Fighting Retreat, page 9
Problems in the area did not disappear immediately after the Cairo Conference. Exacerbating the problems among the Arabs was the fact that a final peace with Turkey had not yet been signed. Pamphlets were being circulated in the area in Urdu, calling on Muslim Indian troops to murder their officers and desert. The Turks were also arming some of the sheikhs.
But overall, the Colonial Office years were much more agreeable for Churchill than he had expected and indeed enhanced his standing. Nobody blamed him for failing to resolve Palestine, where his efforts at reconciliation had been immense. Ireland was judged a success. And he was not the only one who was gratified by the Cairo Conference, which he described as a meeting of the Forty Thieves. He enjoyed saying that he had created the Emirate of Jordan with the stroke of his pen one bright Sunday afternoon, with time left to make several paintings of Jerusalem before the light went out.
* Now, ‘the Troubles’ is used to refer exclusively to the problems of the 1970s and later. But the phrase was first used to describe what the IRA called the ‘War of Independence’ in the 1920s.
* Between 1914 and 1918, according to Martin Gilbert, India provided one soldier for every 225 of its inhabitants; New Zealand one for every five; Great Britain one for every seven; Australia one for every ten; Canada one for every eleven; and South Africa one for every forty-four. There were 14,00,000 Indians in the Indian Army, of whom 8,50,000 were moved to theatres of war.
† Egypt’s position as an imperial possession only went back in law to the start of the Great War, when Britain declared it a protectorate, but de facto the connection was much older.
* Censuses of 1901 and 1907, respectively.
10
Out of Office
In November 1922, a General Election took place. Churchill stood again for Dundee. He was suffering from the serious after-effects of an appendicitis operation and was scarcely able to campaign. Clemmie appeared on his behalf until the very last days of the campaign. The mood had changed. When he did appear, he was heckled and shouted down. ‘What about Gallipoli’? Despite the Enquiry, which exonerated him, he never shook off a taint that still lingers even today. The two Liberal candidates were defeated by a Labour candidate and a famous advocate of prohibition. Churchill, as always, was genuinely magnanimous. He declared that, given the conditions of the working class in Dundee, they were right to demand change. In public, he was buoyant. As he got on his train for London, a Dundonian reporter asked if it were true that he was being given a knighthood. He replied that he was not. He was returning south as plain Mr Churchill, ‘without a prefix, a suffix or an appendix’. In reality, he was devastated by the turn of events and disappeared from active politics for fifteen months.
His career had indubitably suffered a setback. In the course of his political lifetime, it met many setbacks. The move from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Party in 1904 had been risky. His fall after Gallipoli had been potentially more dangerous. It could well have marked the end, and at the time, he thought it probably had. Afterwards, he was very grateful to Lloyd George for giving him a second chance, ‘a remount’, probably because he thought Churchill would be less of a threat in the Government than out of it.
The defeat in the 1922 election was accompanied by other blows. His youngest daughter, Marigold, had died of meningitis. Clementine suffered a nervous collapse. Lady Randolph died following the amputation of a leg. Churchill took a four-month holiday in the South of France. Holidays were not periods of inaction for him, and he spent the time beginning to write a huge (and still important) history of the First World War, The World Crisis.*
His difficulty was in accommodating himself to a changed political landscape. The coalition that Asquith formed between the Liberal Party and the Conservatives in 1915 survived his replacement by Lloyd George. At a personal level, Lloyd George, ‘the man who had won the war’, was almost unassailable.†
At the 1918 General Election, called ‘the Coupon Election’ because the coalition handed out a slip of paper to the candidates it endorsed, the Government won a huge majority. But it depended on its Conservative supporters. Bonar Law had 344 Conservatives. Labour came forward for the first time with a substantial vote of 142 MPs. The Liberals were third, with 115 members, but even that overstated their strength because they were split between Lloyd George’s ‘National Liberals’ and Asquith’s official Liberal Party. Asquith had sixty-two MPs, and Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, only fifty-three.
