Cabinet's Finest Hour Page 9

  Q: But had you made up your mind then that if this should happen you would not serve under Chamberlain?

  Attlee: I don’t know that was ever suggested, He always treated us like dirt.

  Churchill at once leapt to Chamberlain’s defence with an eloquent tribute; he had found him charming to work with as well as most efficient in the despatch of business. Greenwood cut in, “We haven’t come here to listen to you orating, Winston”,100 before continuing that whilst this all may be true it was irrelevant to the fact that Labour leaders could only join with the approval of the Party Conference that was meeting at Bournemouth next day. There is some dispute as to whether it was Attlee or Chamberlain who then scribbled on a slip of paper the questions that would be put to the Labour Conference next morning on 10 May. Was Labour prepared to support a government under (a) the present Prime Minister, (b) another Prime Minister? There is no doubt, whatever its provenance, that Attlee agreed with the formula, but added, as he took it away with him, according to Amery, that there was not the ghost of a chance of the Conference accepting the first alternative which sounds a very typical example of both Attlee’s brevity and style. When interviewed in 1965, Lord Attlee remembered saying at that same meeting, “I have to be quite frank with you Prime Minister, our party will not serve under you. They don’t want you, and in my view the country doesn’t want you.”101

  When Attlee and Greenwood left the Cabinet Room David Margesson joined the meeting as the Conservative Party Chief Whip. The Chief Whip traditionally played a role in deciding who would emerge as party leader prior to the now established procedure of an election. There is little doubt that Chamberlain, now having full knowledge of Attlee and Greenwood’s position, here admitted that it was impossible for him to continue.

  Writing in September 2013 on a new edition of The Holy Fox, its author, Andrew Roberts, writes in his introduction:

  There has only been one piece of brand new information that has come out about the crucial meeting of 9 May 1940 in which it was decided that, on his resignation, Neville Chamberlain would recommend Winston Churchill to King George VI as his successor rather than Chamberlain’s (and indeed the King’s) first choice of Lord Halifax. That is to be found on page 476 of Amanda Smith’s 2001 edition of Hostage to Fortune, her edition of the private papers of her grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy, the American Ambassador to London from 1938 to 1940.

  Knowing he was dying of cancer – indeed he had less than three weeks to live – Chamberlain invited Kennedy to his home in the country on 19 October 1940 to say farewell. According to Kennedy’s diary, they discussed the May meeting, and Chamberlain told Kennedy that after the Labour Party leaders had indicated that they would not serve in a National Government under him, ‘He then wanted to make Halifax P[rime] M[inister] and said that he would serve under him. Edward, as [is] his way, started saying “Perhaps I can’t handle it being in the H[ouse] of Lords” and finally Winston said, “I don’t think you could.” And he wouldn’t come and that settled it.102

  Other accounts have Churchill saying nothing when asked by Chamberlain, “Can you see any reason, Winston, why in these days a peer should not be Prime Minister?”103 We are told that Churchill had been warned that this trick question would be posed by Kingsley Wood in a private conversation before the meeting and took his advice to say nothing. Churchill’s account admits his silence was out of character: “Usually I talk a great deal but on this occasion I was silent … As I remained silent, a very long pause ensued. It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemorations of Armistice Day”.104 Halifax writes, “Winston wore suitable expressions of regard and humility, [and] said he could not but feel the force of what I had said” when earlier Halifax had referred to having “no access to the House of Commons”.

  For Roberts, who has studied Halifax in depth and with objectivity, Kennedy’s is the authentic account of what was said; Churchill did say it would be difficult to be in the Lords. This does not mean that membership of the House of Lords was the real reason for Halifax not taking on the premiership however. The king had said that Halifax’s peerage could be put into ‘abeyance’, and only four months previously Chamberlain had contemplated an enabling bill to allow Lord Stamp to be Chancellor of the Exchequer and speak in the Commons.

  Halifax’s own account is probably best encapsulated within Butler’s, whom he saw immediately after the meeting: “He told me that he felt he could do the job. He also felt that Churchill needed a restraining influence. Could that restraint be better exercised as Prime Minister or as a minister in Churchill’s Government? Even if he chose the former role, Churchill’s qualities and experience would surely mean that he would be running the war anyway and Halifax’s own position would speedily turn into a sort of honorary Prime Minister”.105 Roberts writes that “to restrain Churchill from below rather than above” was a strategy understood by Chamberlain and a significant reason why he did not push Halifax to become Prime Minister.106 Ambition is not the simple pursuit of personal power on every occasion. At a time when your country is in peril and close to invasion, it is perfectly possible that Halifax was ambitious above all to maximise the war effort and prepared to forgo the premiership in order to provide, along with the military, the control and restraint required from below. Attlee was to provide, not control of Churchill, but a persistent, well-judged restraining influence.

