Dominion (83 page)

We know now, more accurately than people did in the 1930s, how appallingly murderous the regime that Lenin and Stalin had created actually was, but in the 1930s it was no possible military
threat to the West. The widespread fears on the British right of communism spreading at home were a chimera.

Then there were others who positively admired Nazism. Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the Great War, called Hitler also ‘unquestionably a great leader’ and ‘the greatest
German of the age’.
⁴
There were Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, supported for a time by Lord Rothermere’s
Daily Mail
, and Hitler also
had influential admirers in business and on the wealthy aristocratic right. There were very few Labour politicians who had any good words for the Nazis, but there were one or two, notably Ben
Greene, quite an important figure for a while in the 1930s. In
Dominion
he becomes Labour leader in the pro-Treaty coalition.

Then there were the pacifists, whose opposition to war in any form was total, even after the Second World War began. Pacifism within the Labour Party had been strong in the early 1930s, but
declined as Fascist aggression grew, particularly with the Spanish Civil War. Pacifism remained as a force, though, both within and outside the Labour Party. The position taken by people like Vera
Brittain and the minority of some twenty Labour MPs who formed the Parliamentary Peace Aims Group was courageous given the atmosphere of the time, but the Peace Aims Group would undoubtedly have
voted for a treaty in 1940, and lived – though perhaps not for long – to regret it.

At Munich in 1938, Chamberlain believed that by ceding the predominantly German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, he had met the Führer’s last demand. When, the following
spring, Hitler occupied the remaining Czech lands and set up Slovakia as a puppet state, Chamberlain realized he had been deceived. When he went on to invade Poland in September 1939 Chamberlain
declared war, but he was a reluctant and ineffective war leader. His long-held hopes for peace gone, he became a tragic figure. When, in spring 1940, Chamberlain said that Hitler had ‘missed
the bus’ for a spring offensive only for the Germans immediately to invade Denmark and Norway, and British military operations in Norway ended in disaster, his position as Prime Minister came
under threat. A large minority of Conservative MPs voted against the government or abstained in the Norway Debate in Parliament in May 1940. Chamberlain turned to the Labour leaders with the offer
of a coalition; they agreed to serve, but only under a different Conservative leader. Chamberlain realized he would have to go.

Thus followed the fateful meeting of 9 May 1940 between Chamberlain, the Conservative Chief Whip David Margesson, and the two leading candidates for the succession, Halifax and
Churchill. Each of the participants left a record of what happened, which differ considerably in detail but not in essentials.
⁵
Edward Wood, Lord Halifax,
Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, had the premiership for the asking. He was patrician, experienced, trusted, reliable and respected, though he had been a leading appeaser and there was
sometimes an odd element of passivity in his nature. He was supported by the bulk of the Conservative party, Chamberlain, and the King. His junior minister, Rab Butler, had spent the previous
evening imploring him to accept the premiership. Labour sat on their hands between the two candidates. Churchill, on the other hand, who had been brought back into the Cabinet when war was
declared, was tough, pugnacious, brilliantly creative and popular with the public; but had a reputation among Conservatives as serially disloyal, an ex-Liberal, an unreliable adventurer who had (as
he did) some questionable friends.

But Halifax did not press for the position, and agreed to serve under Churchill. He seems to have realized that he did not have the personality to fight the titanic struggle that was coming; the
very next day the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France. He also suffered at times of crisis from agonizing, probably psychosomatic, stomach pains. Honourably, he stood aside. Churchill
became Prime Minister and entered the House of Commons to loud cheers from the Labour benches, but few from the Conservatives. They took a long time to learn to love him.

