Churchill remained a compelling figure, for all his comic quirks, and a statesman of the front rank even though he had been for so long conlined to the back-benches. Phipps spared no pains to discredit him with the French, assuring Herriot and others that Churchill only spoke for a very small section of the British public and that his utterances should be taken with “liberal sprinklings of salt.”
It was not surprising that Churchill should have provoked mistrust. For although he was brave, eloquent, witty, industrious, dogged, versatile and supremely talented, with most great offices of state under his belt and many gorgeous feathers in his cap, Churchill had given more hostages to fortune than any other politician of his day. Britain’s leading parliamentarian had changed parties twice and policies so often that, Lord Beaverbrook declared, he had held every view on every question. Said to be a warlord at sea during Armageddon, Churchill had sired the Dardanelles disaster. He had treated strikers as the enemy within and earned a reputation as warmonger towards foreign foes. He had returned the pound to the gold standard at too high a rate. He had attacked progress towards Indian independence, branding himself as a blimpish reactionary. In a mood of cavalier romanticism during the abdication crisis he had championed Edward VIII. In short, Churchill seemed to be brilliant but unsound. It was an opinion to which most leading figures of the day subscribed. According to Asquith, Churchill thought with his mouth and had “genius without judgement.” He possessed a powerful brain, noted Lloyd George, but it was prevented from running true by “a tragic flaw in the metal.”‘ Baldwin repeated (and modified) a story told by an early biographer that at Churchill’s birth the good fairies came trooping in with their gifts-imagination, daring, energy, guts-and then a bad fairy arrived to deny him wisdom. It became a commonplace to depict Churchill as a buccaneer: picturesque certainly, but rash, ambitious, dangerous and volatile. R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office before the war, considered him “the greatest adventurer of modern political history”
Butler also cast aspersions on Churchill’s origins, calling him a “half breed American.” This was a typical instance of the character assassination by association to which he was subjected. Undoubtedly, though, Churchill’s stock was lowered as much by his rakish relations as by his disreputable friends. They all seemed to identify him as “a particularly way, Ward, rootless and anachronistic product of a decaying and increasingly discredited aristocratic order.”8 Churchill’s mother was not only the daughter of a notorious Wall Street speculator, she also acquired a train of unsuitable husbands and lovers. His father, the erratic and syphilitic Lord Randolph, was a striking example of ducal degeneracy. For “all his remark~ able cleverness” Lord Randolph was, in the estimation of the fifteenth earl of Derby, “thoroughly untrustworthy: scarcely a gentleman, and probably more or less mad.”Winston’s staunch belief in Churchills against the world seemed less like family loyalty than tribal chauvinism when other members of his clan were considered: vapid dilettantes such as Moreton Frewen, known as “Mortal Ruin”; blue-blooded boors such as “Sunny,” ninth Duke of Marlborough, whose wife Gladys said that he was ruled by “black, vicious personal pride like a disease”;‘° the unwelcome and nonpaying Guests; and, the greatest trial of all, Churchill’s spoiled son Randolph, who jovially acknowledged that he was not fit to be allowed out in private.
Churchill’s friends were cast in the same mould, with the partial exception of the vegetarian, non-smoking, teetotalitarian Professor Frederick Lindemann. (Even he was a social carnivore-he once took counsel’s opinion about what place he was entitled to occupy at high table in his Oxford college, Christ Church.) They were high-living and often hard-drinking freebooters who dwelt on the outer edge of respectability. F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was considered to be a “fluent and plausible bounder”II early in his career, while later, to his fury, he was represented as a “crapulous and corpulent buffoon.”“ Lord Beaverbrook was aptly nicknamed “Been-a-crook” and seemed to be “a kind of Dracula, Svengali, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one.” Brendan Bracken, the redhaired financial and political chancer who was (wrongly) rumoured to be Churchill’s illegitimate son, appeared to be a charlatan incarnate. “Everything about you is phoney,” said a journalist; “Even your hair, which looks like a wig, isn’t.”‘With friends and relations like these, Churchill understandably offended the bourgeoisie, though he did not let that worry him. He used “middle-class” as a term of abuse, shared his father’s disdain for suburban “lords of pineries and vineries” and despised “adjectival grocers”“-what he would have made of an adjectival grocer’s daughter can only be imagined.
