff Cooper to Singapore. Churchill had at first approached Lloyd George for the role of British Ambassador to the US which he turned down on 16 December. Beaverbrook then spoke unprompted, he claimed, to Halifax on 17 December about Washington, and told Churchill wrongly that Halifax would go if pushed a little. Halifax however never varied in his opposition to the whole idea, describing it as an “odious thought”11 while Halifax’s wife told Churchill to his face, “The day would come when he might need E’s support”. But Churchill held all the cards. It was not possible at that stage in the war for Halifax to be seen to refuse, and Churchill knew it. From Churchill’s viewpoint there was an inexorable logic to the appointment and Lady Halifax was in essence right when she said he “wanted to get Edward out of the Government and that this gave him the chance of doing so and nothing would deter him.” Churchill told the Cabinet of Halifax’s appointment on 23 December.
The bitterness between Churchill and Halifax would linger. As David Reynolds reveals, in 1948 Churchill, when drafting his ‘Provisional Final’ version of Their Finest Hour, used these words about Halifax during the 26–28 May highly confidential War Cabinets: “‘The Foreign Secretary showed himself willing to go a long way to placate [‘buy off’ in an earlier typescript] this new and dangerous enemy’ … and in clear contrast writes ‘I found Mr Chamberlain and Mr Attlee very stiff and tough.’”12 Reynolds then cites General ‘Pug’ Ismay as the mediating influence who urged discretion, conscious no doubt that Churchill was then having to work closely with Halifax as Opposition Leader of the Lords. “I feel sure that Halifax would be hurt by any inference that he was not as tough during the war as the rest of them, he wrote on the 17 September 1948”. Ismay here referred to Halifax’s diary, to which he had access, and quoted an extract “to the effect that Halifax did not believe anything could be done to buy off Italy but wanted to avoid seeming ‘too unsympathetic to Reynaud in his distress.’”Churchill, unconvinced, wrote in the margin by way of response “General P, You have not perhaps read Reynaud’s account. I have however.’” Nevertheless, the incriminating references to Halifax, Reynolds notes, were removed and Churchill wrote merely “I found my colleagues very stiff and tough.”13 Churchill’s telegram to Reynaud on 28 May 1940 however remains, with its revealing reference to “the formula prepared last Sunday by Lord Halifax suggesting that, if Mussolini would co-operate with us in securing a settlement of all European questions, which would safe-guard our independence and form the basis of a just and durable peace for Europe, we should be prepared to discuss his claims in the Mediterranean”.14 Indeed, as Reynolds continues to note, such documents tell a story quite different to the auspicious and morale-boosting statements of Churchill’s. This is poignantly highlighted in Ismay’s recollection to Robert Sherwood of a talk between himself and Churchill on 12 June 1940 following the penultimate meeting with French leaders: “When Churchill went to the airport to return to England, he said to Ismay that, it seems ‘we fight alone’. Ismay said that he was glad of it, that ‘we’ll win the Battle of Britain’. Churchill gave him a look and remarked, ‘You and I will be dead in three months’ time.’”15
In the summer of 1953 at a lunch given by the French Ambassador, Halifax said in Clementine Churchill’s hearing unflattering comments about her husband to the effect that he, more than anyone else, had been responsible for India wanting to get rid of the British. She snapped back, “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” continuing “if the country had depended on you we might have lost the war.”16 When Halifax asked her to apologise, Churchill said he hoped she would not.
On 29 December 1940 President Roosevelt gave one of his fireside chats on radio but this time the world, not just the nation, listened. “We must become the great arsenal of democracy” and “there can be no appeasement with ruthlessness” was matched by “no dictator, no combination of dictators.” There was no pretence – the days of isolationism were over. Roosevelt had once explained to his close adviser Rexford Tugwell his attitude to people like General Slaughter, Mac-Arthur and Joseph P. Kennedy, another eccentric leader, in his case in business: “We must tame these fellows and make them useful to us.” He wanted them either where he could keep an eye on them or out of the way.17 Roosevelt first appointed Kennedy to re
gulate the stock market on the basis that it takes a thief to catch a thief, and then made him Ambassador to Great Britain, cynically in order to keep the isolationists happy in America. In this role Kennedy is described in the Introduction to The Patriarchy as courting “new criticism in Washington and London, first as a toady for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Cliveden Set, then as a defeatist, a loudmouthed Cassandra who believed the Nazis would easily conquer Europe and Great Britain.”18 He left the UK in October unloved and despised by most people. He formally resigned in December 1940. Roosevelt had shamelessly manipulated him right to the end, even getting his endorsement for President before his election. In reality Kennedy did not do Britain much harm because his advice was discounted and Roosevelt’s relationship was direct to Churchill.
