Cabinet's Finest Hour Read online




  CABINET’S FINEST HOUR

  Cabinet’s Finest Hour

  The Hidden Agenda of May 1940

  DAVID OWEN

  First published in 2016 by

  Haus Publishing Ltd

  70 Cadogan Place

  London SW1X 9AH

  www.hauspublishing.com

  Copyright © David Owen, 2016

  David Owen has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-910376-55-3

  eISBN 978-1-910376-59-1

  Typeset by MacGuru Ltd.

  Printed in the United Kingdom.

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Preface

  1Speak for England

  2In the Name of God, Go!

  3The Politics of the Coalition Government

  4The Hidden Agenda

  Minutes and Documents

  Diaries

  5Speaking for All of Us

  6Dunkirk and Defiance

  7Epilogue: Prime Minister to

  President – conflict and the post-war Cabinets

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Many people have helped me at Haus Publishing. Barbara Schwepcke, Harry Hall and Emma Henderson have been towers of strength. Once again my cousin Simon Owen has contributed criticism and advice and as always Maggie Smart has been strongly supportive. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the British Library have been very helpful in providing access to the writings of Arthur Greenwood who has never been the subject of a biography. His contribution with Clement Attlee to rebuilding the Labour Party from 1935 was second to none and was of particular importance to the whole nation in 1939 and 1940. It is hard to do justice to the helpful support I have received from the staff of the library at the House of Lords. I have written in other books about many of the people who feature in this work, in particular In Sickness and In Power: Illness in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years1, a work I updated for a new edition in 2016. I have used or modified the same words about these people rather than attempting to revise my own considered judgements.

  I am convinced that Winston Churchill’s greatness is not impaired but enhanced by demonstrating that his War Cabinet was one of collective decision-making in which his judgements were challenged and opinions changed in debate; the authority and quality of the Government was hugely improved by Churchill’s wish to remain primus inter pares, or first among equals.

  Limehouse, August 2016

  1 Methuen Publishing Ltd, 2009.

  Preface

  I first sat around the Cabinet table as a junior minister for the Royal Navy at the age of 31, deputising for Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defence. The subject under discussion at the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee of the Cabinet was the source of much amusement in the country. A somewhat bizarre decision to authorise ‘Operation Sheepskin’ had been taken the previous week, on Friday 14 March 1969, by DOPC which had resulted – five days later, on 19 March at 5.30 am – in 331 paratroopers and marines wading ashore at two sites with guns at the ready only to be greeted on the sand of the island of Anguilla in the West Indies by sixty television crews and reporters. It was too early for the tourists asleep in their hotel rooms to be present.

  The farcical nature of what was in Whitehall terms a successful operation to restore the authority of the British Government over local politicians was lampooned by the press who dubbed it as the ‘Bay of Piglets’ after President Kennedy’s ill-fated and somewhat more serious invasion of Cuba in 1961.

  After a Cabinet conversation accompanied by frequent references to SNOWI, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins leant back somewhat languidly in his chair and, with a smile, asked Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister sitting opposite him, “Who and what is SNOWI?” The answer, to our baffled amusement, was Commodore Lacey the Senior Naval Officer West Indies!

  Periodic attendances as Health Minister from 1974 to 1976, again under Harold Wilson, was followed by full Cabinet membership as Foreign Secretary under Prime Minister James Callaghan from 1977 to 1979. This period was marked by seemingly endless armed conflicts in Southern Rhodesia, the Horn of Africa, Mozambique and Angola. There was a very real danger of the Cold War between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union spilling over from Europe into the African continent. There was also an important economic agenda in the context of our membership of what was then the European Economic Community.

  I do not think this book would have been possible without this Cabinet experience. As the years pass I grow evermore convinced that collective decision-making is the hallmark of a true democracy, however differently it might be organised. Also that there is nothing old-fashioned about its mechanisms that are proven to work. The worst possible form of democratic governance in my view is that which tries to make an ad hoc amalgamation of the strong powers of a US President with the UK tradition of a Prime Minister and seeks to do so without the complex separation of powers that exists in the US with checks from Congress and the Supreme Court, while retaining the fusion of power between Parliament and the Executive. The UK has suffered, with varying degrees of intensity, from that combination under three Prime Ministers and successive Cabinet Secretaries from 2001 to 2016. It is time to not just dismantle such appalling governance but to put constitutional safeguards in place that make it virtually impossible for it to re-emerge.

  As with my 2014 book with Haus Publishing, The Hidden Perspective: The Military Conversations of 1906–1914, I attach much importance to making available to the reader original documents from the time. I have tried to select sufficient quotes so that the narrative is not dependent on reading the documents in full but is rather a matter of individual preference as to whether one chooses to do so. I have long been fascinated as to whether there was the basis for a negotiation with Mussolini in 1940 and am deeply indebted to John Lukacs’ ground-breaking book Five Days in London, May 1940.1 When I first read the War Cabinet minutes in full covering nine meetings of six ministers from Martin Gilbert’s brilliantly edited work of scholarship and revelation, The Churchill War Papers: Never Surrender,2 I wanted to make them available as an easy and continuous read. This is done in Chapter 4. What they bring alive is a genuine debate and clash of views mainly, but by no means exclusively, between Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and Churchill as Prime Minister. The outcome of the debate had a profound impact on world history.