  Halifax had had a formidable career. As Viceroy of India he had ruled over more than 300 million people, and had exercised political power under both Baldwin and Chamberlain. He undoubtedly wished to continue to exercise power on 10 May. He did not resign, as well he might have, after being defeated in the War Cabinet, as the reader will discover in the next two chapters. He defied with great intensity being pushed out of exercising real power in December 1940 by resisting being sent to Washington. There is a very good case for concluding that Halifax’s ambition was to exercise as much control over Churchill, when he thought it was needed, as he could. Given Churchill’s formidable gifts, he was right to conclude that this should be done from below.

  Churchill had his own sources of information as to the attitude of the Labour Party before hearing from Attlee and Greenwood. Amery claims that dining with Brendan Bracken, a Conservative MP who later became the proprietor of the Financial Times, on 7 May, Attlee had expressed the view that, if there was a change of government, his people, who had never forgiven Churchill for Tonypandy, would expect it to be under Halifax with Churchill as Minister of Defence. Bracken, entirely on his own responsibility, had insisted that Churchill could not and would not serve under Halifax, incurring all the blame if things went wrong, and with no real control of the situation, and had persuaded Attlee at any rate not to refuse to serve under Churchill, if the occasion arose. Churchill however knew that evening of 9 May that he was going to become Prime Minister the next day. At a dinner that evening, he told his companions Eden and Sinclair that he thought Chamberlain “would advise the King to send for him. Edward [Halifax] did not wish to succeed. Parliamentary position too difficult.”

  On the evening of 9 May, Boothby wrote urgently to Churchill to keep him up with developments, but Churchill knew the die was cast. The note is nevertheless important for showing where Churchill’s support was coming from:

  Dear Winston,

  I have been in the House all day. This is the situation, as I see it.

  (1)The Labour Party won’t touch Chamberlain at any price.

  (2)Nor will Archie [Sinclair].

  (3)Nor will our group.

  Therefore it is inconceivable that Chamberlain can carry through a reconstruction of the Government.

  A majority of the House is, nevertheless, determined on a radical reconstruction, which will involve (inter alia) the elimination of Simon and Hoare.

  (4)Opinion is hardening against Halifax as Prime Minister. I am doing my best to foster this, because I cannot feel he is, in the circumstances, the right man.

  At the
moment of writing, our group would oppose his appointment, unless it commanded universal assent. It is quite a powerful group. It is now led by Amery and includes Duff Cooper, Eddie Winterton, Belisha, Hammersley, Henderson-Stewart, Emrys-Evans, Mrs Tate, R. Tree, Russell, Harold Nicolson, [Derrick] Gunston, Clem Davies, & [Stephen] King-Hall.107

  Next morning, 10 May, the world woke up to the shock news of a double invasion of Holland and Belgium. Chamberlain’s first reaction when the War Cabinet met at 8.00 am was to feel that the change of situation made it necessary for him to stay in office, until the immediate crisis was over, according to Amery’s account. Corroboration of Chamberlain’s assumption that he would temporarily remain Prime Minister is available in that even before the meeting of Cabinet he had told Reith, formerly the head of the BBC and now Minister of Information, that he was to attend all future Cabinet meetings. The news of his intention to stay on was simultaneously given out by the Whips’ Office. On getting wind of this, Davies at once telephoned Attlee and Greenwood, urging them to lose no time in getting an immediate decision from the Labour Conference in Bournemouth. That Labour were willing to serve in a National Government, but not under Chamberlain, was, by then, a foregone conclusion, but it was only communicated by telephone to staff in No. 10 early that afternoon.

  The War Cabinet met again that morning at 11.30 am with the issue of Labour’s attitudes still not confirmed officially, though a wire report describing the mood of the Conference was handed in while the Cabinet was sitting. Churchill went back to the Admiralty not knowing when the task of forming a government would fall on him. Attlee, before leaving for Bournemouth, issued a statement about the “latest series of abominable aggressions by Hitler”.108 He went on to say that he was “firmly convinced that drastic reconstruction of the Government is vital and urgent in order to win the war” and which “reaffirms its determination to do its utmost to achieve victory. It calls on all its members to direct all their energies to this end.” Attlee’s statement, drafted with Greenwood and Dalton, had deliberately not endorsed Chamberlain staying on and was soon followed after the 3.00 pm National Executive Committee meeting in Bournemouth with an even clearer statement: Labour would serve in a coalition government but on specific conditions. The formal confirmation of the Labour Party’s conditions were eventually conveyed by Chamberlain to the Cabinet after Attlee had read the statement at dictation speed to one of Chamberlain’s secretaries over the telephone. Labour would serve only “as a full partner in a new Government under a new Prime Minister which would command the confidence of the nation.”109 Wisely, Labour did not articulate who should be Prime Minister.

