Читать книгу Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955 - Barbara Leaming - Страница 5

During the war, Churchill had always slept with the key to the Cabinet boxes. He kept it on his watch chain. Suddenly, the key was gone. There were no more boxes, no constantly ringing phones, no telegrams requiring his immediate attention. From the first, he found it impossible to adjust to a new tempo of life. It was as if his heart was still pounding at the maximum rate, though his body had been forced to a standstill. Previously, Clementine Churchill had doubted that he could survive the intense demands on his time and energy. The question now was whether he could live without them.

Churchill returned to London on Monday, 30 July. While Clementine supervised the removal of their possessions from 10 Downing Street, the couple took up temporary residence in a sixth-floor penthouse at Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair. Long prone to bouts of depression, Churchill worried about sleeping near a balcony at a time when he was haunted by what he described as ‘desperate thoughts’.

A sense of incompleteness gnawed at him. He could hardly believe that other hands had taken over with Stalin when it was he, Churchill, who had established a relationship with the Soviet leader, understood him, and saw what needed to be done. Not for the first time in his life, Churchill despaired that his peculiar powers and gifts were being wasted.

The shift in his political fortunes had left him feeling hurt, humiliated, and confused. Because he had cast the election as a referendum on his conduct of the war, he was tortured by the idea that the outcome had called his record into question. Though he was no stranger to rejection, he had never developed the thick skin that is so useful to a politician. No analysis of the Labour vote prevented him from interpreting the numbers as a personal disgrace. No references to an overall leftward swing in British politics, to the public’s desire for a better material life after the war, or to festering public resentment of previous Conservative leaders’ failure to prepare adequately for the struggle against Hitler were capable of lessening the blow to Churchill’s ego.

For all that, he was able to make light of his defeat, as when he sang an old music hall song to the doorman at Claridge’s:

I’ve been to the North Pole

I’ve been to the South Pole

The East Pole, the West Pole

And every kind of pole

The barber’s pole

The greasy pole

And now I’m fairly up the pole

Since I got the sack

From the Hotel Metropole.

Sometimes, others sang to him. On 1 August, six days after the Conservative rout, the new Labour-dominated Parliament assembled to elect the Speaker of the House of Commons. The chamber was packed and tensions ran high as, flushed with victory, the ‘new boys’ on the Labour benches taunted and jeered at the Conservatives sitting across from them. At a quarter to one, when everyone else was in place, Churchill made his much-anticipated entrance. With chin up, he sauntered to his seat on the Opposition front bench. Conservatives greeted him with raucous cheers. One Tory began to sing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and others heartily joined in.

Labour countered with their party anthem, ‘The Red Flag’. In boisterous spirits, a Labour member dashed to the front to pretend to conduct what a witness likened to ‘the chorus of birds and animals sometimes to be heard in a Disney film’. Some of the newcomers did not really know the words and struggled to improvise. Meanwhile, whenever the Labour majority threatened to drown the Conservatives out, the latter raised their voices.

At Chequers the previous weekend, Churchill had made it clear that he hoped to go on leading the Opposition and the party as long as Conservatives wished him to and as long as his strength held. The cheers from the Tory benches suggested that he had his party’s unanimous support. The British people might have rejected him, but the warm emotional reception accorded him by fellow Conservatives left him in no doubt that they at least wanted him as their leader.

Sadly, as he had done at the time of his electoral tour, he misconstrued the meaning of those cheers. Now, as then, the fact that people were grateful to their wartime prime minister did not necessarily mean that they wanted him to remain in power during what promised to be very different circumstances.

Hardly had Churchill left Westminster after his debut as Opposition leader when a trio of Conservative heavyweights met to find a way to manoeuvre him out of the job. The driving force in the effort was Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, leader of the Opposition peers. The fifty-one-year-old heir to the 4th Marquess of Salisbury was a grandson of the prime minister Lord Salisbury and a cousin of Churchill’s wife. His politically prominent family had been advising monarchs since the sixteenth century and one ancestor had been instrumental in the accession to the English throne of James VI of Scotland. In the Conservative Party as well, the Cecils (pronounced to rhyme with ‘whistles’) were noted as kingmakers and power-brokers. They had had a long and complicated relationship with the Churchill family. ‘Your family has always hated my family,’ Winston was known to grumble, at which Cranborne would ‘laugh uproariously’ in response. In 1886, the prime minister Lord Salisbury had been responsible (at least as Winston saw it) for the political ruin of Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the second surviving son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. In the 1930s, Cranborne himself had done much to obstruct Winston’s career despite the fact that both men opposed the policy of appeasement. Nevertheless, Winston had long found it impossible to decide whether he admired the Cecils or resented them on his late father’s behalf. Salisbury had been kind to Winston when he was in his mid-twenties, and Winston later dedicated a book to him. Winston had enjoyed friendships with Cranborne’s uncle, Hugh Cecil, who served as best man at Winston’s wedding, as well as with, however improbably, Cranborne himself. He adored Cranborne’s wife, Betty, whose acerbic conversation he prized, and through the years he and Cranborne had managed rigorously to keep their political differences in one compartment and their private friendship in another.