There is a particular analysis of the personalities of Churchill and Roosevelt that has never been exceeded in insight, coming from the vantage point of Washington during the war which lends it a peculiar intimacy. I refer to Isaiah Berlin’s essay which appeared in 1949 in The Atlantic Monthly and the Cornhill Magazine under the title, ‘Mr Churchill and FDR’:
Each was to the other not merely an ally, the admired leader of a great people, but a symbol of tradition and a civilisation; from the unity of their differences they hoped for a regeneration of the Western world … Mr. Roosevelt was imaginative, optimistic, Episcopalian, self-confident, cheerful, empirically-minded, fearless, and steeped in the idea of social progress; he believed that with enough energy and spirit anything could be achieved by man … Mr. Churchill was imaginative and steeped in history, more serious, more intent, more concentrated, more preoccupied, and felt very deeply the eternal differences which would make such a structure difficult of attainment. He believed in institutions and permanent characters of races and classes and types of individuals …
Berlin went on to identify “the peculiar degree to which they liked each other’s delight in the oddities and humours of life and their own active part in it. This was a unique personal bond … Mr Roosevelt’s sense of fun was perhaps the lighter, Mr Churchill’s a trifle grimmer.”
Churchill wrote to Roosevelt after his broadcast: “With this trumpet call we march forward.” Lend-Lease was on its way and with finance and military assistance. The year 1941 promised more than the bleakness of 1940 in which Britain had overcome the threat of invasion. It was to see the inexorable build-up in Japan for an act of infamy and the premeditated attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of the year, which would bring America into the war against Japan, and with Hitler’s foolish decision to declare war on America, into the war on Germany. British power would never be as crucial or as strong again, but in May 1940 Britain paved the way for victory in 1945, first over Germany and then Japan, and in that process there was no weapon or military strategy more important than that of Cabinet government in a parliamentary democracy.
As Churchill had said to the House of Commons on 4 June, “Wars are not won by evacuations.” Wars are won by the determination to fight, to lose and to fight again, and again. Had the British Cabinet decided not to fight on 28 May 1940 and instead to negotiate, it is a salutary thought that there would have been no victory celebration on 7 May 1945. Those who criticise Cabinet government today will argue that the wartime coalition government was exceptional and holds no lessons for why a more Presidential system of government, with a Prime Minister more authoritative than primus inter pares, is relevant in 2016. It came at a strange juxtaposition of historical circumstances, but in my judgement it is far from being irrelevant simply because it happened 76 years ago. There are modern lessons for Britain to learn about collective decision-making, just as there are lessons for the Labour Party over why Lansbury was removed as leader owing to a conviction that Labour would never win power with a pacifist leader. Lessons about alternative defence and foreign policies should also be learnt from Chamberlain’s hubris over Munich in 1938, Eden’s drug-induced hubris over Suez in 1956, and Blair’s hubris over the invasion of Iraq and the horrendous incompetence in the handling of the aftermath. Time can bring fresh thinking, and a return of the old values to government. But first there must be recognition of why and where things have gone badly wrong in the Presidential style of Tony Blair and in the self-styled “heir to Blair”, David Cameron, who resigned after the Brexit vote in 2016.