  Chamberlain told the Cabinet he was going to see the King to advise that Churchill should be sent for. Churchill saw the King soon after 6.00 pm. Later that evening at 9.00 pm Churchill saw Attlee and Greenwood at Admiralty House on their arrival from Bournemouth and invited them to join his War Cabinet. This was constitutionally the correct way of proceeding. Churchill was installed as Prime Minister by Conservative Party informal mechanisms; no formal votes were cast but soundings of key people in the party were heeded. Attlee would be Lord Privy Seal and Greenwood Minister without Portolio. Churchill would be his own Minister of Defence and Chamberlain would be Lord President of the Council, able to cover international and domestic policy. Halfax was already Foreign Secretary, and the three service ministers would be Anthony Eden, responsible for the army as Minister of War; Sinclair, the Liberal Party leader, as Minister for Air; and A.V. Alexander would reassume the role of First Lord of the Admiralty, which he had been in the last Labour Government.

  Chamberlain, in a farewell broadcast that evening, announced that he would be in the War Cabinet and Leader of the House, in effect Deputy Prime Minister. Many Labour MPs had hoped that Chamberlain would be kept out altogether. Attlee and Greenwood saw Churchill next morning and protested against Chamberlain being Leader of the House and formally Deputy Leader. They were to meet with Churchill again in the afternoon; in the meantime, the Conservative Watching Committee and Amery’s group, including Clem Davies, learnt of the exasperation of the Labour leaders and of their grave doubts as to whether they could join the Government on this basis. Amery and Davies explained the situation to Salisbury on the telephone, who was deeply disturbed by the thought that Churchill’s insistence on the retention of Chamberlain could conceivably wreck the prospect of a real National Government. He promised to ring up Churchill at once to convey the strong objection felt by himself and his Conservative associates, as well as by the Opposition, to such an arrangement. Amery had no doubt that, due to Salisbury’s intervention, when the Labour leaders returned to see Churchill later that day, it would be agreed that Chamberlain should be President of the Council but with no departmental responsibilities. Churchill had also made clear that, of the Labour people he wanted to serve in the Government, foremost on the list was Bevin, along with Morrison and Dalton. This was a clear indication of Churchill’s respect for Bevin since he was then not even an MP.

  Though Churchill looked to be in a powerful position he knew that he was doubted or disliked by most Conservative MPs, and yet they were the source of his power. William Spens, the Conservative Chairman of the 1922 Committee of Backbench MPs, succinctly spelt it out. Three quarters of Conservative MPs were ready to oust Churchill and bring back Chamberlain. It was no more than common prudence therefore for Churchill to keep Chamberlain and Halifax in the War Cabinet. A few purists might be upset in the Conservative Party but Churchill was a pragmatist, and certainly no purist. He knew where power lay at least for the next few months and he had to harness it. Hostility was not just the language of the hard right. Rab Butler, Halifax’s deputy, records Halifax saying to him in his room in the Foreign Office, “‘it is all a great tragedy, isn’t it?’ I replied, ‘that is because you did not take the premiership yourself.’ He said, ‘you know my reasons, it is no use discussing that – but the gangsters will shortly be in complete control’”.110 By “gangsters” Halifax was alluding to the Churchill entourage, such figures as Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken and Professor Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell. Butler, a moderate one-nation Conservative, never quite lived down his reputation as an appeaser with a sharp tongue; he was reported as saying, “Surrendering to Winston and his rabble was a disaster and an unnecessary one. It was like mortgaging the future of the country to a ‘half-bred American’ whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.”111

  In the House of Commons, on 13 May, for the first time as Prime Minister, Churchill moved a vote welcoming a government representing the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion. He said, with Clement Attlee sitting beside him on the front bench:

  I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: it is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.112

  This magnificent injunction to fight had more resonance, however, outside the House of Commons. Inside, while he had a promising reception from Labour, Conservative MPs listened to Churchill in ‘sullen silence’.

  1 Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain: A Biography (Ashgate, 2006), p 256.

  2 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: The Life of Lord Halifax (Head of Zeus, 2014), p 85.

  3 David Dutton, Neville Chamberlain (Arnold, 2001), p 112.

  4 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox.

  5 David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century (Allen Lane, 2007), p 91.

>   6 CAB 23/95 39 (38).

  7 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, p 111.

  8 Neville Chamberlain, The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters: The Downing Street Years 1934–40. Ed Robert C Self (Routledge, 2005), pp 348–9.

  9 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, p 115.

  10 Ibid, pp 117–18.

  11 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, p 115, 117, 118.

  12 David Reynolds, Summits, p 91.

  13 Geoffrey Best, Churchill and War (A & C Black, 2006), p 104.

  14 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, p 128.

  15 Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (Oxford University Press, 2011), p vii.

  16 David Owen, The Hidden Perspective: The Military Conversations 1906–1914 (Haus Publishing, 2014), pp 212–13.