Known familiarly by his boyhood nickname, Bobbety, Cranborne was tall and gaunt, with a long nose and protruding teeth. A speech impediment caused his r’s to sound like w’s and he spoke at the breakneck speed characteristic of his family, who were famous for their ability to utter more words in a minute than most people can in five. He was an ugly man, slightly bent and often shabbily dressed, whose great personal charm caused many women to find him immensely attractive. He was an invalid and a hypochondriac, whose frail frame housed a will of iron. And he was a political powerhouse, who, like other Cecils before him, preferred to operate behind the scenes, often so subtly that it was difficult to perceive his hand in events. Invisibility appealed to him because he prided himself on basing his actions not on the dictates of personal ambition, but on duty and principle. Since he ostensibly wanted nothing for himself, he had a reputation in party circles for ‘objectivity’ that gave his pronouncements particular weight. Past disagreements notwithstanding, Cranborne warmly acknowledged the greatness of what Churchill had done in the war. He marvelled, as he later said, that in 1940 Churchill ‘did not talk of facing the realities: he created the realities’. Now that victory had been secured, however, Cranborne maintained that Churchill ought to ‘face facts and retire’ without delay. Had not Churchill himself taken a similar view of Cranborne’s grandfather in the twilight of his career?

During the war, the Tory party had been allowed to disintegrate on almost every conceivable level. Churchill was not a party man and never had been, and from the time he became the party’s leader in 1940 he had shown no interest in overseeing its affairs. As a consequence, by 1945 there was no management, no organization, and no programme. Lacking specific policies, Tories had fought the general election on the aura of the Churchill name and record. In the wake of overwhelming defeat, there was broad agreement that Conservatism needed to be drastically rethought. In Cranborne’s view, the effort needed to begin immediately under younger leadership. Anthony Eden had long been his ‘horse’ in the political race. From the outset, Cranborne’s career in politics had been closely tied to Eden’s. Cranborne started out as Eden’s parliamentary private secretary, and Eden and he grabbed headlines together in 1938 when they resigned as Foreign Secretary and Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs respectively in protest at the Chamberlain Government’s appeasement of Mussolini.

The description of Cranborne as Eden’s under secretary belied a more intricate relationship. Cranborne was Eden’s most powerful political supporter. Cranborne did not himself aspire to the premiership; influence was what he was after, and he viewed an Eden Government as the best way to secure it. As a politician, Eden benefited from the prestige of a connection to the house of Cecil, as well as from Cranborne’s superior intellect and cunning. Cranborne was also the nervier by far. He often quietly but insistently pressed Eden to act as Eden almost certainly would never have dared on his own. Eden, whose theatrical good looks and sartorial elegance contrasted sharply with Cranborne’s less photogenic appearance, attended the meeting on 1 August 1945 to discuss Churchill’s future.

Also present was Britain’s Ambassador to the US, Lord Halifax, who had returned from Washington on leave the previous day. When Chamberlain resigned in 1940, Halifax had been his choice to replace him as prime minister, as well as that of King George VI and much of the Conservative Party, but Halifax had declined in favour of Churchill. (Halifax calculated that the public clamour for Churchill was so great that any other appointment would inevitably be overshadowed by his looming presence in the Government. Halifax took consolation in the judgement that Churchill’s character flaws made it likely that his tenure would be brief.) When Churchill became prime minister, he returned the favour by shipping Halifax off to Washington lest he re-emerge as a political rival.

For Churchill, who could be as passionate about fighting off real and potential rivals for power as he was about fighting the war, there had been an additional advantage to replacing Halifax as Foreign Secretary with Anthony Eden. As the Conservative Chief Whip James Stuart later observed, Churchill ‘knew he could bully Anthony … but not Halifax’. By exiling him to the US, Churchill lowered the curtain on Halifax’s political career. Five years later, Halifax was one of those who believed the time had come for Churchill to bow out, and by his reckoning, Churchill was fortunately not one of those individuals whose sole interest in life is his work. There were many activities that afforded him much pleasure, but that he had had little time to pursue during his premiership. Among other things he was an author and painter, and Halifax believed he might actually welcome a chance to be free of the burdens of leadership and retire of his own accord.

