Cabinet's Finest Hour Page 11
Churchill accepted Chamberlain’s conditions, passing him a note in the War Cabinet, and they later had a discussion in which Chamberlain pointed out that “he had nothing to complain of in the behaviour of my colleagues” present but that “I was bound to ask myself what they were doing to allow these venomous attacks by members of their parties to go on while we were all supposed to be working harmoniously to win the war.”11 Chamberlain wrote: “I got satisfactory assurances from all concerned & since then the campaign has stopped even more suddenly than it began.”
Meanwhile Churchill once more saw Lloyd George, who wished to think over the offer of conditions before accepting. Churchill passed Chamberlain a note saying, “The Wizard [Lloyd George] remains silent.”12 In a talk with Beaverbrook, the Minister of Aircraft Production, Chamberlain asked why Lloyd George hated him. He records Beaverbrook’s answer that Lloyd George
thought I was chiefly responsible for keeping him out of office for 18 years. He had counted on the collapse of Bonar Law’s Government in 1922 & it had been saved by my joining it and in Baldwin’s time he had always looked on me as the real power in the Govt & the one which was most hostile to him.13
Lloyd George had been out of office since 1922. He had since then developed an admiration for presidential government, which had begun with Theodore Roosevelt before extending to his fifth cousin, Franklin Roosevelt. He went on to admire Hitler too much for his own good. Ribbentrop, as German Ambassador in 1935, with a combination of attention and flattery, prepared the visit by Lloyd George to Hitler’s ‘eyrie’ high in the Bavarian Alps. Lloyd George met first with Ribbentrop in Munich for dinner. The meeting with Hitler began on the afternoon of 4 September 1936 for two hours, after which Lloyd George asserted, “He is a great man. Führer is the proper name for him for he is a born leader, yes and a statesman.”14 Hitler had, in Mein Kampf, written a few words of praise for Lloyd George’s speeches. By having his old civil servant, Tom Jones, now working with Prime Minister Baldwin, accompany him, Lloyd George avoided criticism of undermining the Government.15 Lloyd George was still writing admiringly of Hitler as late as December 1937 to Professor Cornwell Evans, “I have never doubted the fundamental greatness of Herr Hitler as a man, even in moments of disagreement … I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country.”16 When Lloyd George spoke in the House of Commons debate in May 1940 it was not the speech of a man of power. He nevertheless savaged Chamberlain with, what Dingle Foot, a Liberal MP called, “the accumulated dislike and contempt of twenty-five years”.17
On 12 May Churchill invited Lloyd George to lunch at Admiralty House. On 16 May they spoke again. On 28 May Churchill asked to meet him in the House of Commons, after which Lloyd George wrote a letter to Churchill the following day, saying:18
Secret and Personal
My dear Winston,
You were good enough to ask me if I would be prepared to enter the War Cabinet if you secured the adhesion of Mr Chamberlain. It is the first time that you have approached me on the subject and I can well understand your hesitancy, for, in the course of our interview, you made it quite clear that if Chamberlain interposed his veto on the grounds of personal resentment over past differences you could not proceed with the offer. This is not a firm offer. Until it is definite I cannot consider it.
I am sure you will be just enough to realise that the experience I have already had in this war justifies my reply to your conditional inquiry. Since the war began I have in public thrice offered to help the Government in any capacity, however humble. No notice has been taken of my tenders. I have never been consulted. I have never been invited even to sit on a committee. Since you became Prime Minister I offered to do my best to help in organising the food supplies of this country. I have acquired considerable knowledge and experience both in peace as well as in war in that line. At the request of your personal friends I put forward alternative proposals for the intensive production of food in this country, and I suggested the part I might play in directing this essential branch of national service. Nothing came of this scheme. I have not even been informed of the reason for its rejection. I say this in order to show that it was due to no unwillingness on my part that you found it impossible to utilise my services. I apprehend that party and personal considerations frustrated your wishes. I cannot be put in that position again. I am no office seeker. I am genuinely anxious to help to extricate my country from the most terrible disaster into which it has ever been plunged by the ineptitude of her rulers. Several of the architects of this catastrophe are still leading members of your Government, and two of them are in the Cabinet that directs the war.
