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  The French Cabinet, reluctantly, had voted to accept the plan. A fortnight of silence followed from London, during which time Stalin dismissed Litvinov and chose Vyacheslav Molotov as his successor. Assurances were given that Russian policy would remain unchanged. But change it did. On 8 May, three weeks after the Soviet Union had announced its initiative, London replied in terms which had the effect of strengthening suspicions in Moscow that Chamberlain was not willing to make a military pact with Russia to prevent Hitler from taking Poland. Chamberlain revealed his opinion of the Russian proposal in the House of Commons on 19 May when Lloyd George, Eden and Churchill in his words, “pressed upon the Government the vital need for an immediate arrangement with Russia of the most far-reaching character and on equal terms”.

  Churchill again spoke in the House of Commons on 19 May:

  If His Majesty’s Government, having neglected our defences for a long time, having thrown away Czechoslovakia with all that Czechoslovakia meant in military power, having committed us without examination of the technical aspects to the defence of Poland and Romania, now reject and cast away the indispensable aid of Russia, and so lead us in the worst of all ways into the worst of all wars, they will have ill-deserved the confidence and, I will add, the generosity with which they have been treated by their fellow countrymen.29

  There was a storm of criticism and Chamberlain, on 23 May, grudgingly agreed to negotiate with the Soviets on the basis of a British-French-Soviet alliance.

  The Chamberlain-Halifax split was becoming ever more apparent. Halifax wanted a coalition government. He mixed socially with Churchill and it was clear that the two should have combined over Russia to make the Polish Guarantee credible. Nevertheless, between 19 and 24 May Halifax switched from distaste at Soviet “blackmail and bluff” to commending a Russian alliance to Cabinet. Cadogan was also now in favour but it was too late. The time for a deal was with Litvinov not Molotov. Churchill later wrote that a three-power coalition “would have struck deep alarm into the heart of Germany.”30 He was correct in this assessment.

  Talks continued between Britain and Russia in June and July but they were looking to Germany, and Stalin soon could count on getting back what Russia lost at Versailles – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and the Balkans.

  Near to midnight on 21 August Berlin radio announced the Reich Government had concluded a pact of non-aggression with Russia. Ribbentrop would sign in Moscow on 23 August. On 25 August Butler disagreed with Chamberlain and Halifax, overturning the Polish Guarantee in favour of a formal Treaty of Alliance with Poland. Butler, ever the appeaser, felt it “would have a bad psychological effect on Hitler and would wreck any negotiations”.31 Butler was divorced from political reality; negotiating with Hitler was not an option for any British Prime Minister by then.

  The German-Russian pact focused minds across the parties in the Westminster Parliament. Poland was about to be attacked. Chamberlain alienated many MPs over Russia. More had to be done to co-ordinate activity. Many played important roles. There were three MPs, however, whose activity in particular deserve further recognition and examination. Bob Boothby, a Conservative; Clement Davies, a Liberal; and Leo Amery, the man whose speech encouraged many of his fellow Conservative MPs in May 1940 to withdraw their support.

  The Conservative MP, Bob Boothby, in what he calls his “book of memories that might otherwise be forgotten” wrote: “In the middle of September 1939, Clement Davies formed a small non-party group in the House of Commons, and asked me to be Secretary. We dined together once a week, and from time to time invited a distinguished guest to talk to us.”32 Leo Amery in his diary described in The Empire at Bay how Clement Davies’ group was “… the most significant of the groups of dissidents in the winter of 1939–40. In the words of Alun Wyburn-Powell in his biography Clement Davies: Liberal Leader, the group was “…spurred by Munich and the inadequacy of the British Government’s response to Hitler and constituted “… an all-party action group … known as the ‘Vigilantes’”. This group either met in the House of Commons or at the Reform Club. In an interview quoted by Robert Rhodes James, Boothby recalled that “… [Clement] Attlee frequently attended these meetings”.33 The frequency of Attlee’s involvement is hard to corroborate, but he was definitely supportive. The group also had three sub-committees “... to discuss economic issues, home defence and foreign policy”34 with Davies as chair of the economic sub-committee and Boothby as secretary. Leo Amery in his memoir, My Political Life refers to the “little dinner group convened by Davies, originally to discuss the economic aspects of the war, which met every Thursday, first at the House and afterwards at the Reform Club”.35 On 4 April 1940 the 4th Marquis of Salisbury had also formed a ‘Watching Committee’ of Conservative members from both Houses of Parliament. This group met at his flat in Arlington Street and, according to Leo Amery, gathered in order “to exchange views and make representations to the Government.”, meeting “every few days in April either as a body or as a sub-committee on the military effort of which I seem to have been chairman”. 36