Eden thought he knew Churchill’s mood better. Cranborne, as well, was far from optimistic that Churchill would willingly step down, and his strategy was to ease him out of power. Churchill had been asked to go to New Zealand to be honoured for his war service, and Cranborne was determined that he accept that invit ation, as well as many similar ones that were sure to follow from around the world. While Churchill was abroad, Eden would run the party in his stead. Halifax was set to see Churchill at 5 p.m. that day, and Eden was to dine with him after that. Cranborne urged both visitors to press Churchill to go to New Zealand, and generally to entice him with the joys of retirement. Halifax readily agreed, but Eden hesitated.

This was partly a matter of propriety on Eden’s part, partly a matter of self-preservation. He flinched at the unseemliness of trying to push Churchill aside in open pursuit of his own interests. He did not wish to appear vulgarly ambitious. Was that not among the very qualities in Churchill that had long repelled him and many others? At the same time, Eden longed to lead the Opposition and he did not want to do or say anything to provoke Churchill to turn against him at this late date and to name another successor. During the war, Churchill had been known to taunt him with the names of other ‘possibles’ – Oliver Lyttelton, John Anderson, Harold Macmillan. By Eden’s lights, the wait to succeed Churchill had been long and excruciating, and he did not want to jeopardize his position before the handover actually took place. But Cranborne was insistent, and as had often been the case between the two friends, Eden reluctantly gave in to the stronger will.

As it happened, 1 August was also the closing day of the Potsdam Conference. The plenary sessions were set to wind up that night, and Halifax was scheduled to be present at the King’s meeting with Truman in England the following day. The talks had failed to produce anything like the settlement Churchill had been chasing. When the newly configured British delegation returned to Potsdam, Stalin had viewed Attlee warily and had insisted on grilling him and Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, about Churchill’s fate. Long preoccupied with averting his own removal from office, Stalin was palpably shaken by the news from London. If Churchill was dispensable, presumably the same was true of Stalin. He did not like the change. He would not have it. For two days he failed to show up at the conference table. Ostensibly he was ailing but Truman suspected the real reason was that he was upset about Churchill. When Stalin did reappear, he seemed to have lost interest in the proceedings.

Under the circumstances, Potsdam and all it signified to Churchill cast a shadow over Halifax’s visit to Claridge’s. Rather than listen to his guest’s paean to memoir-writing and other activities to be looked forward to in retired life, Churchill preferred to mourn the loss of power and efficacy. In conversation, he dwelled on the fact that only a week had passed since he had been at Potsdam. He found that impossible to believe. How could everything have changed so quickly?

By the time he saw Eden, he had begun to dwell on the mistakes that might have led to his defeat. It was widely believed that by attacking Labour too violently Churchill had diminished his hard-won status as a national hero who stood above the political fray. On the present occasion, he lamented that if only Eden had not been ill with a duodenal ulcer during the campaign he would have had the advantage of his heir’s advice and avoided that perhaps fatal error. In making such a claim, Churchill was flattering Eden in the conviction – which had helped to sustain the number two man during the war – that he served as a ‘restraining hand’ on Churchill’s often monstrously poor judgement. (As Pug Ismay once put it, ‘Some men need drink. Others need drugs. Anthony needs flattery.’) Over the course of the evening, Churchill clutched Eden to his bosom, insisted the younger man was his ‘alter ego’, and otherwise strove to convey how much he valued and depended on him. But the love fest was short-lived. When Eden dared to suggest that the party vice-chairmanship be awarded to a close friend of his own, a man associated in people’s minds with Eden’s interests, Churchill exploded. The charm, the flattery, the unctuous affection – all dissolved in an instant. Furious at being pushed, Churchill made it clear that he had his own candidate for the post.

After Eden left at midnight, Churchill swallowed a sleeping pill and went to bed. Since Saturday when the Potsdam talks had resumed without him, he had found that even after taking a ‘red’ he was unable to sleep through until morning. For the fifth night in a row, he shot awake at 4 a.m., his thoughts racing uncontrollably, and he required a second barbiturate pill to sleep.

