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  17 William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone (Dell, 1989), p 419.

  18 William Manchester, The Caged Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1932–1940 (Michael Joseph, 1988), p 421.

  19 HC, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, 1938, vol. 345.

  20 Sidney Aster, 1939: The Making of the Second World War (Simon and Schuster, 1974), p 94.

  21 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, p 145.

  22 HC, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, 1939, vol. 347.

  23 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox.

  24 HC, Hansard, 13 April 1939.

  25 J. Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe 1933–39 (Springer, 1984), p 211.

  26 Alexander Cadogan, The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan O.M. 1938–1945. Ed. David Dilks (Cassell & Company Ltd, 1971), p 175.

  27 William Manchester, The Caged Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1932–1940, p 455.

  28 Alexander Cadogan, The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan O.M. 1938–1945. Ed, David Dilks, p 175.

  29 HC, Hansard, 19 May 1939.

  30 Will Podmore, British Foreign Policy since 1870 (Xlibris, 2008), p 91.

  31 Anthony Howard, RAB: The Life of R A Butler (Jonathan Cape, 1990), p 85.

  32 Bob Boothby, Recollections of a Rebel (Hutchinson, 1978), p 136.

  33 Robert Rhodes James, Bob Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally (Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), p 245.

  34 Ibid, p 91.

  35 L. S. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, 1929–1940 (Hutchinson, 1955), p 339.

  36 Ibid, p 355.

  37 Robert Rhodes James, Bob Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally, pp 245–6.

  38 V. Bonham Carter to Gilbert Murray, 6 April 1950, Lady Asquith MSS.

  39 Robert Rhodes James, Bob Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally, p 242.

  40 Robert Rhodes James, Robert Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally, p 161.

  41 Ibid, p 170.

  42 Robert Rhodes James, Robert Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally, pp 166–167.

  43 Matthew Parris, Kevin Macguire, Great Parliamentary Scandals: Five Centuries of Calumny, Smear and Innuendo (Robson, 2004), p 119.

  44 Carlo D’Este, Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War 1874–1945 (Allen Lane, 2009), p xv.

  45 Winston Churchill, Clementine Churchill, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill. Ed. Mary Soames (Doubleday, 1998), p 53.

  46 Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey (Harper Collins, 1994), pp 209–10.

  47 Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (Doubleday, 2003), p 253.

  48 Jonathan R T Davidson, Kathryn M Connor, Marvin Swartz, ‘Mental Illness in US Presidents between 1776 and 1974: A Review of Biographical Sources’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (2006), vol. 194, pp 47–51.

  49 Robert Rhodes James, Robert Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally, p 167.

  50 Robert Rhodes James, Robert Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally, p 167.

  51 Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: A Biography (Politico’s, 2002), p 243.

  52 Ibid, p 243.

  53 Alan Bullock, Baron Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin: Trade Union Leader 1881–1940 (Heinemann, 1960), p 650.

  54 J. Rofe, Franklin Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy and the Welles Mission (Springer, 2007), p 110.

  55 Ray Moseley, Mussolini’s Shadow: The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano (Yale University Press, 1999), p 92.

  56 Stephen Borsody, The Tragedy of Central Europe: The Nazi and Soviet Conquest of Central Europe (Cape, 1960), p 121.

  57 Robert L. Miller, The Welles Mission to Rome: February – March 1940. Lecture given at the Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, NYU, 27 May 2008.

  58 John Kelly, Never Surrender: Winston Churchill and Britain’s Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in the Fateful Summer of 1940 (Simon and Schuster, 2015), p 110.

  59 Reginald William Thompson, Winston Churchill: The Yankee Marlborough (Doubleday, 1963), p 270.

  60 François Kersaudy, Norway 1940 (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p 81.

  61 Ibid, p 142.

  62 Ibid, p 116.

  63 Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p 547.

  64 Bob Boothby, Recollections of a Rebel (Hutchinson, 1978), p 142.

  65 John Barnes, David Nicholson, The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929–1945 (Hutchinson, 1980), p 587.