  1 John Lukacs, Five Days in London, May 1940 (Yale University Press, 2001).

  2 Martin Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, Volume II: Never Surrender May 1940-December 1940 (Heinemann, 1994).

  1

  Speak for England

  On Saturday 2 September 1939, after rushing through the Military Service Bill, followed by a long wait until nearly eight o’clock in the evening, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made a short statement to a House of Commons expectant of a declaration of war on Germany. Instead, according to the Conservative MP, Leo Amery, he “came to tell us in a flat, embarrassed voice, first of all that Mussolini’s project for a conference could not be entertained while Poland was subject to invasion; secondly that we were discussing with the French.”1 There was a deep sense of frustration in the Commons when Chamberlain sat down. In part, such feeling stemmed from the assumption that we were already at war. And yet here was Chamberlain ready only to speak about a delayed reply from Hitler to the British message delivered a day before to his Foreign Secretary, Ribbentrop.

  Few, if any, MPs were even the slightest bit intereste
d to hear about a proposal from the Italian Government for a conference, believing, correctly, that even Chamberlain would find it impossible to take part. It was a House of Commons seething with frustration; Poland was being subjected to invasion, her towns under bombardment and Danzig made the subject of a unilateral settlement by force. The House of Commons very rarely sits on a Saturday; the only recent precedents have been 3 November 1956 during the Suez Crisis, and 3 April 1982 when Margaret Thatcher announced that in response to an Argentinian landing on the Falkland Islands, a task force would sail for the South Atlantic on the Monday.2

  Suddenly, though unrecorded in Hansard – the supposedly verbatim report of what is said in the Commons – Leo Amery, one of Chamberlain’s foremost critics, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1922 to 1924 and a very successful Colonial Secretary from 1924 to 1929, called out to Arthur Greenwood on the opposite bench as he rose to reply to the Prime Minister, “Speak for England, Arthur!” Amery “dreaded a purely partisan speech” and afterwards felt that “no one could have done it better”.3

  Greenwood was deputising for the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, who was away from Parliament recovering from an operation on his prostate. Attlee’s total trust and confidence in Greenwood is revealed through his determination to keep to his doctor’s orders and not cut short his convalescence. So he was sitting on the beach with his children on 23 August 1939 when the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed; he was playing golf on 1 September when Hitler sent his forces into Poland; and was back on the beach on this day, 2 September, when Chamberlain made his statement to Parliament and Greenwood made his speech. Attlee had told Greenwood to protest furiously that Britain had not yet fulfilled its obligations to Poland. The two communicated constantly by telegram while Attlee was absent, though one rather important telegram was torn up by the Attlee family dog, Ting, and only when pieced together read “War imminent. Arthur.” 4

  Amery’s words carried the clear implication to everyone in the House that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had not spoken for England – the effect was electric. Greenwood at the despatch box was a tall and, on this occasion, a commanding figure, who only a few years later would still be able to beat off a knife attack from an assailant outside the Commons late at night. On such occasions as these the House becomes a cockpit, with a theatrical atmosphere that cannot be reproduced when it is half empty. It is a moment when reputations are made as well as broken.

  Speaking with a new authority to a crammed chamber, Greenwood began, “This is indeed a grave moment. (Cheers) I believe the whole House is perturbed by the right hon. gentleman’s statement. There is a growing feeling, I believe, in all quarters of the House that this incessant strain must end sooner or later – and, in a sense, the sooner the better (Cries of “Now”). But if we are to march, I hope we shall march in complete unity and march with France.” A maverick backbench MP, John McGovern, then interjected with a sneer: “You people do not intend to march – not one of you.”5 Greenwood wisely did not deal with the charge, intent on maximising unity amongst all MPs and appealing to the better nature of everyone. John McGovern had sat as an independent MP for the Scottish seat, Glasgow Shettleston, while retaining membership of the Independent Labour Party [ILP] since a by-election in 1922. He was a combative figure who maintained his passionate commitment to peace throughout the war, and was described as someone capable of causing hackles to rise on the left as well as the right.

