Читать книгу Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955 - Barbara Leaming - Страница 10

A fur coat draped over his bowed shoulders, Churchill waited in the disembarkation shed at Southampton for his car to be brought round. During his nine weeks abroad, the political landscape at home had altered subtly but significantly. It was a measure of how much had changed that, two days before, when Stalin announced plans to withdraw from Iran he had felt the need to tell the world that his decision had not been prompted by anything Churchill had said in America.

On the other hand, much in political London remained the same. The Edenites were hoping to oust Churchill; Macmillan and Butler, perceiving elements of dissatisfaction with the interim Tory leadership, were jockeying to undermine Eden; and Eden himself was intent that that night, 26 March 1946, was the night when he would finally (in Cranborne’s words) ‘grasp the nettle’ and make a forceful case to Churchill about why it would be best if he retired.

At a moment when Churchill had begun again to feel his power, he was coming home greatly alarmed by how physically weak he felt. The dizzy spells had persisted, and there was concern that they could be the precursors of a stroke. At the Southampton quayside, he deflected questions about when he would next appear in the House of Commons by saying that he did not yet know the state of business in the House. He would have more information as soon as he had dined with his deputy.

A soupy fog in the English Channel had caused Churchill’s ship to dock two hours late, so Eden was already waiting for him at Hyde Park Gate. On various prior occasions Eden had struggled to suggest that Churchill stand down in his favour. At the last minute, something had always caused him to hesitate. This time, he was confident things would be different – not because of any change in himself, but because Churchill’s circumstances had changed. Initially Eden had taken a cynical view of the Fulton speech. He had remarked in private that he feared Churchill might actually be willing to set off another war in the hope of regaining the premiership. In the three weeks since Fulton, however, Eden had begun to sense that all the attention Churchill had been getting of late could prove useful to those who wished to force him out as Tory leader. In the past, Churchill had resisted any suggestion that he abandon power. But given his egotism and love of the limelight, might he not now be inclined to concentrate on his headline-making Soviet crusade and leave the conduct of party affairs to Eden?

Despite the long wait, Eden was in a hopeful mood when Churchill arrived at nine, but his plans quickly went awry. Before Eden could bring up the subject of Churchill’s retirement, Churchill caught him by surprise. He, too, had a proposal to make this evening. Concerned about his waning strength, Churchill had devised a plan to allow him to hold on to the Conservative leadership without overtaxing him -self. Just when Eden was about to ask the old man to step aside, Churchill asked Eden to help make it possible for him to keep his job. Churchill wanted Eden to take over for him officially in the House of Commons, as well as to assume the day-to-day work of running the party, while Churchill retained the overall party leadership. As he was aware that Eden was financially pressed, he had already asked James Stuart, the Chief Whip, to see if a way might not be found to pay Churchill’s salary as Opposition leader to Eden instead. He went on to assure Eden that the arrangement was temporary, that he intended to keep the leadership for just a year or two, and that his successor would benefit from having an opportunity to establish himself.

Few things could have been more insulting to Eden than the suggestion that he still had anything to prove, and few could have been more exasperating than the implication, heard so many times before, that he need wait only a bit longer before the prize was his. Again, the details of the handover were hazy. Again, Churchill set no firm date for his departure.

There was resentment on Churchill’s side as well. An old man does not like to feel that he is being watched by ‘hungry eyes’. When at some point in the discussion Eden managed to suggest that Churchill give up the leadership altogether, Churchill refused. And Eden, though he did not reject Churchill’s offer in so many words, did not accept it either. The encounter on which Eden had pinned his hopes ended in bitter stalemate.

Having informed the press that he had no idea when he would next visit the House of Commons, Churchill disregarded his state of exhaustion and made a strategic surprise appearance on the Opposition front bench the next day. Entering to his usual ovation, he let it be known that he intended to make his first speech in April during the budget debate. Eden, whose deputy leadership was widely deemed to have been a success, shrank to a subordinate position beside Churchill.