In the days that followed, Churchill in his misery was of various minds about how to proceed. He tested some of the suggestions others had made, but none appeared to satisfy him. He spoke of his war memoirs, but despaired of the taxes he would be required to pay on the earnings. He said he might go abroad indefinitely, but complained that he had no appetite for travel. He talked of honours and invitations, but added that he was in no mood to accept them. By turns he vowed to fight to retain control of the Conservative Party and admitted that he did not know how much longer he wished to lead. He groused that it would have been better had he died during the war but also insisted that he was not ready to die.

On 6 August, the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. A second bomb targeted Nagasaki three days later. The new weapon, which reduced innumerable victims to tiny black bundles of smoking char, proved to be everything described in the report Churchill had seen at Potsdam, and more. The news jolted him out of his lassitude and self-pity, for it vividly suggested what a world war fought with atomic weapons might be like. The prospect made it more urgent than ever to get a proper postwar settlement in Europe, but political defeat had left Churchill helpless to do anything except try to warn the world in time.

Japan surrendered unconditionally on 14 August. That evening, Churchill dined with Eden and other Conservative colleagues in a private room at Claridge’s. After the meal, he and his guests listened to Attlee’s midnight broadcast to announce the end of the war. Inviting people to relax and enjoy themselves in the knowledge of a job well done, Churchill’s successor decreed two days of victory holidays.

V-J Day, 15 August, coincided with the state opening of Parliament. An estimated one million celebrants lined the route from Buckingham Palace as the King and Queen rode to Westminster in an open red-and-gold coach drawn by the Windsor greys. Elsewhere, in a scene reminiscent of his thousand-mile electoral tour, Churchill, travelling in an open car, was mobbed by well-wishers. Shouting ‘Churchill forever’ and ‘We want Churchill’, they greeted him as the saviour of his country, the leader who had snatched Britain from the jaws of defeat, the man who more than any other had made this day possible. Three weeks after he had been hurled from power, the ovations comforted and reassured him. When he went to the Palace afterwards to congratulate George VI on his address in the House of Lords, it was evident that Churchill was ‘gleefully anticipating’ the speech he planned to deliver in the Commons the next day. That evening, London, which had spent so many nights in darkness, became a city of light. Great buildings were floodlit, bonfires blazed, and fireworks streaked the sky. All across the city there was singing and dancing in the streets.

The celebrations were still going strong on 16 August when Churchill spoke in Parliament of the danger of a new war more terrible than any in the past. He gave thanks that the atomic bomb had brought peace to the world, but he cautioned that it would be up to men to keep the peace. He called the bomb ‘a new factor in human affairs’ and emphasized that with the advent of such a weapon it was not just the survival of civilization that was imperilled, but of humanity itself.

Hours after Attlee proclaimed that the last of Britain’s enemies had been laid low, Churchill pointed out that significant differences had already arisen with their Soviet ally about the state of affairs in Eastern and Central Europe. He noted the emergence of police governments and he observed that it was ‘not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is imposing itself behind the iron curtain which at present divides Europe in twain’.

A fortnight after the conclusion of the Potsdam Conference, he lamented that instead of resolving the most serious questions, the three leaders had handed them off to a committee of foreign ministers, which was to meet in September and was gifted with less far-reaching powers. As he had at Potsdam, he perceived a unique opportunity in the fact that thus far only the US had the bomb. He warned that the time to get a settlement was during the three or four years that remained before any other power was likely to catch up. There was not an hour to be wasted, he cautioned, and not a day to be lost.

Despite the gravity of what Churchill had to say, he enjoyed parrying interruptions by some of the new Labour members. With a puckish grin he played up the irony of being the man to press for free elections elsewhere in the world when he had just been overwhelmingly defeated at home. Thumbs in lapels, he avowed his faith in democracy, whatever mistakes the people might be inclined to make. Speaking of the ideal of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ that he hoped to see implemented everywhere in Europe, he delighted listeners of all political persuasions with the self-mocking aside, ‘I practise what I preach!’

One young Labour member wrote in his diary afterwards that Churchill’s speech had been ‘a real masterpiece’; the New York Times called it ‘one of the greatest speeches of his parliamentary career’. Still, on a day of merrymaking in the streets, his words of warning were fatally out of sync with the national mood. Part of the power of Churchill’s iconic wartime speeches was the extent to which they captured the nation’s mood and gave magnificent voice to the hopes and ideals of the people. By contrast, the 16 August address was a throwback to his speeches in the 1930s, which had taken the form of warnings that no one wanted to hear, particularly so soon after the carnage of the First World War. In 1945, eager to start a new life under Labour, the war-weary British did not want to be informed that their trials had only just begun.