  Greenwood continued, “I am speaking under very difficult circumstances – (Cheers) with no opportunity to think about what I should say; and I speak what is in my heart at this moment. I am gravely disturbed. An act of aggression took place 38 hours ago. The moment that act of aggression took place, one of the most important treaties of modern times automatically came into operation (Opposition Cheers)”. He ended by saying, “I believe that the die is cast, and we want to know in time.”6

  In a revealing letter to his sister Ida seven days later on 20 September 1939, Chamberlain explained that the “long drawn out agonies that preceded the actual declaration of war” were due to “three complications”.7 Firstly, secret communications that a neutral intermediary conducted between Hitler and Göring and himself and his Foreign Secretary Halifax which he had found “rather promising”. Though “they gave the impression, probably with intention, that it was possible to persuade Hitler to accept a peaceful and reasonable solution of the Polish question in order to get an Anglo-German agreement”. Once again, Chamberlain was not ready to accept the reality that Hitler was intent on war. What Chamberlain wrote was that until Hitler “disappears and his system collapses there can be no peace … What I hope for is not a military victory – I very much doubt the possibility of that – but a collapse of the German home front.” Still in November Chamberlain thought the war would be over by the Spring with “the German realisation they can’t win”.8

  Many MPs were surprised by the effectiveness of Greenwood’s speech, but he was a far more significant figure in the Labour Party than many Conservative MPs and right-wing political commentators had hitherto recognised. From his position as Head of Economics at Huddersfield Technical College and the economics department at Leeds University he had written in the Economic Journal, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and Political Quarterly. Greenwood, besides a long-standing expertise in education, left Leeds to become Secretary to the Council for the Study of International Relations for which he contributed to a book The War and Democracy,9 published in 1914, writing at the end: “Today is seed-time. But the harvest will not be gathered without sweat and toil. The times are pregnant with great possibilities, but their realisation depends upon the united wisdom of the people.” He became a civil servant in the Ministry of Reconstruction where he worked with Christopher Addison and Arthur Henderson. Besides all this, he produced a report on adult education with R H Tawney. This gave him well-rounded experience and sufficient knowledge to deal with international crises as well as domestic issues.

  In September 1916 he spoke at a conference which was written up in The Athenaeum, a monthly journal he was closely associated with. He spoke about the news of partially disabled soldiers and the important question of women, all in consideration to the question of Reconstruction after the war. The Athenaeum in January and February 1917 was critical of the five-man War Cabinet that the new Prime Minister Lloyd George had established, fearing that either way they must bring in other members of the Government to unify general policy or they must seek the advice of people less responsible, which would certainly lead to dissension and confusion. Greenwood was secretary of the Labour Party’s research department from 1920, before being elected as MP for Nelson and Colne in Lancashire at the general election on 15 November 1922. This was precipitated by the disowning of Prime Minister David Lloyd George by his Conservative coalition partners at the earlier ‘Carlton Club meeting’. That was also the same election in which Attlee became the MP for Limehouse. The two men were destined to be key partners from 1935–40 in bringing the Labour Party back to being a major political force, a force which deserved to serve again in government. They would both be ready to participate in and weld together a cross-party grouping in May 1940, among the first to remove Chamberlain as Prime Minister and then to be Labour’s two members of the five-member War Cabinet formed by Churchill on 10 May 1940.

  As his biographer Beckett has written, Attlee “came to socialism slowly and reluctantly, by painstakingly eliminating all possible alternatives, through his heart first and his head afterwards, mentioning (but only privately, never publicly) the ‘burning anger which I felt at the wrongs which I could see around me’.”10 Attlee quietly dropped the Christianity that had played a major role in his family life growing up, and became a social worker. But Attlee wanted political action, not talk of theory. He became a member of the Independent Labour Party and joined the only union for which he was eligible – the National Union of Clerks. When he joined it had 887 branches, 22,000 members and 30 MP
s. It was not Marxist but linked to the Social Democratic Federation, and it did not talk the language of class war.

  Attlee started to build a reputation in the ILP in London as a whole. Then in 1914 Britain was at war with Germany. The ILP was divided; it had previously declared that in the event of war as socialists they should refuse to fight. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, was in favour of refusing yet Arthur Henderson supported the war. Attlee enlisted in the army two days after war was declared.

  By September, Attlee was a lieutenant in the 6th South Lancashire Regiment in Tidworth. He became in temporary command of a company of seven officers and 250 men from Liverpool, Wigan and Warrington. He was made a Captain early in 1915 and, in June, he and his company of men set sail for Turkey stopping off en route in Valletta in Malta and in Alexandria in Egypt. After arriving at the port of embarkations, Mudros Harbour, he, as part of a battalion, went up the peninsular to find themselves in trenches stinking from Turkish corpses, and water which tasted of sand in the dreadful heat and flies. Soon the main enemy was dysentery which Attlee eventually caught; he ended up on a stretcher, unconscious, on a hospital ship where he was dropped off to recover in Malta. In his absence, the South Lancashires fought in the battle of Sari Bair and 500 of them were killed. He rejoined his men on 16 November and they held the final lines, embarking on HMS Princess Irene on 19 December. Attlee was the last but one to leave Gallipoli, the last being Major General FS Maude.

  The fascinating and important historical consequence of Attlee’s fight against the Turks and the strategy of the Eastern Front, with which First Sea Lord Winston Churchill will always be identified, was that he fully supported the concept of taking the pressure off the Western Front in France. “It was a bold strategy and controversy still rages about whether it was a good one, but Attlee never had any doubt. It gave him his lifelong admiration for Churchill as a military strategist, an admiration which contributed enormously to their working relationship in the Second World War.”11