  66 L. S. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, p 358.

  67 John Barnes, David Nicholson, The Empire at Bay, p 591.

  68 Alun Wyburn-Powell, Clement Davies: Liberal Leader, (Politico’s, 2003), p 990.

  69 L. S. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, p 358.

  70 Ibid, pp 358–369.

  71 Ibid, p 359.

  72 Gerard J. DeGroot, Liberal Crusader: The Life of Sir Archibald Sinclair (C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1993), p 153.

  73 L. S. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, pp 359–360.

  74 HC, Hansard, 7 May 1940, vol. 360, CC1073–196.

  75 HC, Hansard, 7 May 1940, vol. 360, CC1073–196.

  76 HC, Hansard, 7 May 1940, vol. 360, CC1073–196.

  77 HC Deb, 7 May 1940, vol. 360, CC1073–196.

  78 HC Deb, 7 May 1940, vol. 360, CC1073–196.

  79 L. S. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, p 364.

  80 J. S. Bromley, E. H. Kossmann, Britain and the Netherlands, volume 5: Some Political Mythologies (Springer, 2012), p 162.

  81 HC, Hansard, 7 May 1940, vol. 360, CCI073–I96.

  82 Ibid.

  83 Roy Jenkins, Mr. Attlee: An Interim Biography (Heinemann, 1948), pp 215–6.

  84 Bernard Donoughue, G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), p 272.

  85 Ibid, p 272.

  86 L. S. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, p 366.

  87 HC, Hansard, 8 May 1940, vol. 360, CC1251–366.

  88 L. S. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, p 366.

  89 Bob Boothby, Recollections of a Rebel, p 142–3.

  90 John Barnes, David Nicholson, The Empireat Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries 1929–1955, p 6II.

  91 L. S. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, p367.

  92 Alun Wyburn-Powell, Clement Davies: Liberal Leader, p 104.

  93 HC Deb, 8 May 1940, vol. 360, cc1251–366.

  94 HC Deb, 8 May 1940, vol. 360, cc1251–366.

  95 HC Deb, 8 May 1940, vol. 360, cc1251–366.

  96 L. S. Amery, My Politica lLife: The Unforgiving Years, p 368.

  97 Asa Briggs, They Saw It Happen: An anthology of eye-witnesses’ accounts of events in British history, 1897–1940, vol.3. (B. Blackwell, 1960), p 500.

  98 John Barnes, David Nicholson, The Empire at Bay, p 611.

  99 John Barnes, David Nicholson, The Empire at Bay, p 612.

  100 William Manchester, The Caged Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1932–1940, p 668.

  101 Alan Watkins, The Road to Number 10: from Bonar Law to Tony Blair (Duckworth, 1998), p 45.

  102 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, p xv-xvi.

  103 Anthony Dix, The Norway Campaign and the Rise of Churchill 1940 (Pen and Sword, 2014), p 152.

  104 Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm: The Second World War, vol.1 (Rosetta Books, 2010), p 597.

  105 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox.

  106 Ibid, p 200.

  107 Samantha Heywood, Churchill (Psychology Press, 2003), p 80.

  108 Alan Watkins, The Road to Number 10: From Bonar Law to Tony Blair (Duckworth, 1998), p 48.

  109 Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (CUP Archive, 1977), p 191.

  110 Anthony Howard, RAB: The Life of R A Butler, p 94.

  111 Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor (Hodder & Stoughton paperback, 2014), p 33.

  112 Alan Axelrod, The Rea
l History of World War II: A New Look at the Past (Sterling Publishing Company, Inc., 2008), p 66.

  3

  The Politics of the Coalition Government

  Prime Minister Churchill, seasoned politician that he was, knew from the start he had to pay attention personally to four political figures: Chamberlain, Lloyd George, Bevin and Roosevelt. Their goodwill was urgently needed; their ill will could be fatal for victory. Parliament, for the purpose of debate and legitimacy, was essential, but in a three-party coalition votes were unlikely to be very frequent or important. If Churchill was to run into trouble it was going to be instigated by the Conservative MPs who had never wanted him; ever in his memory was what Conservative MPs had done to Lloyd George in 1922. Two people in the House of Commons that Churchill felt could have perhaps the most significant bearing on his standing and authority was, most obviously, Neville Chamberlain; the other, more surprisingly, was Lloyd George and Churchill persisted throughout 1940 in trying to bring him into the fold.

