Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955. Barbara Leaming

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СКАЧАТЬ to turn out the Government more than Churchill. No one can have had greater reason to be impatient. He was truly, as his father had said of Gladstone, an ‘old man in a hurry’. Still, he protested, the timing was all wrong. The Attlee Government had only been in power for a few months and it was too soon to argue that they had failed. Like it or not – and Churchill did not like it – the Opposition had little choice but to wait upon events. The Conservatives needed to let some time pass and give things a chance to go wrong. Far from benefiting Conservatives, Churchill argued, a premature confrontation would spotlight Tory weakness, allowing Labour to emerge even stronger than before.

      Churchill suggested that when his critics had had more experience they would see that he had been right, but they were unyielding. At last he reluctantly consented to go on the warpath against Attlee; it was either that or allow the charge to stand that somehow he had lost the will to fight.

      On the evening of 27 November, three days before his seventy-first birthday, Churchill placed a motion of censure before the House, which claimed that the Government had focused on long-range nationalization plans at the expense of the people’s immediate postwar needs. Churchill filed the motion without comment in expectation of a full-dress debate the following week.

      Robert ‘Rab’ Butler, Churchill’s wartime Minister of Education, established the tone at the next day’s Conservative Central Council meeting in London. The pale, balding, pouchy-eyed Butler introduced Churchill as the ‘Master Fighter’. Churchill’s mockery of Socialist ministers elicited peals of delight, and when he slowly, mischievously flapped his arms to help listeners visualize ‘the gloomy vultures of nationalization’ hovering over Attlee’s Britain, the hall echoed with appreciative laughter. Delegates from throughout Britain insisted they had never known Churchill to be in better form.

      He met a less enthusiastic reception in the House of Commons. Labour shot down Churchill’s motion – by this time, despite its genesis, it was very much identified in the public mind as his motion – by a vote of 381 to 197. But then, he had expected it to fail. What he could not have expected was the wit and ferocity of Attlee’s counterattack. Churchill was known to view his successor as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’, but there was nothing sheepish about Attlee’s devastating performance on 6 December.

      Clementine Churchill watched from the gallery, and more than a hundred politicians had to stand or squat on the floor for want of seats, as the small, spare, fidgety Attlee, who had a reputation as a lacklustre speaker, gave what was widely received as the best speech of his parliamentary career to date. Attlee made Churchill seem ridiculous for asking why a Government that had been elected to carry out a socialist programme did not carry out a Conservative programme. He avowed that Britain disliked ‘one-man shows’ and he characterized the motion of censure as nothing more than ‘a party move by a politician in difficulties’.

      Every time Attlee scored a hit – and there were many – the Labour benches roared. His plush pink target looked on in silence. Churchill made a point of rising above the abuse. Still, that Attlee had out-debated him was a blow to his prestige. Soon, it looked as if it might even have been a knockout, and the talk in political London was that Churchill might be preparing to step aside.

      In fact, that was the last thing he meant to do. While Churchill had been managing the unrest in his party, Truman had officially confirmed his offer to introduce the Fulton speech. Since then, Churchill had been back and forth with Washington to press for a firm date, to ask that the event be announced simultaneously from the White House and in London, to urge Truman to make public his endorsement of the invitation, and to express a wish for talks between the President and himself. Ironically, when Truman granted all of these requests, the news of Churchill’s impending trip, to speak in Missouri and to enjoy a rest in Florida with Mrs Churchill, sparked new rumours of resignation.

      Speculation was rife that Churchill’s willingness to leave Britain at a time of deep division in the Conservative Party meant that he intended to give up the leadership upon his return. There were reports in the world press that he was travelling to Florida on doctor’s orders and that the state of his health might soon force him to retire. Meanwhile, mindful of the havoc that had ensued when both he and Eden were missing from Parliament on 19 November, Churchill reassured a large gathering of Opposition members that Eden was set to lead in his absence. Instead of allaying fears, however, his comments provoked upset in certain Conservative quarters.

      Eden enjoyed broad support in the party, but if indeed Churchill was preparing to hand over, not everyone was pleased with the prospect of power passing to Eden. His critics dismissed him as a lightweight who possessed more style than substance and who had risen only because so many of the best young men of his generation had perished in the First World War. In a public challenge to received wisdom about the succession, the Evening Standard, which was owned by Lord Beaverbrook, questioned whether Eden was quite up to the task. There followed a round of press comment, both at home and abroad, about Rab Butler and other possible successors should Churchill retire.

      As 1946 began, representatives of fifty-one countries gathered in London for the first United Nations General Assembly. On 9 January, final preparations were under way at St James’s Palace for that night’s state banquet on the eve of the historic session when the Churchills sailed for America. Their giant liner, the Queen Elizabeth, which had delivered Eleanor Roosevelt and other members of the US deleg ation four days previously, was part of the effort to repatriate nearly two million American and Canadian troops that had begun after the surrender of Germany. On the present westward crossing, more than twelve thousand Canadians were finally on their way home. The day before they reached New York, Churchill addressed the troops over the ship’s loudspeaker system. In the course of speaking to them of their future, the old warrior offered some hints about how he saw his own.

      As the young men prepared to begin new lives after the war, Churchill promised them that the future was in their hands and that their lives would be what they chose to make them. The trick, he told them, was to have a purpose and to stick to it. He recalled that the previous day he had been standing on the bridge ‘watching the mountainous waves, and this ship – which is no pup – cutting through them and mocking their anger’. He asked himself why it was that the ship beat the waves, when the waves were so many and the ship was one. The reason, he went on, was that the ship has a purpose while the waves have none. ‘They just flop around, innumerable, tireless, but ineffective. The ship with the purpose takes us where we want to go. Let us therefore have a purpose, both in our national and imperial policy, and in our private lives.’

      Some people at the time interpreted those remarks as Churchill’s ‘farewell to politics’. In retrospect, they appear to have been anything but that. Far from being inclined to shut down his political life, Churchill, though he too was no pup, was about to restart it.

       V The Wet Hen St James’s Palace, 1946

      A cold rain pelted London on the night of Britain’s first state banquet since 1939. Inside St James’s Palace, crackling wood fires perfumed the air. Servants wore prewar red-and-gold and blue-and-gold liveries, and royal treasures that had been stored away for the duration of the war were once again on display. Candles twinkling in gold candelabra illuminated a banquet table set for eighty-six with heavy gold plate. As each of the fifty-one chief UN delegates and other guests entered, they were taken to a cavernous, tapestry-lined room where they were presented to the King. The fifty-year-old George VI wore the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. The Colombian delegate responsible for overseeing the preparations for the first General Assembly sat at his right, and the Belgian who was expected to be elected its president the following day sat at the King’s left. Among the topics dominating the delegates’ conversation was who would be appointed to the post of Secretary General.

      Hours after Churchill СКАЧАТЬ