Lloyd George’s personal popularity was enormous, but his political support in Parliament was obviously fragile. His government depended on Conservative votes, and the Conservatives fairly soon tired of supporting a man they had always hated. At a famous meeting of the party at the Carlton Club in 1922, they voted for the Party to go its own way. Lloyd George was deposed. For a year, until the 1923 General Election, the Government was a Conservative Government. After the minority MacDonald Government from 1923 to 1924, the Conservatives returned and formed a government until 1929. From 1929 until 1931, MacDonald again presided over a minority Labour Government, but from 1931 until the outbreak of war, the Conservatives formed a government, the National Government, which they dominated despite Labour and Liberal elements.
So 1922 was the end of the great Liberal Party, one of the dominating influences on nineteenth-century life, not just politically but perhaps to an even greater extent morally. In the century that followed, it never again formed an administration and was only represented in coalition governments. A great political earthquake had taken place.*
This left Churchill with a problem. His move to the Liberal Party in 1904 had not been a difficult one. He had never had an obvious affinity with the Tories. That made coming back to them, ‘re-ratting’, as he called it, ‘in itself an awkward manoeuvre, even more difficult.’* In 1904, the issue of Free Trade genuinely mattered to Churchill, and at heart he was of a Whiggish disposition. Moreover, he never greatly liked the Conservatives, particularly the Unionist element, and the Conservatives were pretty ambivalent about him. On the other hand, he had come to dislike Bolshevism greatly and to an extent to conflate Bolshevism with Socialism, which did chime in with Conservative prejudices. That fitted in with the Unionists, as he often called the Conservative Party, but until the outbreak of the Second World War, while he had the support of the Tory press and of much of the party in the country, he was regarded by many Tory MPs with distrust and suspicion, a mercurial (that word again) opportunist. After his magnificent leadership in the Second War, his position was unassailable, but more because of support in the party than in Parliament.
So after 1922, he began to edge towards the Tories. As late as December 1923, he stood again as a Liberal, at Leicester West. He was defeated by the Labour candidate and was thus reinforced in his prevailing instinct, to oppose Socialism. The break came when, after the following General Election, the Liberals decided to support a minority Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald. His intention was to stand as an independent, relying on support from both the Liberals and the Conservatives, and at the by-election in the Westminster Abbey Division in March 1924, he stood unsuccessfully against the Conservatives but, note, as a ‘Constitutionalist, independent anti-Socialist’. The chorus girls of Daly’s theatre sat up all night addressing envelopes and dispatching the election address. The edging to the right was completed when, shortly afterwards, he was adopted by the local Conservative Association as their candidate for Epping. Even then, he stood not as a Conservative but again as a ‘Constitutionalist’. He could not bring himself to use the uncomfortable Conservative label.
The move away from radicalism played a role in the development of his convictions. Because Churchill lived until 1965, it is easy to assume that he was still quite a young man in 1924. He was not. Particularly as it affected his views on India, it is important to remember where his roots were planted. He was in fact forty-nine, and surprised that he had not died the early death that he had always expected. His youthful nonchalance was leaving him. He had been greatly affected by the First World War, not only for the tragedy of the deaths, which distressed this humane man, but because of the way in which it upturned the certainties of life and the geopolitical structure on which these certainties rested. When he came in 1930 to write My Early Life, a delightful and beautifully written account of his life from his birth to the time when he entered the House of Commons, he was recording an elegy: ‘I was a child of the Victorian era, when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the seas was unrivalled, and when the realisation of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was ever growing stronger.’1
The drift to the right can be discerned as early as the latter years of the First World War. Even before the war, while still MP for Oldham, part of the appeal for him of a Liberal–Conservative coalition was to block the development of socialism and communism. Now, as he saw the growth of the Labour Party, he became more concerned about the threat to the kind of society of which he approved and its replacement by doctrinaire ideology. When Duff Cooper had dinner with Churchill in January 1920, he reported that ‘Winston said that he was all out to fight Labour. It was his one object in Politics.’ He was becoming ‘splendidly reactionary’.2 There is a caesura between the young, liberal Churchill and the Churchill who hated and feared the implications of Socialist theory. This was Churchill for the rest of his life.