Underlying Cabinet government is a recognition of the value of a collective approach and the weaknesses of unbridled power. If, during the period of greatest peril our country has ever faced, Cabinet decisions were, as shown clearly in these pages, not only informed but enhanced, then such a model cannot be easily disparaged for the future. It is the strength of Churchill’s period as wartime Prime Minister that he did not try to bypass either Cabinet or Parliament. Britain was facing dictatorships, authoritarian styles of government that led through Hitler to rampant anti-Semitism and to the genocide of the Jewish people. The brutal occupation of territory and the forced migration of people were crimes against humanity. A vital element in this fight – that democracy should not just be maintained but strengthened – was the readiness of people across political parties to come together, through the willingness of politicians, hitherto competing against each other for votes, to work together for victory. The history books continue to roll out of the post-Second World War period, but there has been a tendency to focus too much on Churchill as an individual leader and not on Churchill the collective leader. Under his leadership there was a deepening of democracy from 1940–45. He and his colleagues built the machinery to bring people together in a government of national unity, a spirit that continued in the UK through Attlee’s peacetime Cabinet government.
1 Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), pp 554–555.
2 Martin Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, Volume II: Never Surrender (Heinemann, 1994). p 255.
3 Sir Oswald Mosley, principally known as the founder of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). MP for Harrow 1918–24 and Smethwick 1926–31. Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Labour Government of 1929–31. Formed the New Party which merged with the BUF (also known as the Blackshirts) in 1932. Interned in 1940, released in 1943.
4 Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian military officer and politician who became nominal head of government of Norway after the Nazi occupation. The puppet government, known as the Quisling regime, was dominated by ministers from Nasjonal Samling, the party he founded in 1933. After WW2, he was put on trial for high treason and executed in October 1945.
5 Alexander Cadogan, The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan O.M. 1938–1945. Ed. David Dilks (Cassell & Company Ltd, 1971), p 296.
6 Martin Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, p 395.
7 General de Gaulle, War Memoirs: The Call to Honour 1940–1942, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Collins, 1955), p 20.
8 Anthony Howard, RAB: The Life of R A Butler (Jonathan Cape, 1990), pp 96–100.
9 Simon Hoggart, David Leigh, Michael Foot (Hodder and Stoughton, 1981), pp 80–83.
10 Jonathan Schneer, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet (Basic Books, 2014), p 38.
11 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, The Life of Lord Halifax (Head of Zeus, 2014), pp 270–280.
12 David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Penguin, 2005), p 171.
13 Ibid.
14 David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, p 172.
15 Ibid.
16 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, p 299.
17 Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, p 320.
18 David Nasaw, The Patriarch; The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P Kennedy (Penguin Press, 2012).
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Epilogue: Prime Minister to President – conflict and the post-war Cabinets
On 6 April 1955 Anthony Eden followed Churchill as Prime Minister. After calling a general election in May of the same ye
ar, he emerged with a majority of 58 seats in the Commons, a stunning personal victory. It could have been, and perhaps should have been, the start of a great Prime Ministership. However a combination of illness and temperament made it the worst period of governance in British Cabinet history until the Iraq War of 2003.
On 20 July 1956 President Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal Company. Eden took this very personally, seeing it as a direct threat to British interests. He compared Nasser to Mussolini in the 1930s and declared he must not be allowed “to have his thumb on our windpipe”. Despite active diplomacy and sanctions, Nasser was still in control of the Suez Canal nearly three months later. Before long there were grumblings in the Conservative Party about Eden’s overall performance.
On Sunday 14 October 1956 Eden held what turned out to be a fateful meeting with the French Prime Minister Guy Mollet’s emissaries, General Maurice Challe, a deputy Chief of Staff of the French Air Force, and Albert Gazier, France’s acting Foreign Minister. Anthony Nutting, Eden’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, was also present. The Challe plan, based on a conspiracy with Israel against Egypt, was presented and, ruinously, was adopted by Eden as the central policy instrument in his handling of the crisis.
Until this meeting with Mollet and Challe, Eden had had no inkling that the French were already deep in collusion with the Israelis over Egypt. The plan was that Israel would invade the Suez Canal Zone on the agreed understanding that British and French forces would then intervene to separate the Israeli and Egyptian forces, posing to the world as peacekeepers between the combatants. The RAF would take out Egyptian planes that might otherwise have threatened Israeli territory.