The young men tried to explain their actions, but it wasn’t the Cartwright case that mattered to Joe. He wanted to know whether the Hooligans were going to continue to be a thorn in the government’s side. Was there any way to keep them in order?
“Has your little gang any principles at all?” he asked. “And, if so, what are they?”
This blunt demand left the Hooligans flustered. It was Earl Percy—the highest-ranking aristocrat among them—who finally offered the boss of Birmingham an answer. Trying to sound clever, he came up with three terms to describe Hugh Cecil’s obsession with moral and spiritual issues, Winston’s desire to cut government waste, and his own interest in the Middle East. The Hooligan principles, he told Chamberlain, were “Purity, Parsimony, and the Persian Gulf.”
“I see,” replied Joe, eyeing them critically through his monocle. “I thought they might be Pushfulness, Personalities, and the Press.”
Having put the Hooligans in their place, Joe relaxed, enjoyed his dinner, and returned to his old genial manner. He lingered afterward, making easy conversation over cigars and his favorite late-night drink, a “mixture of stout and champagne.”
By the end of the evening he had mellowed sufficiently to offer the group a few words of wisdom to ponder in the coming months. “You young gentlemen have entertained me royally, and in return I will give you a priceless secret.”
In his best whisper, no doubt, he confided the magic word: “Tariffs!”
As the young Hooligan Ian Malcolm remembered it, Chamberlain went on to explain, “Why don’t you young men take up some cause really worth fighting for, such as the protection of our markets against world-competition, and a closer economic union with the Colonies?” The group listened politely, but made no commitments. When the time came to go home, they all parted in good spirits.16
The “secret” that sly Joe had shared would indeed provide Churchill and his friends a cause “worth fighting for.” But it would not be what Joe had in mind. They would use it against him, and it would prove his undoing. The stage was being set for the greatest battle of his career, and Winston would soon emerge as one of his most implacable foes.
* * *
What Chamberlain thought he had discovered in tariffs was the golden key to the British Empire. He was intent on unlocking its potential by allowing it to develop into a strong, unified market protected from foreign competition by a high wall of tariffs. This economic union would soon turn into a political one, and then become the basis of a grand, inseparable “Federation of the Empire,” as he called it—something like a United States of Britain, governed by an imperial parliament representing England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and other major states. “The sons of Britain throughout the world,” he told a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Liverpool, “shall stand shoulder to shoulder to defend our mutual interests and common rights.”17
His dream was to become the George Washington of this federation, the father of an empire that would last for centuries, and that might even begin with Joe at the head of its imperial parliament. But getting the vast empire to unite behind a specific policy wasn’t an easy undertaking. Voters usually think first of what they want for their own part of the world, and too many of those in the parts represented by the House of Commons didn’t want what Joe was offering. They preferred free trade and cheap imported food to protection. The economic policy of the last half century had been guided by these principles, yet Chamberlain was ready to undo them. Misled by his popularity in Birmingham, and his power in the House, he failed to anticipate how fierce the opposition would be to his plans.
Not even a close call with death could make him reevaluate his ambitious project. Less than three months after confiding his “secret” to the Hooligans, he was riding along Whitehall in a hansom cab when the horse lost its footing, and he was thrown violently against the glass pane in the front, slashing open his forehead. The cut left a three-inch gash that exposed the bone. He lost a pint of blood before doctors at Charing Cross Hospital were able to tend to the wound. It was Monday, July 7, 1902, the day before his sixty-sixth birthday. The shock to his system was so great that the doctors kept him in bed for two weeks, first at the hospital and then at his London home. The enforced rest gave him lots of time to consider his future, but when he returned in August to his usual busy schedule, he had lost none of his enthusiasm for his imperial dreams. It was just a matter of choosing the right time and place for announcing his grand plan to the public.
But while Chamberlain was still recovering from his accident, and his supporters were nervously waiting for updates on his health, Lord Salisbury and his nephew Balfour decided the time was right for making big changes. In recent weeks Salisbury’s health had grown worse, and rumors had been flying that he would soon relinquish his office. Even King Edward was worried that his prime minister couldn’t last in the job much longer. He had recently given a new photograph of himself to Salisbury, who had gazed at it for a while with a confused look before mistaking it for someone else and putting it aside. “Poor old Buller,” he remarked to the king, whose large, round face only slightly resembled that of the inept General “Reverse” Buller.18
Within a week of Chamberlain’s accident, Salisbury had resigned, and Balfour was prime minister. Joe was consulted and accepted the change, but he had signaled beforehand that he was happy to stay at the Colonial Office. All the same, the move appeared to be made in haste, as if the various members of the Hotel Cecil were worried that Joe might change his mind when he felt better. They didn’t understand yet that he was already looking beyond the prime minister’s job to a future in which he would be the grand statesman of the empire.
To make sure that Joe’s family was given honorary standing in the Hotel Cecil, Balfour handed Austen Chamberlain a minor plum—postmaster general. Other changes included a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a ministerial position for one of the Hooligans—Earl Percy. But there was nothing for Churchill. He had to stand by and watch as Balfour demonstrated how easily he could lure away a member of Winston’s small group. By the end of the summer the new prime minister seemed to have a solid grip on power, and Churchill was left in a position where he had nothing to lose and every reason to continue his rearguard attacks.