Churchill’s extravagant style of life was also an affront to more modest folk, especially during the Depression: adopting F. E. Smith’s maxim, he professed to be easily satisfied with the very best. He behaved like a nabob, crowned with flamboyant hats out of doors and robed in garish dressing gowns at home. With the body of an unrepentant sybarite and “the face of a self-indulgent cherub,”‘he exuded an aura of cigar smoke, eau-de-Cologne and good liquor. (His wine merchant’s bills, which were large and paid slowly, as he had a lordly way with tradesmen, included many half bottles of champagne-not for sharing. But he was no alcoholic for, as C. P. Snow said, no alcoholic could drink that much.) Churchill’s appetite for food was gargantuan: he liked roast beef as well as white wine for breakfast, with other meals on an equally carnivorous scale. He made no secret of his patrician taste for gambling, polo and hunting (foxes not women). Servants were part of the tenure of his existence, running his life on oiled wheels. His country house, Chartwell Manor, near Westerham in Kent, was organised like a miniature Blenheim Palace.
Churchill adored Chartwell and spent huge sums on renovating and improving it, with mixed results. The dining-room, for example, scene of oratorical as well as gastronomic feasts, had to accommodate great girders which made it much too low for its length. It was like eating in a basement-except for the wonderful views over Churchill’s happy valley. This he cherished. He planted and dug, laid out a tennis court and excavated a swimming-pool which was heated so that it steamed. He built enormous walls, laying bricks with more energy than skill and often dictating letters as he went. He created lakes, dams, waterfalls, fish-ponds, treating his black swans, golden orfe and other creatures with anthropomorphic indulgence. He farmed in a lavish but inexpert fashion, telling Lloyd George that he was determined to make agriculture pay, “whatever it costs!”
Churchill often guyed himself thus, giving involuntary colour to hostile interpretations of his character and conduct. Equally provocative in deed, he was himself largely responsible for the fact that pre-war contemporaries saw him in caricature terms-as a fabulous soldier of fortune forever plotting some fantastic coup. That view of Churchill was almost entirely effaced by his great achievements during the Second World War and by his subsequent account of them. Since Churchill hung on to his prime-ministerial papers, this account was authoritatively documented as well as unashamedly partisan. History would be his judge, he liked to jest, and he would write the history. So for a generation Churchill remained a gleaming titan marching triumphantly to broad sunlit uplands through the pages of his own works-and those of his many admirers. His was the spirit that inspired the nation in its finest hour. His was the voice that gave the lion’s roar. He was the colossus who won victory over the forces. Churchill’s tragedy, and Britain’s, was that during the late 1930s he found himself cast in the role of Cassandra.
Churchill’s detractors, none of whom was more determined to keep him in the wilderness than Neville Chamberlain, would have been given pause for thought had they seen him reading and dictating with inexhaustible fecundity in his Chartwell bedroom. Surprisingly small and austere, with photographs of Lord Randolph and a wide bedside bookshelf crudely installed by the estate carpenter for his papers, it was not the boudoir of a hedonist but the billet of a campaigner. It plainly contradicted Chamberlain’s view of Churchill as a gaudy magnifico, improvising policies (some good, more bad) between drinks and sustaining them with nothing more than facile rhetoric. In fact Churchill did his homework quite as meticulously as Chamberlain himself, devoting particular attention to his parliamentary “impromptus.” Still, there is no denying that the two men were opposites without mutual attraction. Chamberlain, who succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, might admire Churchill’s wit and brilliance, his courage and vitality, but he had always felt that there was an unbridgeable “gulf between him and me.” In his opinion Churchill was unstable and amoral. Taking issue with him was “like arguing with a brass band.“ He must at all costs be kept out of the cabinet, which he would dominate and even silence. When the War Minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, Urged Churchill’s inclusion, Chamberlain replied: “I won’t have anyone who will rock the boat.” For his part, Churchill professed respect for the tough imperial pioneer who had struggled unsuccessfully for seven years to grow sisal on his father’s estate in the Bahamas. But he was essentially out of sympathy with Chamberlain, regarding him as narrow-minded,
cold-hearted and dusty-souled. Theirs was the perennial opposition of the Puritan and the Cavalier. It was the opposition, too, “between Birmingham Town Hall and Blenheim Palace.”