Like millions of my fellow countrymen I say to you that, if in any way you think I can help, I am at your call. But if that call is tentative and qualified I shall not know what answer to give.
Believe me,
Ever sincerely,
D. Lloyd George
Churchill replied that same day.
My dear LG,
I have just received your letter of today. I am sorry that the same difficulties in regard to persons which you mentioned to me are also only too present elsewhere. I cannot complain in any way of what you say in your letter. The Government I have formed is founded upon the leaders of the three parties, and like you I have no party of my own. I have received a very great deal of help from Chamberlain; his kindness and courtesy to me in our new relation have touched me. I have joined hands with him, and must act with perfect loyalty. As you say, the inquiry I made of you yesterday could only be indeterminate, and I could not ask you to go further than you have done in your letter.
With regard to the organisation of the food supplies of this country, of which my personal friends had some talk with you, I can assure you that no personal or party difficulties have frustrated its consideration. The Ministry of Agriculture was discussed and one of my friends made representations to you. It was only after you had taken the decision that you did not at that time contemplate sharing responsibilities involved in joining the administration, that I made another selection, without making any stipulations with the new Minister. The alternative project of organisation of food supplies could well be taken up on another occasion. I have simply been so over-pressed by terrible events, that I have not had life or strength to address myself to it.
Thank you very much for what you say in your last paragraph and I trust that we shall keep in personal contact, so that I may acquaint you with the situation as it deepens. I always have the warmest feelings of regard and respect for you.
Yours ever,
Winston S Churchill
This letter is particularly interesting for one claim: “like you I have no party of my own”. This is more than stretching the truth; Churchill was a Conservative MP, elected as such and eligible to become, as he did, the Conservative Party choice for Prime Minister. He had asked Chamberlain to stay as leader of the party, but that was a tactical manoeuvre, and when Chamberlain died he became leader of the Conservative Party himself. However, what is true is that Churchill respected the Lloyd George Liberals and wanted to attract them to the Conservative Party under his leadership, as particularly apparent in his readiness to include in his government his deputy from his service as Colonel in the regiment for which they had both fought in France, Archibald Sinclair. Churchill stressed that his government was “founded upon the leaders of the three parties”.
Still Churchill persisted. On 6 June, Lloyd George was offered by Churchill at a hurriedly convened meeting an unconditional offer of a seat in the War Cabinet. Despite advice to accept by Tom Jones and his by-then wife, Frances Stevenson, and his friendly talk with Churchill, he refused, telling his wife he would not share in the guilt of defeat, a message he repeated in a letter to his 12-year-old daughter, Jennifer:
1. I do not believe in the way we entered the war – not in the methods by which it has been conducted. We have made blunder after blunder and are still blundering. Unless there is a thorou
gh change of policy we shall never win.
2. I do not believe in the way or in the personnel with which the War Cabinet is constituted. It is totally different to the War Cabinet set up in the last War. It is not a War Directorate in the real sense of the term. There is therefore no real direction.
I am convinced that unless there is a real change in these two matters it would be a mistake for me to join up with the present lot.19
Even so, and again very surprisingly, in December 1940 Churchill asked Lloyd George, first, if he would consider going to Washington as ambassador when Lothian died.