Moran arranged for his patient to be examined by the neurologist Sir Russell Brain, who concluded that the dizzy spells were nothing to worry about, that Churchill had merely overstrained himself in America, and that the episodes would soon pass. Thus reassured, Churchill seemed to forget his worst health worries and began to recover. He did not, however, forget Eden’s bid to unseat him. When, over the vehement objections of his wife, Churchill took on the party leadership in 1940 in addition to his duties as wartime prime minister, it had been in part to keep the job from going to a younger rival who might later pose a threat to his premiership. In a similar vein, when he anointed Eden during the war he had been blocking the emergence of a more potent rival, someone less reluctant to seize the crown. In that sense, Eden’s designation as heir apparent had been far from a sign of approbation.

Eden was still stoutly insisting to supporters that he would never accept Churchill’s offer of the Opposition leadership in the House without the party leadership overall when Churchill tripped him up by abruptly withdrawing it. Suddenly it was no longer in Eden’s power to accept or refuse. Churchill indicated that as he was already feeling better, a formal arrangement was no longer necessary. Eden would still be called on ‘in an ever-increasing measure’ to fill in for him in the House, but without any official status or salary. Churchill now expected Eden to do it all for nothing. The object of this division of powers was no longer to conserve an ailing man’s strength; it was to spare Churchill what he saw as the drudgery of routine party business. In essence, Churchill wanted to do the work he chose, when he chose to do it. He wanted to speak and act when the spirit moved him – and to dump the rest of the job on Eden.

This time there was no display of temper on Churchill’s side. On the contrary, in his note to lay out the new terms, he addressed Eden with ironic courtesy, assuring him, even as he joyously twisted the screws, that he looked forward to working together ‘in all the old confidence and intimacy which has marked our march through the years of storm’.

Still, Churchill made it clear that this was an offer Eden could not refuse – if, that is, he hoped to retain his claim to the succession. As if Churchill were innocent of Eden’s nightmare of being overtaken by other claimants, he went on enthusiastically to propose Macmillan (‘certainly one of our brightest rising lights’) as a candidate to become the next party chairman. There was probably only one other name Churchill might have mentioned that would have been as likely to cause Eden to gag. Reminded that he was dispensable, Eden backed away from his demands. Eden timidly assured Churchill that he could count on him ‘to play my part’.

Cranborne was horrified. He had spent the past few weeks in Portugal for his always precarious health, but he had been avidly monitoring all the moves and counter-moves from afar. He worried that under Churchill’s leadership the postwar Conservative Party was fast becoming a kind of dictatorship. Cranborne fully shared Churchill’s anxiety about the Soviet threat in Europe. Nevertheless, he was appalled that Churchill had delivered the Fulton speech without bothering to consult his Conservative colleagues beforehand. In the process, Churchill had committed what Cranborne saw as a political blunder which could have been avoided had Churchill taken the trouble to listen to other views. To date, Cranborne had been pleased to see the Labour Foreign Secretary consistently stand firm against the Soviets. On this matter at least, the Conservatives had been in the position of being able to sit back and support Bevin when necessary. Bevin had had to endure a good deal of sniping from the left wing of his own party, which remained infatuated with Moscow, but the broad unity of the country had been maintained. To Cranborne’s eye, Churchill had unwisely destroyed that ‘happy unity’: thanks to Churchill, opposition to the Soviet Union had become the policy of the party of the right, and not of Bevin, whose position with his own supporters had thereby been made vastly more difficult.

Apart from all this, Cranborne believed there was a larger issue at stake. In important respects, Churchill was a lone wolf who disdained the pack. Cranborne regarded the Fulton speech as typical of Churchill’s lifelong tendency to act without concern for his colleagues’ opinions or his party’s best interests. As far as Cranborne was concerned, this was the sort of high-handed, self-serving behaviour he and Churchill’s legion of other critics had long fervently complained of. Churchill for his part shrugged off such criticism. In the present instance, he saw it as a matter of perspective: why concern himself with relative trifles like party interests or colleagues’ wounded feelings when he was trying to head off another world war?

Thus the battle lines were drawn. Cranborne viewed Churchill as ‘imperious Caesar’ who simply had to be stopped. If Eden lacked the will to force the issue of Churchill’s retirement, it seemed to Cranborne that others were going to have to do it for him. Within days of his return to London, Cranborne was discreetly proposing that party leaders ‘take their courage in both hands’ and make a joint approach to Churchill. He acknowledged that Churchill would probably never forgive them and that they might very naturally hesitate to participate. But, Cranborne stressed, he saw no alternative. When Eden discouraged him, Cranborne wrote in disgust to his father, Lord Salisbury, that he had been ready to lead a cabal against Churchill but that there was no reason to go forward as long as Eden refused to act.