* * *
One of these began on a trip to Egypt. Churchill decided to return to the Nile, which he had described so vividly only a few years earlier in The River War. This time his destination was the Aswan Dam, the latest wonder of the empire, which had just been completed at an enormous cost after almost four years of construction. It was more than a mile long, but as magnificent as it was, the dam didn’t interest Churchill as much as the company he would be keeping on the trip.
He was traveling with a distinguished party led by Sir Ernest Cassel, the brilliant German-born financier who had arranged the loan of £2.5 million to build the dam. Cassel had invited him to come as his guest to the opening of the dam on December 10. They left England on November 18 and were gone for six weeks. Among the others in their party was Sir Michael Hicks Beach, who had resigned from the Cabinet in the summer after serving for seven years as Chancellor of the Exchequer. His resignation had come in the wake of disagreements with Chamberlain in early discussions on the tariff issue, though this wasn’t publicized at the time. For Churchill, however, what mattered was that he now had the opportunity to spend several weeks in close company with two of the leading experts on finance in the kingdom. In fact, Cassel was King Edward’s closest financial advisor.
Churchill turned the trip into a crash course on the very subjects that Chamberlain would be raising in the coming year—budgets, tariffs, and economic growth. He was able not only to absorb great masses of information quickly, but also to ask the right questions and get to the heart of a problem immediately. Not many young men would have given so much of their holiday to such study while cruising the Mediterranean and the Nile, but it was pure joy for Winston.
He was preparing for
a long struggle with a formidable opponent twice his age who was worshipped by many. The challenge was irresistible. And the line of attack seemed clear. It made no sense, he wrote in November, “to shut the British Empire up in a ringed fence. . . . Why should we deny ourselves the good and varied merchandise which the traffic of the world offers[?]”
From Cairo, shortly after his twenty-eighth birthday, Churchill sent his mother the good news that Sir Michael Hicks Beach had been immensely helpful. “I rejoiced in my talks with him,” he wrote. “He is such a good and true friend; & we agree in almost everything political. . . . I foresee many possibilities of cooperation.”19
For good measure, when he came home, he also consulted at length with Sir Francis Mowatt, the permanent secretary at the Treasury who had been around for so long that he had advised both Disraeli and Gladstone on financial matters. “He was one of the friends I inherited from my father,” Churchill later said of Sir Francis. Indeed, all three of the older men who helped prepare him for combating Chamberlain’s protectionism had been friends of Lord Randolph. Each seemed to relish the prospect of watching the son rise to prominence in a great public campaign fought over issues they knew so well. It was bracing to watch the son throw himself into a whirlwind of study. Long afterward Churchill would claim, “I had to learn economics in eight weeks.”
Tutoring Winston stirred the emotions of old Sir Francis, who was nearing retirement and feeling nostalgic for the brief but exciting period in the 1880s when Randolph was Chancellor of the Exchequer. “He loved to talk to me about Lord Randolph,” Winston recalled of their discussions: “How quick [Randolph] had been to learn the sound principles of public finance. . . . How resolutely he had fought for public economy and reduction of armaments! What fun he was to work with and serve!”20
So prodigious was Winston’s energy at this time that he was preparing not only to make history in the inevitable clash with Chamberlain, but also to write it. For many months he had been collecting information for a biography of his father, and he had already started working on it when he went to Aswan. Both Ernest Cassel and Michael Hicks Beach were happy to share their memories of Randolph, filling gaps in the historical record.
On the journey Winston brought along a large tin case with compartments to hold pens and paper, various notes, and a few books. Whenever he had a spare moment he would turn his attention to the biography, getting up early to work on it every morning. “The book is making progress,” he assured his mother in a letter written while he was sitting on the deck of Cassel’s steamer at Aswan.21
He was alone that day. The rest of the party had gone to see the dam. But he was content to work at a peaceful spot on the river, thinking of the future, writing about the past, and looking up occasionally to stare at the Egyptian landscape with its reminders of other civilizations that had risen and fallen long ago.
VI
THE GREAT RIFT
One of Churchill’s early champions in the press was Herbert Vivian, a handsome Cambridge-educated writer who hoped to launch his own political career someday. In the early 1900s he often sought out Churchill when he wanted advice or the latest parliamentary gossip, and usually found him in good humor. But when he called at Winston’s London flat one morning in May 1903, he was surprised to find him looking preoccupied. “His eyebrows were knitted in deep thought” as he paced the room, slowly twisting the watch chain at his waist.1
Herbert had not yet seen the daily papers, but their pages held the clue to his friend’s brooding appearance. They were full of news about a major speech Joseph Chamberlain had given the night before in Birmingham.