  Clement Davies was born a Welshman on 19 February 1884 in Montgomeryshire. He developed a successful legal commercial practice in London, and having volunteered for military service in 1914, was posted instead to the office of the procurator general as adviser on enemy activities in neutral countries and on the high seas. He was later seconded to the Board of Trade. From 1919 to 1925 he was a junior counsel to the Treasury. He gave up his legal practice in 1930 when he joined the board of Unilever and became the Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire which he represented for the rest of his life. Although his work with Unilever took up much of his time, as a Liberal National he made his name in public health services and housing administration in Wales.

  At the beginning of the war in 1939 Davies became an important element in the cross-party attempt to replace Chamberlain with Churchill, and according to the ODNB Bob Boothby, ‘one of the architects – some may judge the principal architect’ – of the coalition government. That no satisfactory place was found for him by Churchill in the coalition, “Boothby took as proof of his own belief that Churchill ‘did not treat his friends well’.”37 That may be true. Davies rejoined the independent Liberal Party in 1942, becoming its leader in 1945 in succession to Sir Archibald Sinclair, who had been defeated in Caithness and Sutherland. With Frank Byers, who later joined Labour, as his Chief Whip, Davies was determined after the debacle of the Liberal Party in 1945 to maintain Liberal independence. He dismissed as ‘unworthy subterfuge’ Churchill’s appeal for an electoral arrangement with the Conservatives before the general election of 1950. But in the absence of an electoral pact only nine Liberals were returned. That number fell to six in 1951 at which point Churchill offered him a place in his government. The Liberal vote had dropped to a mere three-quarters of a million and it would barely improve in 1955. At the following year’s party conference in 1956, Davies surprised the assembly by announcing his intention of ‘handing over the wheel’ to Jo Grimond. Davies had by then long suffered from alcoholism which he kept from public view. He struggled with the conflict in the party, not least between Lady Megan Lloyd George and Lady Violet Bonham Carter who ultimately held considerable affection for Davies but who had once described him as ‘a jellyfish who drifts on every tide ... and goes wherever he is pushed or pulled’.38

  The Times newspaper described Bob Boothby on his death in 1986 as a “political maverick of unfulfilled promise”. He was a hugely colourful figure – a star of the TV chat shows in later life and reviled for his links to the Kray brothers’ criminal gang. For the purposes of this book, there is only one narrow, but very important, question to answer concerning these key figures: were Boothby and Davies’s roles in helping to establish Winston Churchill as Prime Minister exaggerated, as the ODNB claims was the case, at least for Clement Davies’s. Boothby’s official biographer, Robert Rhodes James, was the Conservative MP for Cambridge from 1976–1992, and had also worked in the Clerks De
partment of the House of Commons providing an internal civil service for MPs. There was no one more knowledgeable on the intricate workings of the House of Commons and so it is interesting to consider his judgement that:

  Although in later life Boothby often tended to exaggerate his role on certain occasions (in which he is not alone in politicians’ memoirs) on this occasion it was indeed crucial, as was that of Davies.39