Lloyd George refused and thereafter he paid everyone less and less regard, and even lost his respect for Parliament and they for him. Very unwisely, he took part in a no-confidence debate on 7 May 1941 and said that talk of invading the European mainland was “fatuous”. Churchill angrily replied that his speech was not helpful. “It was the kind of speech with which I imagine the illustrious and venerable Marshal Pétain might well have enlivened the closing days of M. Reynaud’s Cabinet.”20
It is very hard, in retrospect, to understand why Churchill was so determined to have Lloyd George enter his government. Lloyd George, ‘the Welsh Wizard’, or ‘the Big Beast of the Forest’, or ‘the Goat’, as he was variously called, was by 1940 a shadow of his former self. His eloquence was still on display in the debate on 8 May, with his reference to Churchill not allowing himself to be an air-raid shelter. However, apart from sentiment, it is difficult to understand why Churchill, so soon after becoming Prime Minister, tried so hard to bring Lloyd George into his government. There is no shadow of doubt that the War Cabinet Churchill constructed in May 1940 owed much to what he knew from Lloyd George’s Cabinet, which he had rejoined on 17 May 1917 as Minister of Munitions, a position he held until 10 January 1919 when he became Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air until 1921. The intimate exchanges the two men had shared at a time of peril were not easily forgotten.
However, though seemingly sentimental, it is probable that Churchill’s concern to keep Lloyd George in a job was largely driven by his fear that if he, Churchill, ever became vulnerable after military defeats, his opponents would likely turn to Lloyd George, despite his age and ill health. Churchill perhaps perceived Lloyd George as a potential figurehead ripe to be used in a plot to overthrow him with Conservative votes.
When Lloyd George died on 26 March 1945, all was forgiven by Churchill in a most generous eulogy in the House of Commons two days later: “As a man of action, resource and creative energy, he stood, when at his zenith, without a rival.”21 There is little doubt that as Prime Minister Lloyd George was the man who Churchill most admired. For all Churchill’s persistence however, one is left with the conclusion that he, Churchill, was lucky Lloyd George never came into his Cabinet; it was far more important for him to retain Chamberlain as long as he did.
Attacks on the ‘Men of Munich’, the agents of a failed act of appeasement, continued. On 5 July 1940 – under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ – Guilty Men, an indictment of the failures of Baldwin, Chamberlain and their colleagues from 1931 to 1940, was published. Chamberlain warned his sister Ida in a letter on 20 July to remember:
when you read of the “Men of Munich who brought us into this mess”, that the exploits of the Navy, RAF and BEF must have been made possible by the “Men of Munich”. For no one can suppose that our equipment has all been turned out in the last six weeks. However it would be foolish to expect from these blind partisans either reason or logic since those things are not allowed to interfere with their emotions.22
Sadly in personal terms in that same letter, Chamberlain wrote he was “having considerable trouble” with his “inside” which “hadn’t been working properly for a long time” and “is getting worse”. In another letter to his sisters on 27 July, now from 11 Downing Street, he wrote again about his health:
I mentioned in my last letter that I was having trouble in my inside. As a matter of fact it has been going on for some time, gradually getting worse and Horder at last thought it best that I should be X-rayed. That was done this week and the result is that I am to enter a nursing home next Monday for an operation that afternoon. It is not in itself a serious operation and I should be out again in a fortnight but the consequences will not be altogether pleasant.23
This was a deliberate understatement to protect his sisters. In his diary on 27 July 1940 Chamberlain noted it was a major operation and he had ‘even chances’.
Aside from Lloyd George and Chamberlain, the other figure whom Churchill had singled out on becoming Prime Minister was Ernest Bevin, who was not even in Parliament. The initial approach came from Attlee who rang Bevin on 11 May at his headquarters at Transport House. He started by asking him what he thought of Labour joining the coalition. Bevin’s unhesitating reply was, according to his biographer Bullock, “In view of the fact that you helped to bring the other fellow down, if the party did not take its share of responsibility, they would say we were great citizens but cowards.”24 Having been informed that Churchill wanted four Labour men in high office immediately, and top of the list was Bevin himself, Attlee asked if he would indeed be willing to join the Government. “You have sprung it on me,” Bevin said, to which Attlee replied, “It is sprung on all of us.” Bevin asked for time to think. Then, at 3.00 pm that same day, he walked over to the House of Commons and told Attlee he was willing to serve, but only if he had the support, apart from his own Executive, of the TUC General Council and the party’s National Executive. It was only then that he asked Attlee what job he was expected to take, and the answer was Minister of Labour. He spoke to Churchill sometime that day, probably by telephone, since he referred to it in his letter of acceptance.
