Winston’s War. Michael Dobbs

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      Alfred Duff Cooper, PC, DSO, MP and many other bits and bobs, was a man of prodigious appetites. He couldn’t spend a week without women – many of them – including his beautiful and sophisticated wife, Diana. As a species he found them irritating, yet individually they were irresistible. Neither did he seem able to live without the encouragement of alcohol, although in this he was far from unique within the clubs and corridors of the powerful. He was also a man of considerable intellectual capacity, having written an acclaimed biography of Talleyrand and another of Field Marshal Haig even while he was undertaking his duties as a senior member of the Cabinet. But above all else his appetite was for politics, a game that had brought fame, high office and many beautiful women to his doorstep. Yet, for ‘Duffie’, politics were to prove the most faithless mistress of them all.

      ‘A trim and a shave, if you will, McFadden. And take your time. I have to look my best.’

      ‘An important engagement, sir?’

      ‘With the executioner’s axe.’

      ‘Certainly, sir,’ Mac replied, displaying as much emotion as if he had been asked to put out the empty milk bottles.

      The politician had walked the fifteen minutes from his office in the Admiralty to Trumper’s, the finest gentlemen’s barbers in the country, which stood on Mayfair’s Curzon Street. It was a walk made by an extraordinarily large number of the grandest men in the land (although in the case of the Palace and Downing Street it was more usual for the barber to pack his small case of necessities and make a house call). McFadden was one of that handful of select barbers who served them. He had joined the firm years before through a combination of good fortune and his considerable ability. Everyone liked Mac because he was totally undemanding. Nobody needed to bother getting to know him. He arrived, he worked, he cleared up and he left. Now the First Lord of the Admiralty was reclining in his chair within a highly polished wood-panelled cubicle, one of many that stretched into the depths of the shop.

      ‘I’m sorry to hear you’re going to die, sir. Any particular reason?’ Mac enquired as he prepared the hot towels. The announcement of this great politician’s imminent demise had seemed to require some sort of response, but Mac was always careful not to appear too interested or to become emotional about any of his customers’ concerns. They came here to relax, to put aside the troubles of their day, and they found it much easier to accomplish this with someone like Mac who simply didn’t matter. It was bred into them, the tendency to display in front of a servant the range of thoughts and emotions you’d never dream of sharing with a friend or your wife. It also helped that Mac had a slight accent and a limp and appeared to be a little stupid and slow, not a complete man, conforming to a certain notion of the working man that made him the safe recipient of confidences, if not of the vote.

      Duff Cooper closed his eyes and allowed a slow exhalation of breath. ‘I’m not dying literally, for God’s sake. It’s worse than that. This afternoon I have a very important speech to make to the House of Commons. My resignation speech.’

      ‘A sad day, sir.’ Mac slowed down his preparations for the shave. The client clearly wished to share a confidence with him, which he would find difficult through a swathe of hot towels.

      ‘God, but I’ve loved my job. I’ve sat in the Admiralty and sent the mightiest navy in the world to every corner of the globe. More power and privilege than most men could ever dream of. Yet by tonight I shall be an outcast, despised by people who yesterday hung on my every word and called me their friend. All because of …’

      ‘Lift the chin for me, will you, sir? Thank you. Because of what, sir?’

      ‘Damn it, McFadden! We won the bloody war. Never again, we said. Then Hitler comes along and starts building his squadrons of panzers and fighter planes – purely for defence, he assures everyone, and we believe him. Even when he marches into the Rhineland we believe him. Two years later he’s trampling all over bloody Austria, and now he’s ripping Czechoslovakia to pieces. And still our Prime Minister says he trusts him!’

      His client was tense, his moustache a-bristle. Mac reclined the chair even more to help him relax.

      ‘Tell me, McFadden, what do you think of our beloved Mr Chamberlain?’

      Mac didn’t care for such direct questions. All his adult life had been spent in the mentality of the gulag, never openly complaining, always seeming to conform, never risking a row. Perhaps that’s why he had agreed to marry, not so much to avoid disappointing the lady but more because it was the simplest way to fit into the flow of things. Yet there weren’t any simple ways open to him any more. The time had come when even barbers had to take sides.

      ‘I think Mr Chamberlain wears his hair too long,’ the barber replied softly.

      ‘God, but what would I do to get near him with a razor,’ the politician spat.

      ‘Doesn’t go with the image, it doesn’t. That hair – and the winged collar and tail coat. Out of date, if you ask me.’

      ‘A man out of time.’

      ‘Will any of your colleagues be joining you, sir?’ Mac made it sound like an invitation to sit down and dine. As he applied the first towel, the politician offered up a soft moan and for a moment Mac thought he had applied it too hot, but it soon became clear that the pain came from an entirely different source.

      ‘They promised, you know. Walter Elliot, and others. We’ll be there with you, they said, right at your side. Munich was one goose-step too far. But where are they now? Elliot waffles on about how he can be of more use working from inside the Government than being a leper on the back benches. Leper. That’s the term he used. The day before he was talking about honour, now it’s become some sort of disfiguring disease. The bastard. And the others keep drivelling on about there being an election around the corner and how it would be suicide to resign now, how party headquarters would make sure they never got another job again. What sort of job do they think they’ll have when the Wehrmacht comes marching down bloody Whitehall, for Christ’s sake?’

      Mac held back on the final towel. It was as though the politician was pouring out all the anguish and pain of betrayal he would never be able to display in the House, needing somehow to get to grips with the wreckage that only hours ago had been a grand life.

      ‘I despair. What’s become of my party? I thought we were a league of gentlemen, but only Eden telephoned. And Winston, of course. In tears. Sentimental old bugger. By God, if tears could drown Hitler, Winston would’ve finished him off before a single jackboot ever trod on Vienna.’

      Mac hobbled around the chair to apply the final towel. Before his face disappeared, Duff Cooper muttered the words that Mac had heard so many times from this chair. ‘Not to be repeated, of course, McFadden. Shouldn’t really be telling you this but … Just between the two of us, eh?’

      The politician wanted a sounding board and who better than a slow, stupid Jew-boy barber? Mac dropped the towel and at last the politician was silent.

      Mac held a simple view about politicians. He loathed the lot. He’d been governed by Tsars, by Kaisers, by Kings and by Bloody Chaos. He’d seen both imperialism and communism up close – too close – and he had a pretty clear idea about Nazism, too. They were all the same. They were politicians. They sat behind vast desks in their vast palaces and moved vast armies backwards and forwards across the map – until the armies were no longer vast but had been destroyed and the game was over, for a while. Lives of millions of men sliced to pieces by arrows on a map.

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