  How did it come about that Boothby, only 40 years old when Churchill became Prime Minister, came to be in a position as to wield such influence? Born in Edinburgh on 12 February 1900, his parents were comfortably off. Exceptionally precocious, he entered Eton College in September 1913 and hated it, his masters and his house. Passed out of the Household Brigade Officers Cadet Battalion just before the November Armistice, he went to Oxford in 1919. His cousin was one Ludovic Kennedy, the broadcaster and lifelong member of the Liberal Party, and likewise he had been brought up to have a Liberal outlook. In his capacity as chairman of the Canning Club, he first met Churchill when he came to speak at the Oxford Union accompanied by Lord Birkenhead, better known as F E Smith. Boothby had heroes – Baldwin, Birkenhead, Lloyd George and Chaim Weizmann – but Churchill was not one of them. He fought Orkney and Shetland at the general election losing to the Liberal. Then at the age of 24, in 1924, he became the MP for East Aberdeenshire and a passionate supporter of the herring fish industry and the farmers.

  In October 1926 after the General Strike, Boothby wrote a long letter to Churchill which made a deep impression. He was asked to come and have a talk with Churchill when in London, whereupon he was made Churchill’s parliamentary private secretary and also a member of The Other Club – a political dining club Churchill had founded with Lord Birkenhead in 1911. In April 1927 Boothby, with Harold Macmillan, Oliver Stanley and John Loder, published ‘Industry and the State’ and had become a keen supporter of Keynes and a friend of Oswald Mosley. Churchill never seemed to mind his PPS taking somewhat contrarian views. Boothby won his seat in the 1929 election while his friend Macmillan lost his. Boothby invited him and his wife, Dorothy, to his father’s annual shooting party and there began a love affair that lasted until Dorothy Macmillan’s death in 1966. The political consequences of this relationship became apparent when James Stuart MP, who was married to Dorothy’s sister, became a Scottish Whip in 1935 and Deputy Chief Whip in 1937 under David Margesson. Whips are dangerous enemies and Stuart and Boothby hated each other. Stuart also harboured a dislike for both Eden and Churchill.

  Many Conservative MPs disliked Boothby intensely for his gambling and womanising and his relations with Churchill waxed and waned. Boothby saw over the years anti-Semitism building up in Hitler’s Germany and warned against it and of the growing strength of Himmler. In January 1932 in Berlin, Boothby had met Hitler and sent his assessment to Churchill. Boothby reacted strongly against the Hoare-Laval Pact of 1935, describing it as “one of the most discreditable documents ever issued in the name of the people”.40 Both the French and British Foreign Ministers had underestimated the ensuing public reaction to assigning the fate of the Abyssinians to the Italians and Hoare was soon replaced by Eden. In the abdication crisis, Boothby sympathised with the King but he did not doubt, unlike Churchill, that the King’s position was untenable. At Churchill’s Chartwell home on 6 December 1936, Churchill, the Liberal leader Sinclair, and Boothby prepared a declaration for the King saying he would not contract a marriage against the advice of his ministers. On 7 December, according to Boothby, was the only time he saw Churchill the worse for wear in public due to drink. Churchill made a disastrous intervention following Baldwin’s statement to a question in the House of Commons. Boothby wrote a letter to Churchill which he came to believe, according to Rhodes James, was fatal to their relationship. Churchill took five days to reply. “The old intimacy was never to return.”41

  Dear Winston,

  I understood last night that we had agreed upon a formula, and a course, designed to save the King from abdication, if that is possible.

  I thought you were going to use all your powers – decisive, as I believe, in the present circumstances – to secure a happy issue on the lines that were suggested.

  But this afternoon you have delivered a blow to the King, both in the House and in the country, far harder than any that Baldwin ever conceived of.

  You have reduced the number of potential supporters to the minimum possible. I should think now about seven in all.

  And you have done it without any consultation with your best friends and supporters. I have never in my life said anything to you that I did not sincerely believe. And I never will.

  What happened this afternoon makes me feel that it is almost impossible for those who are most devoted to you personally to follow you blindly (as they would like to do) in politics. Because they cannot be sure where the hell they are going to be landed next.