Some of Churchill’s long-time friends were also quietly advising him to retire, but their motives were very different from those of the Edenites. There was feeling among some of Churchill’s contemporaries, such as the seventy-six-year-old South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts and the seventy-one-year-old Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, that by allowing himself to be caught up in party strife he was tarnishing his reputation. An incident in the House of Commons on 24 May was a case in point. Churchill had caused a furore when, during a particularly fierce dispute, he stuck out his tongue at Bevin.

In contrast to those who wished to give Churchill the hook for personal or party ends, Smuts and King, who were in London for a meeting of Dominion leaders, were concerned solely with what was best for him. Churchill was especially fond of the South African leader, of whom he once said, ‘Smuts and I are like two old love-birds moulting together on a perch but still able to peck.’ On the present occasion, Smuts advised Churchill to retire immediately.

In a similar vein, Mackenzie King, who was then beginning his twentieth year in office, recommended that Churchill remove himself from the hurly-burly of domestic politics in favour of taking a larger view in keeping with his titanic stature. Both he and Churchill were now the very age Lord Fisher, the former First Sea Lord, had been in 1911, when, Churchill recalled in The World Crisis, ‘I was apprehensive of his age. I could not feel complete confidence in the poise of the mind at 71.’ As Churchill well knew, King had begun to worry about his own fading powers. As a consequence of the uproar over Churchill having stuck out his tongue at Bevin, claims had been heard from the Labour benches that Churchill had entered his ‘second childhood’. Might the time have come to bow out for dignity’s sake? Churchill was firm that it had not.

He made his intentions clear at a dinner party on 7 June in honour of Mackenzie King’s long service, hosted by Clement Attlee in the panelled dining room at Number Ten. Field Marshal Smuts was present as well. When the conversation among the old men turned to Roosevelt’s state of mental and physical deterioration at Yalta, Churchill suggested that he could close his eyes and see the ruined President as he was then. Someone chimed in to speak of Gladstone, who had been returned to power at a great age. In response, Churchill expressed confidence that he had time yet. But did he really mean to suggest that he believed he could be prime minister again? When King urged him to devote himself to authorship rather than politics, Churchill shot back that he had no intention of abandoning the fight and planned to lead his party to victory at the next election. In a separate conversation, he told Betty Cranborne (who later repeated it to her husband) that nothing would induce him to retire.

He dropped his bombshell to Eden when the latter returned from a three-week trip abroad. Mindful of the work that faced him in preparing his memoirs, Churchill suggested that he might be willing to renew the offer of officially dividing the Tory leadership and of transferring his salary to Eden. This new offer would differ from the previous one in a crucial respect. In March, Churchill had assured Eden that he meant to keep the leadership for a limited time. Three months later, he told him what he had already told Mackenzie King and others about his determination to recapture the premiership.

It took Eden a while to absorb the astonishing news. Churchill, after all, had gone from pledging to retire at the end of the war, to promising to stay on as party leader for no more than two years, to this. After the Conservative rout, Eden’s sole consolation had been that when next the tide of Toryism came in, Churchill could not possibly still be in position. Now, Churchill was confidently suggesting it was possible.

In the tortured weeks that followed, Eden by turns doubted that Churchill could be right about his prospects, wondered whether in light of Churchill’s comments he had better give up politics in favour of a career in finance, told himself and others that Churchill was likely to take a more realistic view by the end of the summer, and strongly considered trying to find a way to accept Churchill’s offer – if, that is, he ever actually made it.

Cranborne suggested to Eden that, under the circumstances, it might be best at this point simply to stand down as second-in-command and take his own independent line in Parliament. He was urging Eden, in effect, to abandon the security of his role as designated heir and to fight for the crown alongside any other contenders. The proposal reflected the considerable freedom of action Cranborne’s position as heir to the Marquess of Salisbury conferred. He cared a good deal less about office and security than Eden, but then he had the luxury to be inflexible and to put practical considerations aside. In 1938, when Eden and Cranborne resigned as Foreign Secretary and Under Secretary respectively, some observers who knew both men believed that Eden had bailed out only because he had been pushed (or was it shamed?) by Cranborne. Eden’s resignation speech in the House of Commons had been, to some tastes, disappointingly soft and vague in contrast to his friend’s forthright remarks. Cranborne had bluntly accused the Prime Minister of surrendering to Italian blackmail. (Chamberlain said of Cranborne: ‘Beware of rampant idealists. All Cecils are that.’) Hoping to protect his claim to succeed Chamberlain, Eden had been careful not to burn his boats irretrievably with the party. In any case, Eden would long be distressed by the perception that he had been – indeed, still was – in thrall to Cranborne’s more powerful personality.