  We have some insight into what Chamberlain was actually feeling on 11 May, the day after Churchill took over, through a personal letter he wrote to his sister, Ida. The so-called ‘phoney war’ was over; Germany had now invaded the Low Countries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and the first major air attack on mainland Britain had started. In the letter, Chamberlain refers back to the debate on 7–8 May in his final days as Prime Minister, which ended in the reduced majority of 81:

  My dear Ida,

  ... The serving members were acutely conscious of various deficiencies, not realising apparently that though you can double your T[erritorial] A[rmy] with a stroke of the pen, you can’t do the same thing with its equipment. The Amerys, Duff Coopers & their lot are consciously or unconsciously swayed by a sense of frustration because they can look on … They don’t want to believe that the real reason is our comparative weakness because we haven’t yet anything like caught up with the German start, but as that fact remains whatever the administration I am afraid they will presently be disappointed again.

  It did not take me long to make up my mind what to do. I saw that the time had come for a National Government in the broadest sense. I knew that I could not get it, but it was necessary to get an official confirmation of the Opposition attitude, if only to justify my resignation to my own party … Winston & Halifax … agreed with my view and I sent for Attlee & Greenwood that afternoon to ask the definite question whether the Labour Party would join a Government under me or, if not, under someone else. I did not name the someone else to them but I had understood that they favoured Halifax, and I had him in mind. He declared however that, after careful reflection, he would find it too difficult, being in the Lords, whereas troubles always arose in the Commons. Later I heard that the Labour Party had changed their minds and were veering towards Winston and I agreed with him and Halifax that I would put Winston’s name to the King.1

  Chamberlain went on to say that Winston had been most handsome in his appreciation of Chamberlain’s own willingness to help and ability to do so, paraphrasing Churchill’s letter to him, “My fate depends largely on you”. He then went on to refer to Lloyd George:

  It has been suggested to me by the way that Ll.G.’s speech yesterday in the Commons in which he sought to justify Hitler on the grounds that we had broken faith with Germany was deliberately made to separate himself from the new Government and stake out a position from which ultimately he might be called to make the peace. This seems to me so characteristic of Lloyd George that I think it is very likely true. I know that he thinks we shall be beaten in the war.2

  Another interesting vignette was that Winston had told him not to move from No. 10 for a month or even longer, and he tells his sister “if the Govt still stands” we will go back to No. 11. This sensitivity to Chamberlain’s feelings shows Churchill at his strategic best, working to build a positive and indeed productive relationship with Chamberlain.

  Then on 17 May, writing from Downing Street to his older sister, Hilda, as part of his practice of alternating letters which each sister passed on to the other, his reserve is set aside when he confides:

  All my world has tumbled to bits in a moment. The national peril has so swamped all personal feelings that no bitterness remains. Indeed I used to say to Annie before war came that if such a thing happened I thought I should have to hand over to someone else, for I knew what agony of mind it would mean for me to give directions that would bring death & mutilation & misery to so many. But the war was so different from what I expected that I found the strain bearable and perhaps it was providential that the revolution which overturned me coincided with the entry of the real thing. I confess that I am thankful that the primary responsibility is off my shoulders, though of course it is quite impossible for me to detach myself from the knowledge I have of the possibilities in the immediate future.