On this reading, after his defeat at Dundee, his return to the Tories was pretty inevitable. He had lunch with Sir Robert Horne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. He said, ‘I am what I always have been—a Tory Democrat. Force of circumstance has compelled me to serve with another party, but my views have never changed, and I would be glad to give effect to them by re-joining the Conservatives.’3 It would be truer to say that his views had changed under the influence of events. The Glasgow Herald said that Churchill was ‘undoubtedly preparing the way of return to the party he had left many years ago’.4
So, far from being the radical firebrand, Lloyd George’s henchman, whose treachery to his own class was so deprecated by the King, he had now become a traditionalist who deprecated the passing of the old order, the disappearance of the great European dynasties, and the threats to Britain’s imperial strength. This change of attitude affected his view of the Empire and of India.
Churchill and India would collide in 1930, when he was at the forefront of opposition to steps that were designed, albeit agonizingly slowly, to lead India towards some sort of self-government. Before we concentrate on this crucial time for both Churchill and Britain’s relations with the Indian subcontinent, we look at Churchill’s last period in office before the Second World War.
The 1924 General Election saw Churchill elected for Epping. He was in Parliament but not yet in Government. The Carlton Club resolution in 1922 had separated the Tories from the Liberals, but it also caused a minor fissure in the Conservative Party. One or two prominent Tories, such as Churchill, Austen Chamberlain and F.E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead), remained apart. There were other difficulties too. The Conservative Cabinet was beginning to do the unthinkable and toy with the idea of adopting the scheme of Imperial Preferences advocated by Joe Chamberlain, which had threatened Free Trade and caused Churchill’s defection in 1904.
A great deal of effort was devoted to getting the dissidents on board and thus defusing a Lloyd Georgian coup. The invitation from the new Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, asking Churchill to come to Downing Street was the culmination of this strategy. Churchill said that Baldwin asked him to become Chancellor, that he replied that he would indeed be glad to become Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the largely honorific government position he had held during the war, and that Baldwin replied that he meant Chancellor of the Exchequer. The story may have been true because it was extraordinary, by ordinary standards, that the double renegade, whose political career had appeared to flounder disastrously, was being invited to accept one of the highest positions at the Prime Minister’s disposal—and one, moreover, for which Churchill displayed no obvious qualifications. ‘I should have liked to have answered, “Will the bloody duck swim?”, but as it was a formal and important conversation I replied, ‘This fulfils my ambition. I still have my father’s robe as Chancellor. I shall be proud to serve you in this splendid office.’5 The story may have been true, but I very much doubt it. Baldwin needed Churchill back and had to pay a high price, and Churchill, who never undervalued himself, knew that.