What made this all so painful was that there was much truth to the picture. To Eden’s simmering frustration, with Cranborne, as with Churchill, he was and perhaps always would be number two. On the kingmaker’s side there was friendship and loyalty, to be sure, but there was also a tendency that did not go unnoticed in their inbred aristocratic world to treat Eden ‘rather as if he were the head butler at Hatfield House’ (the Cecil family seat).

Eden, meanwhile, continued to vacillate, and Churchill went off to Switzerland without having made another concrete offer to share power. Churchill drew more world headlines when he spoke at the University of Zurich on 19 September. His remarks were the second instalment of his prescription for confronting the Soviet danger. Having already called for an Anglo-American partnership to counter the massive Soviet presence in the occupied territories of Europe, he now proposed an end to retribution against vanquished Germany. He declared that Germany must be rebuilt and he argued that France must lead the effort. Churchill urged listeners to turn their backs on the horrors of the recent past and to look to the future – in other words, to welcome the Germans into the community of nations. So soon after the war, his recommendations were strong medicine, but, as he admitted privately, he saw a rebuilt Germany as a necessary defence against the Soviet Union. It was Churchill’s hope that the creation of a strong Europe led by a revitalized France and Germany would do much to avert a war with the Soviet Union, and to produce a lasting settlement at the conference table.

In reaction to Churchill’s call for the rebuilding of Germany and the formation of a ‘United States of Europe’, Moscow radio accused him of seeking to unite the continent in preparation for war. When Churchill went on to ask publicly why the Soviets were maintaining so many troops on a war footing in the occupied territories of Europe, Stalin called him the worst threat to peace in Europe.

Churchill was already under heavy fire from Moscow when he turned up in Paris to discuss the situation in Europe with US Secretary of State Byrnes, who was there for the peace conference. Frustrated by his inability to extract the information from his own Government, Churchill was eager to be brought up to date on current thinking in Washington. He also wanted to maintain his personal contacts with the Americans. Bevin, for his part, could not see why. Was Churchill’s party not out of power? What business did he have in Paris? To the acute irritation both of the Labour Government and of certain of his Conservative colleagues, Churchill seemed to be running some sort of high-flying, out-of-control, one-man foreign policy shop. Official negotiations with Molotov continued to drag, and the British Foreign Secretary was furious at the prospect of Churchill, who had not been invited to participate, doing or saying anything in the course of his short stay to complicate matters.

In anticipation of Churchill’s arrival in Paris, there had been much agitated discussion within the British delegation about how best to cope. Bevin worried that allowing Churchill to stay at the embassy would seem to confer Government approval on his private talks with Byrnes and other officials, when in fact Britain had no control over anything he said. Duff Cooper, the British Ambassador, successfully argued for accommodating him there, the better to manage him. Afterwards, the Ambassador wrote of his fellow Conservative’s whirlwind visit with a mixture of amusement and annoyance (clearly more of the former than the latter), ‘Having possibly endangered international relations and having certainly caused immense inconvenience to a large number of people, he seemed thoroughly to enjoy himself, was with difficulty induced to go to bed soon after midnight and left at 10 a.m. the next morning in high spirits.’

A year after Churchill returned from his Italian holiday, he had reason to be high-spirited. Though out of office, he had handily regained influence. Though Britain had a new Government, he regularly managed to upstage it. Whether or not one sympathized with his arguments in Fulton and Zurich, there could be no denying that he had framed the international debate on such matters as Soviet expansionism and European reconstruction and unification. At the first annual Conservative Party conference since the war, held in Blackpool in October 1946, Churchill avowed that while it would be easy ‘to retire gracefully’, the situation in Europe was so serious and what might be to come so grave that it was his ‘duty’ to carry on. As he approached his seventy-second birthday, he spoke with assurance of turning out the socialists and he remained confident of his ability to secure the peace if only he could get back to the table with Stalin.

