Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955. Barbara Leaming

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