CHAMBERLAIN was often disparaged for being unable to see beyond the confines of local government and petty commerce. Lloyd George maintained that he would have made a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year and that he had “a retail mind in a wholesale business.” Experienced diplomats such as Sir Alexander Cadogan said that Chamberlain equated the conduct of foreign affairs with the handling of trade disputes. With a prissy manner, a reedy voice and a smug expression habitually imprinted on his corvine features, Chamberlain seemed every inch the political haberdasher. His conventional clothes added to the impression: the old-fashioned starched wing-collars; the black jacket and striped trousers; the inevitable umbrella, sceptre of the bourgeoisie since the time of Louis-Philippe-almost the only time Chamberlain showed anger was when his umbrella got broken. Although he was quite a cultured man, his amusements were on a similarly modest scale: he liked Christmas cracker jokes and games of musical chairs-at Cliveden, the Astors’ country house, he was allowed to win because it meant so much to him. Chamberlain’s international outlook was equally naive: America was “a nation of cads”; Russia was “semi-Asiatic”; and the French could not “keep a secret for more than half an hour, nor a government for more than nine rnonths.”‘Obviously Neville was a mere shadow of Joseph Chamberlain, lacking his father’s Olympian manner, global vision and volcanic eloquence. Indeed, like his siblings, Neville was “dwarfed and scorched by the towering inferno of his father’s personality.” He once said that reading about his father reminded him of studying the planets: his “own significance diminished with every step.”
Determined to prove himself, though, Chamberlain grew in self-confidence, even arrogance, with every step he took up the political ladder. Having entered parliament in 1918, aged almost 50, he made his name as a reforming Minister of Health during the late 1920s and as a masterful Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937. Stiff, reserved, penny-pinching and self-righteous, he was not a popular figure. Even his half-brother Austen remarked on his killing coldness. But such was his dedication to business, so logical were his policies and so lucid his speeches that he dominated the National Government. Once in 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain became a democratic despot. He was as masterful as Sir Robert Walpole, a portrait of whom (by Vanloo) hung over the marble fireplace behind his leather-upholstered chair in the long, Corinthian columned cabinet room.
Furthermore Chamberlain drew around himself an inner circle of subservient mediocrities, most of them knights remote from the practice of chivalry. Sir John Simon, a serpentine lawyer described as a snake in snake’s clothing, was singularly lacking in resolution at the Treasury: he had sat on the fence so long, Lloyd George famously remarked, that the iron had entered into his soul. Sir Samuel Hoare, now at the Home Office, had learned no lessons from the dictators: he was later said to have “passed from experience to experience, like Boccaccio’s virgin, without discernible effect upon his condition.” Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Coordination of Defence, had little ability, less power and no perceptiveness: “He could look with frank and fearless gaze at any prospect, however appalling-and fail to see it.” Other acolytes, such as Sir Horace Wilson, with his “temporising, ‘play for safety,’ formula-evolving mind,” and Sir Kingsley Wood, who on the outbreak of war opposed the bombing of munition works in Germany because they were private property, were equally unable or unwilling to stand up to Chamberlain.
Compliance seemed to validate his growing assumption of infallibility, which was expressed with the jauntiness of a schoolboy and the primness of an old maid. Flattery fed Chamberlain’s vanity for, as one official noted, “he likes to be set on a pedestal and adored, with suitable humility, by unquestioning admirers.” There was “no surer way of gratifying him than to make some allusion to the exceptional importance of his position.” By the same token, criticism, mockery and disrespect infuriated him. Chamberlain became increasingly intolerant of disagreement, equating loyalty to himself with patriotism. He squashed or squared the press with unprecedented vigour, using lobby journalists to manipulate public opinion while contemptuously accusing the occasional dissenter of being duped by “Jewish-Communist propaganda.” Chamberlain deployed his own secret propaganda organ, the supposedly independent journal Truth, to discredit opponents. He tapped their telephones. He harried ministers and extended his control to every aspect of government. He crushed par~ liamentary debate, treating the Labour opposition with open contempt and imposing a ruthless discipline on his own rank and file. One Tory MP said that “they had now a Fuhrer in the Conservative Party.” Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, believed that Chamberlain “au fond had a certain sympathy for dictators, whose efficiency appealed to him.” Ironically, the champion of appeasement in Europe was not a weak Prime Minister but an exceptionally strong one. The would~be conciliator of the continent was a domestic autocrat.
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