  I must say that Winston has shown up well so far. After one or two hectic nights when we were kept up till the small hours, he has reverted to morning sittings of the Cabinet. He does take the opinions of the staff and doesn’t attempt to force different views upon them or to shoulder off his colleagues. Our own relations are admirable and I have no difficulty with any of my colleagues in the Cabinet. I have agreed to let Attlee be Deputy Leader in the House.3

  The Labour Party had objected to Chamberlain being Leader of the House of Commons but:

  I am to retain the Leadership of the Party which I think was essential if Winston was to have wholehearted support. There has been much resentment among those who are personally devoted to me, both at my treatment and at the way the “Treachery Bench” has been given office.4

  On I June Chamberlain, still in Downing Street, wrote to Hilda, after the evacuation from Dunkirk:

  There seems to have been hardly any mistake that the French did not make and they invariably started retiring about six hours before the time they had arranged with us so that they constantly uncovered our flank. Their generals were beneath contempt & with some notable exceptions the soldiers would not fight & would not even march. The Belgians were better but not steady and in short as usual the brunt of all the hard fighting and the hard work fell upon the British.5

  He went on to tell his sisters that what truly worried him was:

  …that the people who have been building up a “hate” against me have not in any way given it up. I hear for instance that a party meet every evening at the Reform Club under the chairmanship of Clement Davies, that treacherous Welshman who ratted from the last Government & worked his hardest to whip up opposition to it. The party includes Amery, Macmillan & Boothby among those critics who are now in Winston’s Government and it has been attended by Attlee, Greenwood and Sinclair.

  Chamberlain was also worried about Lloyd George, who had written to Churchill saying he wanted to give the nation the benefit of his services by entering the Government and was now complaining that Chamberlain was the sole cause of his so far being excluded. Chamberlain admitted this:

  It is true that Winston did ask me what I would think about Ll.G. entering the Government last week. He did not specify any office or mention the War Cabinet in particular. But he did say that he himself distrusted Ll.G.

  Chamberlain went on to say:

  Frankly, if at any time Winston thought Ll.G. would be more useful to him than I, I should be quite ready to retire. But I could not work with him. I did not trust him, or believe his word, or feel convinced that his motives were the same as mine. Winston said at once that there was no question of any comparison between Ll.G. & myself. We had gone in together & would if necessary go down together.6

  Then, on 8 June, Chamberlain wrote his final letter from Downing Street:

  In the H. of C … Winston announced that there would be a secret session on Tuesday [.] I saw at once by the demeanour of the Labour Party (who still sit in their old seats opposite to us) that they meant to seize this occasion for a direct attack.”

  Chamberlain went to see Churchill the nex
t day, and said:

  ..if he felt me to be an obstacle instead of a help he must say so & I should be ready to resign without reproaches. I thought it possible that he would, in the most delicate terms he could find, convey to me that it would help him out of certain difficulties if I did go and in that case I should of course have handed in my demission. However he said just the contrary. While professing some surprise that I was taking things so seriously, he declared that he certainly wanted me to stop. I was giving him splendid help and he wasn’t going to have the Government which he had only just formed knocked about.7

  Winston said to him that he would certainly speak for the Government himself. Chamberlain then called upon Winston to appeal to Attlee and Greenwood to help prevent the Herald newspaper attacks; and Churchill promised he would talk to the “press generally and warn them off scalp-hunting”.

  In the secret session on 10 June Churchill warned that seeking scapegoats for the past was “a foolish and pernicious process”.8 Winston then reverted to the Lloyd George issue and said if he had to choose between them he would choose Chamberlain. But Chamberlain explains that Churchill had then asked him

  to consider whether it was right to force such a choice on him. He developed this proposition with great earnestness saying that personal differences ought not to count now & he was quite sure that L.G. would work loyally with me. Finally I asked him to let me think it over & we parted amicably.9

  Next morning the attacks were continuing and Chamberlain writes of a letter he had received from the Prime Minister, saying that he had been much encouraged by their talk and again pressing Chamberlain to withdraw his opposition to having Lloyd George in the Cabinet. Chamberlain writes about his reply:

  I could not resist his appeal, difficult though I found it to accept. But I made two conditions. First that he should obtain a personal assurance from L.G. that he would drop all personal feuds & prejudices and second that the press campaign against me should be stopped before any announcement about L.G. was made, lest it should be said that I had made a bargain to let him in if I were protected against attack.10