The powerful Colonial Secretary had at last made his big announcement, openly calling for protectionist legislation that would unify the economic forces of the empire and enable it to withstand competition from all rivals. Welcomed to the Town Hall on the night of May 15 by an organ playing “See, the Conquering Hero Comes,” Chamberlain had conjured for his audience a vision of peace and prosperity within a tight imperial circle, “self-sustaining and self-sufficient.” This new age would start, he assured the crowd, once the magical power of tariffs began nurturing trade within that privileged haven. As Joe explained it, this system of imperial preference was long overdue, and his followers warmly agreed, cheering him at great length.2
Churchill had been reflecting on the speech all morning. Turning to Herbert Vivian, he said with a serious look, “Well, politics are becoming exciting at last.”
When his friend asked whether Chamberlain’s plan had any chance of working, Winston was quick to dismiss the possibility.
“He has committed an irreparable blunder,” he declared. “He cannot have realised all the consequences of his action. I believe it will be the death-warrant of his career. . . . The country will never stand a tax upon food, and without a tax upon food Protection is impossible.”
“Then what will you do?” Herbert asked.
“Do?” Winston shot back. “The accursed thing must be fought.” His blood was up, and he suddenly began sounding like a campaigner addressing a large crowd. “It must be denounced from every platform, it must be resisted as we would resist the advent of some loathsome pestilence. . . . We are confronted by a perilous crisis in the history of our party, in the history of our country.”3
Churchill had been looking for a big issue to drive his career forward, and now Chamberlain had given it to him. He didn’t need to make halfhearted trouble with his Hooligans on minor issues when free trade offered him a theme large enough to encompass both domestic and foreign concerns. As far as he was concerned, the lines were sharply drawn. At home, imperial preference threatened to increase the cost of living for ordinary people. In the international community, it increased the possibility of economic conflicts that could easily escalate into war.
In the week following Chamberlain’s speech, Churchill publicly warned of the domestic threat, saying that while he valued the empire, “we must not disregard or think of small consequence the very urgent needs of our immense working-class population and the real sources of our national wealth.” Among his political associates, he emphasized the dangers from abroad. “I do not want a self-contained Empire,” he wrote on May 20. “It is very much better that the great nations of the world should be interdependent one upon the other than that they should be independent of each other. That makes powerfully for peace.” (This echoed the old Liberal tenet, “If goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.”)4
An outsider might have assumed that Joe held the winning hand in this game. After all, his political base in Birmingham was large and vocal, and Winston’s supporters were relatively few. Joe’s official position gave him power and influence, and in a political climate that placed a high value on age and experience, he enjoyed a clear advantage over a young man whose time as a backbencher was now just over two years. Yet Winston was right about Joe. The older man had blundered. Churchill understood, as Chamberlain did not, that protectionism would eventually undermine the government from within and energize the Liberal opposition.
In fact, the response to the Birmingham speech among some Liberal leaders was almost joyous. After Herbert Asquith read the report of it in the Times, he was no less convinced than Churchill that the shift away from free trade would be a disaster for the Colonial Secretary. He thought it was certain to bring down the government. Waving the Times triumphantly, he told his wife, Margot, “Wonderful news today . . . it is only a question of time when we shall sweep this country.” Likewise, David Lloyd George sensed that victory was near. “The day of Mr. Chamberlain’s ascendency in British politics is drawing to a close,” he said, “and a fitting termination it is for such a career.”5
* * *
Though Churchill was ready for a great crusade against protectionism, Chamberlain was an elusive target for several months while he worked behind the scenes to gather the necessary backing from the Cabinet. He didn’t have much luck. Having made the basic mistake of announcing his plans without
first obtaining the Cabinet’s full support, Chamberlain realized too late that many of his colleagues were determined either to remain on the fence or to fight him to the bitter end. He seems to have assumed that the country as a whole would rally to him with such enthusiasm that the Cabinet would soon fall in line. When no overwhelming show of support was forthcoming, he needed Balfour to step up and back him without reservation.
But no politician of the time was more adept at equivocation than Balfour, whom Churchill once described as so slippery that he avoided entanglements “like a powerful graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a rather muddy street.” In a series of agonizingly convoluted statements Balfour successfully managed to make his position on protection almost indecipherable. When Churchill tried in late May to get a straight answer from him on the subject, Balfour brazenly argued that tariffs were merely incidental to Chamberlain’s plan of a “fiscal union with the Colonies.” He defined the issue in such a technical way that he was able to tell Churchill with a straight face, “I have never understood that Chamberlain advocated protection.”6
Churchill’s frustration with such evasiveness came into the open during the hot days of July and August. First, he rose in the House of Commons to criticize Chamberlain for launching “a very deliberate and insidious attack” on free trade while refusing to engage in a real debate on the question. Then, several days later, he tore into Balfour for not dealing straightforwardly with supporters on either side of the issue. Cleverly planting his barbs in a series of speculations, he suggested that the prime minister was employing a “disingenuous” and “undignified” stalling tactic. He warned that Balfour would have to take a stand or would soon “find himself in a difficult position.” At that point, the prime minister interrupted Churchill to dismiss any concern about his future. “I shall be all right,” he told the House with his usual air of urbanity.7
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