  I am afraid this letter will make you very angry.

  But not I hope irretrievably angry.

  I could not leave what I feel unsaid.

  Yours ever

  Bob42

  After he became Prime Minister, Churchill appointed Boothby as junior minister to Fred Woolton, the Minister for Food, a role that was well below what Boothby considered to be his right. It was not, however, an insignificant position as it rendered him the lead spokesman in the House of Commons. On 9 October 1941 Boothby received a letter from Churchill informing him that he had seen documents that disclosed a financial association to Richard Weininger, who was born in July 1887 in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire at Baden near Vienna and had been interned under Regulation 18B. There was never any question of Boothby being prosecuted but, nevertheless, there was a prima facie case of allegedly discreditable behaviour by a Member of Parliament with an alien. On 17 October Churchill told the House of Commons that a select committee would be appointed to determine the fate of Boothby, who was not asked to resign his office but was suspended from ministerial duties. The committee concluded “Mr Boothby’s conduct was contrary to the usage and derogatory to the dignity of the House and inconsistent with the standards which Parliament is entitled to expect from its members.”43 Boothby resigned as minister but not from the House of Commons. His career never recovered. His relationship with Churchill continued its “hot-cold pattern”. Perhaps one of the most generous gestures ever made in politics was Harold Macmillan’s decision to offer him one of the first life peerages in 1958.

  After the abdication crisis, Churchill was bound to face a major reappraisal in the House of Commons from MPs of all parties. Many had witnessed his performance in confronting Baldwin, sensed he was drunk and were bound to ask themselves should and could this man ever become Prime Minister. Few doubted that he was as the military historian Carlo D’Este wrote many years later in his book Warlord: “... first a soldier. War and soldiering were in his blood, inspiring his earliest fantasies as a child and his greatest adventures as a young man.”44 What ministers now had to ponder in the midst of war was whether he was more than that: was he a Premier with the make-up and character, not of a warrior but of a leader of men and women who lived their lives as civilians; people for whom war was anathema, something to only contemplate as a last resort; people who wanted as their Prime Minister, while not an appeaser, someone capable of finding a real peace. A man of composure in his person, not at war with himself, a man not prone to excessive mood changes, not manic nor depressive. Of course, they knew he was not an ordinary leader but these were times so testing that normality was a handicap. They could settle for his exceptional personality but as MPs they had to be sure that he was not unstable.

  There was a certain admiration for the way he had donned uniform as Lieutenant Colonel Churchill on 5 January 1916, taking command in the field of the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, having gone to Flanders to fight after resigning from the Cabinet on 11 November 1915 as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Nevertheless, he was greatly diminished in political stature following his dis
missal from the prestigious post of First Lord of the Admiralty following the debacle of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaign. It was not until he served in the Army for over eighteen months that Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, was able to overcome the resistance of the Conservatives in the coalition government and appoint his fellow Liberal, as he then still was, to join his Cabinet.

  Out of government since 1929, as a Conservative, and almost the whole of the 1930s, a period often referred to as his ‘wilderness years’, Churchill began not only to warn against appeasement but became the best-informed MP on all matters related to German rearmament. He studied Hitler with great attention, and his military experience as the serving First Lord of the Admiralty was the crucial factor when on 10 May 1940, aged sixty-five, he took over as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. It was a moment of national peril. Yet MPs from across all parties knew Churchill, his weaknesses as well as his strengths; they had weighed them up by May 1940 from watching him in and out of government. They had assessed particularly what they all knew of his mood changes or cyclothymic personality. Cross-party soundings had revealed that a majority of MPs from all political parties believed that he was the man to lead a wartime coalition.

  He was undoubtedly highly emotional and some of his critics in Parliament thought him mentally unstable. A cyclothymic temperament consists of numerous hypomanic episodes but without clear evidence of a major manic episode. In the mild hypomanic state a person can be highly creative, energetic and productive; in the mildly depressed state they can be agitated and restless and can sleep badly.