Bevin, in fact, was criticised by some of his trade union friends for not holding out for Ministry of Supply, taken by Morrison, or Ministry of Economic Warfare, a position assumed by Dalton. Bevin, however, had an instinct that Ministry of Labour would, as he said to Arthur Deakin, give him “the chance to lay down the conditions on which we will start again after the war was over.” Bevin nevertheless warned Churchill in his letter, “I feel it is imperative that [the Ministry’s] position and place should be strengthened to deal with the problem of labour organisation and supply...”25 Churchill showed the importance he attached to the trade unions writing to Bevin on 24 May with a message which he intended to be read out at their annual conference, though stating he would have welcomed, under conditions of less urgency, to speak to them himself:
The country’s needs are imperative, inescapable and imperious and we shall pay dearly if we fail to meet them. We can meet them now as a Government founded upon a new unity of national purpose … Trade unionists with their tradition of sacrifice in the service of freedom, cannot hesitate to throw their full strength into the struggle.26
Bevin, from 1926 to 1931 had played an important role in national affairs in the Mond-Turner talks after the General Strike, with industrialists Sir Alfred Mond and Lord Weir, and serving on the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry. From 1931 to 1940, however, he was an outsider with no influence on government but a growing influence throughout the Labour Movement. Now at the age of 59 he was to start to assert a crucial influence in the government of the country. Bevin was returned unopposed as an MP at the end of June 1940 when a vacancy arose for the constituency of Central Wandsworth. In October 1940, he came into the War Cabinet.
Beaverbrook, someone Attlee once said Churchill used as a “kind of stimulant or drug”, had been initially impressive but on 2 August 1940 came into the War Cabinet as Minister of Aircraft Production. It was not a successful appointment as Roy Jenkins argued, “he was never nearly enough of a team player to be either happy or useful in the War Cabinet. He was frequently wanting to resign on grounds of asthma or pique”.27 Beaverbrook also had frequent turf wars with Cripps in Moscow, Bevin on manpower allocation, Sinclair on pilot training and coastal command. Gradually the War Cabinet “moved well
away from its original tight-knit group of non departmental ministers”. Yet for the first three months Beaverbrook and Bevin had one essential task: to increase aircraft production at almost any cost. Churchill knew how Lloyd George had taken on the role of Minister of Munitions in May 1915, giving up the Exchequer, and he knew speed depended on drive, energy and a readiness to cut red tape and think unconventionally. These two men were for a short period a galvanic force, and the trade unions responded unreservedly for the war effort and more readily to the call of Bevin than anyone else. Employers were browbeaten by Beaverbrook to cut every possible corner. Two other newcomers came into the War Cabinet besides Bevin; Sir John Anderson in place of Chamberlain and Sir Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Bevin was never out of an influential position in the Cabinet room until his death. Under both Churchill and Attlee he was a hugely powerful figure; only Attlee, Eden and Anderson equalled him in length of service in the War Cabinet.
The full War Cabinet met on 15 May at 11.00 am and Churchill began with an alarmist message that he had received from M. Reynaud earlier in the morning. The Germans had broken through at Sedan and the road to Paris was open. He had also heard from Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, a Conservative MP sent by Churchill to Brussels, who was famous for being in command of the Dover Patrol and the Zeebrugge raid in 1918. Keyes anticipated a strong German attack on Antwerp. The meeting was a significant one as the Foreign Secretary, Halifax, made an intervention noted under the heading ‘Italy’, which was to become very important ten days later.
Continuing, the Foreign Secretary said that it might be of value if the Prime Minister, on assuming office, were to send a communication to Signor Mussolini. Perhaps the general heads of the message might be communicated to Sir Percy Loraine [ambassador in Rome] by telegram, with authority for him to cast the message into the most appropriate form, having regard to the situation in Rome.