Churchill immediately appointed a new War Cabinet, the central core of ministers to direct the war. Besides himself, Halifax and Chamberlain remained for the Conservatives
– other prominent appeasers were cast out (Sir Samuel Hoare suddenly found himself ambassador to Franco’s Spain) – and Churchill appointed two Labour members, the party leader
Clement Attlee and his deputy Arthur Greenwood. This was more than Labour were strictly entitled to, given their level of parliamentary representation, but it was a shrewd move – Churchill
had not been a politician for forty years for nothing – because both were anti-appeasers who could be relied on to support him in prosecuting the war vigorously. It gave him a majority in the
War Cabinet, and Chamberlain too, though now terminally ill, showed a new resolution. This was needed. By the end of May 1940 British and French forces were in full retreat, the British to Dunkirk.
At this point Germany made peace overtures, as they did again later in 1940, the thrust of which was that Hitler, who had never wanted war against his fellow Aryan nation, would leave the British
Empire alone in return for a free hand in Europe. Halifax wanted these overtures to be followed up; it seemed the war in the West was lost and perhaps now was the time to try to settle and avoid
further bloodshed. Churchill argued, though, that a peace treaty would inevitably lead to German domination of Britain and that with her navy and air force, supported (though in some cases not
wholeheartedly) by the Empire and with the protection of the Channel, she should fight on and face invasion if need be. Churchill won the day and obtained support of the full Cabinet. The rest is
history.

Had Halifax become Prime Minister, the outcome would likely have been very different. He would have appointed a different War Cabinet, with a different balance. It might well
have negotiated peace when France surrendered. If that had happened I think both the Labour and Conservative parties would have split, a Labour minority following most Conservatives into a
pro-Treaty coalition. I believe King George VI would have stayed – constitutionally he would have had to support the decision of his government – and carried on as King, however
reluctantly as the regime hardened. I have never bought the idea that the Germans, had Britain surrendered or been defeated, would have restored King Edward VIII, though certainly the Nazis played
with that idea. True, Edward was pro-Nazi, but many in Britain loathed him for abdicating and he was such an irresponsible and foolish man that, as King, he would have been a headache to any
government.

Deciding who Britain’s political leaders might have been in the years that followed is difficult. Even if people are long dead one is reluctant to label them unfairly. Faced with the
realities of what the Treaty brought about in the circumstances of this book, I think Halifax would have resigned in guilt and despair. Chamberlain died late in 1940 and as for the other leading
candidate to succeed Halifax, Sir Samuel Hoare, I am conscious that his first-hand experience of fascism in Spain turned him into an anti-Fascist. I have portrayed Herbert Morrison, who was
anti-Fascist but saw himself as a realist and was always consumed by the lust for power, as leading the Labour pro-Treaty minority but, like Halifax, later resigning in despair. Lloyd George,
however, I am sure would have loved a late return to power and there is no question of his sympathies with Hitler.

As for the man who succeeds Lloyd George in
Dominion
, if one is looking for an appeaser in love with power, fanatical about a united British Empire setting up tariffs against the rest of
the world, and a man who was irredeemably corrupt and unscrupulous (he left his native Canada under a cloud over the circumstances in which he had made a business fortune), the obvious candidate
has to be Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. Clement Attlee, who did not say such things lightly, described him as the only evil person he had ever met, a judgement shared by others,
⁶
although Churchill was, from time to time, friendly with him. To be fair, Beaverbrook was never an active anti-Semite, but nor did he like Jews and nor was the issue
particularly important to him. From the Great War until the early 1930s he was the epitome of the newspaper magnate who successfully interfered in politics, until Stanley Baldwin courageously
squashed him when he described newspaper proprietors as having ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. No single newspaper proprietor had such
power again until the years following Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 when she, followed by Tony Blair (and Alex Salmond of the SNP), handed ever-increasing amounts of influence to Rupert
Murdoch.

Enoch Powell was always the most fanatic of British nationalists, and though in the 1960s he became the ultimate British isolationist, while at the Conservative Research Department in the late
1940s he was a passionate imperialist. He sent a paper to Churchill, then the Leader of the Opposition, in 1946 advising the military reconquest of India, which made Churchill worry about his
sanity, though Rab Butler managed to reassure him.
⁷
Powell seems to me an obvious candidate for India Secretary. Rab Butler later became a leading
Conservative moderate, but he was the most passionate of appeasers before 1939, a fact which earned him the lasting enmity of Harold Macmillan, who hated fascism.