Still, there was growing dissatisfaction in Conservative quarters with a leader who was absent much of the time, travelling, speaking, writing, and collecting awards. A fresh round of defeats in the December by-elections intensified Conservatives’ hunger for a leader willing to devote his energies to remaking the party. It was a measure of how much the tide had begun to turn against Churchill that the Conservative Chief Whip, James Stuart, went to Cranborne to discuss the need for a change of leadership. Though at the end of 1946 Stuart remained distinctly unimpressed by Eden, he had sadly concluded that Churchill’s spotty attendance in the House of Commons was making the conduct of business almost impossible. In conversation with Cranborne, Stuart proposed to speak to Churchill. He wanted him to revive his plan to hand over the Opposition leadership in the Commons to Eden while retaining the broader leadership of the party. At least that way, someone other than Churchill would have real authority to lead in the House. Stuart judged that Churchill might be more amenable to sharing power now that he was so effectively influencing international opinion. Cranborne was a good deal less optimistic about what amounted to a first approach to Churchill by his colleagues, on Eden’s behalf. Nevertheless, he gave the mission his blessing. It was a mission that few would have taken on willingly, but Stuart, a raffish Scot, had a reputation for fearlessness. The very fact that someone unaffiliated with the Eden faction was prepared to make the proposal might signal to Churchill that it was indeed time to think about going.

To Stuart’s relief, Churchill responded calmly to the suggestion that he had already done so much for his country that he could retire and enjoy the rest of his life without regrets. Still, when Stuart proposed that for the good of the party Churchill consider reviving his plan to share the leadership with Eden, Churchill would not hear of it. Churchill explained that great events were pending, though not immediately, and that he wanted to be in a position to handle them himself. His answer went to the heart of what power meant to Churchill. Through the years, he had often suggested that office and title meant nothing to him; what appealed to him was the opportunity to direct events and to shape the future. And so, he made it clear to Stuart, it was now.

On a lighter note, Churchill addressed his colleagues’ concerns about whether he was still up to the burdens of the Opposition leadership by informing Stuart that he meant to install a bed in his room at the House of Commons. He assured the vastly amused Chief Whip that this would allow him to take naps there and no one need worry that he would be too tired to attend. Churchill insisted that Eden could wait a little longer to enter his inheritance and that Eden knew he was devoted to him. At the end of the hour, Stuart, veering between laughter and tears of frustration, had got absolutely nowhere. The most he could say was that at least the old lion had not bitten off his head.

For Cranborne, the news that Stuart had failed was unwelcome but not unexpected. By the end of 1946, he had explored what seemed like every option: he had prodded Eden to approach Churchill on his own; he had volunteered to organize a cabal; he had suggested to Eden that he abandon his role as designated heir and fight for power in the House; he had given the nod to the Chief Whip to act on Eden’s behalf. Nothing had worked.

Cranborne lamented that Eden was ‘rapidly losing ground’. He reckoned that the only way Eden could re-establish himself was ‘by some resolute step, such as he took when he resigned in 1938. That got him the reputation of a strong man, but he cannot live on this one incident in his career forever.’ It was a disturbing assessment of the man Cranborne still hoped to make the next prime minister of Great Britain. Cranborne insisted that if Eden wanted to be perceived as a leader he had better begin to act like one; until Eden made his move, there was nothing anyone else could do for him. In the interval, Churchill clearly meant to hold on to the party leadership ‘at all costs’. For one thing, Cranborne reflected, Churchill liked power. For another, Churchill was convinced that ‘like Lord Chatham he can save England & no one else can’. Cranborne did not intend the comparison to the aged, ailing eighteenth-century statesman who pushed himself to the limits of his physical endurance, collapsed on the floor of Parliament, and died soon afterwards to be flattering. Nevertheless, Cranborne recognized that part of what made Churchill an especially formidable opponent in any attempt to challenge his leadership was that he really did think he was the one man to save his country.

Still, at that point there was no rational reason to believe that Churchill could ever be prime minister again. Labour remained overwhelmingly popular, and the wisdom continued to be that the Conservatives could not hope to recapture Number Ten for at least two five-year election cycles. For all that Churchill had accomplished since he left office, the arithmetic continued to be against him.