If this book were a review of Churchill’s politics as a whole, a lot of space would be devoted to his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer. But it isn’t, and there won’t be. That doesn’t mean that he confined himself narrowly to his departmental brief. He never did. Even in his first office, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, a very junior member of the government, his super-abundant self-confidence carried him brashly into areas that had nothing to do with him. A flavour of this approach can be conveyed by what he said when, just back in the Conservative Party, as Chancellor, he took the Chair of a Cabinet Committee during the General Strike. Two other principal members were the Home Secretary, Joynson–Hicks (‘Jix’) and the Secretary for War, Worthington-Evans (‘Worthy’). ‘I have done your job for eighteen months, Jix, and yours for two years, Worthy, so I had better unfold my plan.’6 As Roy Jenkins nicely put it, ‘He assumed the authority of the Treasury within the Government as though he had the combined Exchequer experience of Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George and Bonar Law, and he behaved towards his colleagues as though he had the most unassailable of Conservative credentials.’7
A number of broad observations can be made about Churchill’s time as Chancellor for the sake of the insights they give. I said earlier that he was not an obvious choice for Chancellor; he had no experience at the Exchequer or in the other departments that mesh closely with it. But he is now recognized as having been a rather good Chancellor. At one time, there was some controversy about his performance. That centred on the return to the Gold Standard. Until 1914, the value of the pound was fixed in relation to the price of gold. In that year, the linkage was removed, and fiscal discipline—and national self-respect—suffered in the exigencies of wartime. America had also abandoned the Gold Standard, but the United States returned to pre-war gold parity in 1919. The effect was to leave the pound at an embarrassingly low rate of exchange relative to the dollar. Relinking the pound to pre-war parity in 1925, as Churchill did, implied a rise of about 10 per cent in its value, and the effect of that on the economy was painful. He was criticized at the time and continued to be for many years. The criticism was stimulated by the pamphlet written by the economist John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill, a very conscious reference to his hugely popular The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
It was a slightly unfair personalization of the issue, doubly unfair because Churchill had worked hard with Keynes to avoid a return to parity. At the Treasury, no one was more opposed to returning to the Gold Standard than the Chancellor himself. He fought vigorously against the opposition of all his senior advisors, deploying arguments obtained, among others, from Keynes and Reginald McKenna, a former Chancellor.*
Roy Jenkins, another former Chancellor, put it well:
As the Gold battle unfolded so there was a sense of even such a rumbustious character as Churchill being swept downstream by the force of a compelling current protesting, but nonetheless essentially impotent. The Treasury was against him, the Bank was against him, the committee presided over first by Austen Chamberlain and then by Bradbury [a former Permanent Secretary of the Treasury] was against him. Snowden, his Labour ‘shadow’ was against him. Baldwin . . . played no part in the decision, but would have been against Churchill had he attempted to decide otherwise. The two tufts of ground—Keynes and McKenna—on which he attempted to stand proved, for varying reasons unsatisfactory footholds.8
As Chancellor, Churchill worked extraordinarily hard. He had done so in the past, and he would do so again, but the impression of his vitality and enthusiasm is particularly marked at this period. He worked in the evenings and at the weekends. He exhausted his associates, as he would do in the war, with the long and draining sessions that he imposed on them. He immersed himself in detail and mastered the technical aspects of his brief. Some who admire Churchill, even claiming to model themselves on him, are taken in by his bombast and rodomontade. It can mislead. Even in the most famous of his wartime rhetoric, with its florid and magnificent perorations, the bulk of the speech consisted of painstaking analysis and a forensic recitation of detail. Churchill’s status as one of the outstanding Chancellors of the twentieth century is underlined by the fact that he delivered no fewer than five budgets. He should not be underrated.
The budgets that he introduced were not, apart from the return to the Gold Standard, dramatic. And even that had been so expected that it generated a feeling of inevitability rather than drama. But the pantomimes with the Gladstonian despatch box outside Number 11 Downing Street were more theatrical than ever. Churchill loved the play-acting. The marches on Westminster, flanked by friends, family and Treasury officials, were impressive affairs. The budget speeches themselves were delivered with style and humour. But the contents were pretty technical; they were economists’ budgets.
Perhaps surprisingly for someone who is forever associated with the defence of the British Isles, they were far from a warmonger’s budget. Possibly the most noticeable feature was his stinginess with money for the forces, particularly the Navy. His expenditure was based on the dubious assumption that there would be no naval wars for the foreseeable future, an assumption from which Britain would suffer at the outbreak of the Second World War. Eschewing the grand schemes and legacy gestures that Chancellors enjoy, his consistent concern was for what he referred to, with genuine compassion, if condescendingly, as ‘the little people’. He was about as far from being one of the little people as could be imagined, but his concern for ordinary men and women, at home and abroad, was a heart-warming and redeeming feature of his approach throughout his political career.