The Scottish Nationalist Party was formed in 1934 through the merger of two small parties, the right-wing Scottish Party and the leftish National Party of Scotland. The new party, which remained
very small, included elements sympathetic to fascism, but had no common policies on the serious issues of the day – mass unemployment, the continuing Depression and the darkening
international scene – beyond the dream, common to all nationalist and Fascist parties throughout Europe, that the expression of nationhood would release some sort of a mystical
‘national spirit’ that would somehow resolve all problems. The struggle against fascism was no priority for them; in 1939 the Party Conference voted to oppose conscription. Their
leader, Douglas Young, was imprisoned for his refusal to be conscripted on the grounds that there existed no Scottish government to decide on it. The SNP’s 1939 resolution and subsequent
behaviour show the unimportance fighting fascism had for them, while the rest of the British people, like my Scottish mother and English father, were either working their fingers to the bone on the
home front or serving in the forces to fight the greatest threat civilization has ever faced.

In my alternative universe I see the SNP splitting, with right-wing elements supporting the Beaverbrook government in return for national symbols like the return of the Stone of Scone and vague
promises of autonomy or independence. As Gunther says in the book, the co-option of local nationalists from Brittany to Croatia was an important element in Nazi policy throughout Europe.

During the 1980s, a new school of thought appeared, criticizing Churchill’s decision to fight the war at all costs. This time it came from the political right. In 1993
the academic John Charmley wrote a book,
Churchill: the End of Glory,
⁸
which stimulated Alan Clark, the ever-controversial Conservative MP, to write
a
Times
article questioning whether Britain might have been better to make peace with Hitler in 1940. This exaggerated Charmley’s position, but nonetheless his book questions
Churchill’s policy of fighting the war at all costs: ‘In international affairs it was the Soviets and the Americans who divided the world between them; in domestic politics it was the
Socialists who reaped the benefits of the efforts of the Great (1940–5) Coalition.’
⁹

To take the last point first, the Attlee government of 1945–51 was put in office not by Churchill, but the electorate. Whether the creation of the welfare state, full employment and the
nationalization of part of the economy was a good or a bad thing is a matter of judgement. (I have portrayed in my book what I think conditions for ordinary people under a government that opposed
these things would have looked like.) But peace with Hitler – which would certainly have involved Britain aligning itself with German foreign policy in Europe – was likely, I think, to
lead to the end of democracy, let alone glory, in Britain. What, for example, would have happened (as in my book appears likely in a 1950 election) if a party or group opposed to the Treaty looked
like being elected?

Charmley accepts that the Empire by 1939, particularly India, was going to be difficult to hold on to for long, and blames Churchill for his failure to see the facts. This is fair enough.
However, a government which accepted the peace terms available in 1940 would inevitably have had to rely more, economically, on the Empire; unrest in India could only have got worse with Britain
tied to the Nazis; the breakup of the ‘old’ Commonwealth would have been a distinct possibility. The New Zealanders, in particular, would have loathed links with the Nazis.

It is true (and the strongest argument used by those who disagree that the Second World War was ‘the good war’), that Stalin’s victory made the Soviet Union the second power in
the world, and gave it control over Eastern Europe, which suffered murderous oppression and economic exploitation from his regime in the post-war years. Even so, had Hitler been allowed a free hand
in Eastern Europe and Russia, the fate of those countries would have been even worse. It took the efforts of Britain, Russia and the USA to end the war in Europe in 1945. By then, the Holocaust had
taken place and twenty million Soviet citizens, many of them civilians, as well as two million Poles and many other people from Eastern Europe, were dead. If the struggle in the East had continued
with Russia fighting Hitler alone, the war would have gone on for years and the slaughter would have been infinitely greater yet. Hitler planned to kill the populations of Leningrad and Moscow,
perhaps seven million people, and either enslave or murder all Russians and Poles who could not show Aryan ancestry.