Clementine Churchill exulted that her husband’s ‘brilliant moving gallant’ speech had been on a par with his best work, but she too was ready for a new life after the war. The Churchills had left Claridge’s for their eldest daughter Diana’s flat in Westminster Gardens, where they were to stay while Clementine worked on reopening their country house, Chartwell, in addition to readying a new house in London. The couple had settled on a brick house in a cul-de-sac at Hyde Park Gate, off Kensington Road, but the sort of life they intended to have there remained a point of contention.

While Clementine, aged sixty, saw Hyde Park Gate as a retirement haven, Winston emphasized its proximity to the House of Commons. He assured fellow Conservatives that he would be able to get to the House in less than fifteen minutes. By the use of certain shortcuts, the driver could probably do it in seven.

In the course of Churchill’s long and tempestuous career, the one person whose backing he had always been able to count on absolutely was his wife. Through thirty-six years of marriage, Clementine had never lost faith in what together they called his ‘star’, and never wavered in the mystical conviction that Winston was destined to accomplish great things. Repeatedly, in the face of political disappointment, she had soothed his bitterness and encouraged him to carry on. Consistently, she had put him above their children’s needs and her own. She once told him that if to help him or make him great or happy she had to sacrifice her life, she would not hesitate.

Clementine also saw his flaws and did not fear to point them out to him. She was nothing if not critical. Nonetheless, whatever he wanted for himself this imposing and formidable woman had learned in some sense to want as well. His trials had been her trials, and his enemies had been her enemies. At least, that had always been the case – until now.

The present situation was lonelier and more personally painful than anything the Churchills had experienced to date because, suddenly, husband and wife were in open and irreconcilable conflict about how to spend the rest of their lives. During the Second World War, Clementine had worried about Winston’s health to the point that her own was affected. Still, as long as the Nazi menace remained she had found a way to accept that her husband must put himself at risk and that she might lose him in the process. After the war, she saw things differently. Winston was old and ill. She loved him and she wanted them to be able to enjoy the few years they still had together. As far as she was concerned, his wartime leadership had vindicated the decades when they had sometimes been almost alone in the world in believing in him.

Though Winston persisted in dwelling on unfinished business, Clementine was confident that he had fulfilled his destiny at long last and that he – no, they – had earned a quiet, happy retirement.

While he certainly did not always do as his wife suggested, he prized her judgement and political acumen. He was always eager to know what she thought, and he would grow annoyed if she refused to tell him. In early 1945, Clementine had counselled her husband to retire as soon as the war was won and to refrain from seeking reelection. She wanted him to leave office, but that did not mean she wished to see him defeated in Britain’s first postwar general election. On the contrary, when he insisted he was not ready to be ‘put on a pedestal’, Clementine supported his candidature unreservedly.

Still, her comment that the election loss might prove to be a blessing in disguise went to the heart of a new kind of sadness in their marriage. Much as Clementine ached for him in defeat, she earnestly believed that they would both be better off in private life. Much as it pained her to see him again feel rejected and unappreciated, there could be no denying that in some sense she had got what she wanted. From this point on, the burdens of the premiership would fall to others.

After Parliament went into recess on 24 August, Churchill had nothing to absorb and distract him. It was almost worse that he had known the fleeting joy of preparing and delivering his big speech. The letdown was stunning in its ferocity. As he once wrote, he found it very painful to be impotent and inactive. In the emptiness of his days he brooded about the election, but even in private he could barely bring himself to criticize those who had cast him out. (Clementine, interestingly, was less forgiving of the British public.) In his view the people’s right to choose their leaders was the very thing he had fought the war to protect, and he struggled to suppress his bitterness at what he could not help but perceive as their ingratitude.

He was mightily unhappy, and his wife observed that that made him very difficult at home. Clementine regretted that rather than cling to each other in their sorrow, they seemed always to be having scenes. He fought with her, with her first cousin Maryott Whyte, with their son, Randolph (always an eager sparring partner), and with others. He complained about the food he was served; he protested at the lack of meat now that he had to endure the same physical shortages as other men; he imagined that the ‘gruff bearish’ cousin, an impoverished gentlewoman who assisted Clementine in household matters, was intent on thwarting him at every turn. He wanted to have cows and chickens at Chartwell. ‘Cousin Moppet’ maintained it would never work. Feathers flew. Clementine said she was sure it was her own fault, but suddenly she was finding life with Winston more than she could bear.

The people had spoken, and by any realistic assessment Churchill was never going to be prime minister again. Eventually, even he accepted that no one could go on being this miserable and that he had to come to peace with what had happened to him; but how?