The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (26 page)

The point is that he went back on gold in spite of his better judgement—and his judgement was better than that of a whole host of supposed financial experts. For those who remember recent British monetary history, he was in exactly the same position as Mrs Thatcher when she was bamboozled (by Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe) into joining the disastrous European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1989.

Both Churchill and Thatcher had the right instincts about the monetary straitjacket of a fixed exchange rate; both, after long resistance, submitted to the view of the ‘experts’. Going back on gold gets a
FIASCO FACTOR
of 10, in view of the economic mayhem that ensued, but we should surely rate it no higher than
CHURCHILL FACTOR
2, since any other minister would have done it without a second thought—and he certainly gave it a second thought.

Partly as a result of the economic mess that he helped to create, Churchill and the Tories were kicked out again in 1929; Labour overtook the Tories for the first time in parliamentary seats; and he now spent more than ten years ‘in the wilderness’. He needed a new political fox to chase, a new cause to fight. He soon found a way of infuriating just about everyone, including the Tory Party leadership under Stanley Baldwin. Of all his misjudgements, the one that still looks the worst today is his

Misjudgement Over India.

He decided that it was his mission to resist any move towards Indian self-government—and he did so in a style that to us looks patronising and blimpish almost beyond belief.

In 1931 he memorably denounced Gandhi as a semi-naked fakir. He said it was ‘
nauseating’ that this pioneer of non-violent resistance should be simultaneously engaged in organising civil disobedience
while engaged in talks with ‘the representative of the King-Emperor’—i.e. Lord Irwin (later to become the Hitler-appeasing Halifax); as if Gandhi were some kind of terrorist. It was an absurd remark from a man who himself had no scruple about negotiating with gun-bearing Irish nationalists.

He prophesied bloodshed. He spoke in apocalyptic terms of the inability of the Indians to engage in self-rule, of the misery of the Untouchables and the inevitability of intercommunal violence. He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics—die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and sip his chota peg and glory in the possession of India.

Polite opinion held that he had slightly lost the plot. All parties were in favour of greater Indian independence—even most Tories. What was he up to? I am afraid his motives were not exactly pure. He was certainly outraged by the prospect of losing India, and the blow to the ‘prestige’ of the British Empire, not to mention the loss of export markets for Lancashire cotton. In that sense, he seemed selfish and chauvinistic in his objectives.

He wasn’t really a passionate lover of India—he hadn’t been there since 1899, when as a young subaltern he had spent most of his time tending his roses, collecting butterflies, playing polo and reading Gibbon. He wasn’t even particularly expert in the subject. Appearing before one House of Commons committee he seemed—most unusually—to restrict himself to rhetorical generalities. The awful truth is that he was engaged in political positioning.

He wanted to succeed Stanley Baldwin as leader of the Tories; he needed to curry favour with the right wing of the party—who did not think much of this floor-crossing ex-Liberal. India was the perfect issue on which to demonstrate his reactionary credentials. He gave long and florid speeches to rallies at which—like the Ukippers of
today—he revelled in the way that he and his supporters were treated as fruitcakes and loonies. ‘
We are a sort of inferior race, mentally deficient and composed principally of colonels and other undesirables who have fought for Britain,’ he boasted.

The strategy failed. The India Bill was passed. The Labour government got its way, with Tory agreement, in giving greater self-government to what is now the world’s largest democracy and an economic powerhouse. He was marginalised—proved wrong by events. The best that can be said is that he showed characteristic grace in defeat: in 1935 he sent a message to Gandhi, wishing him well. ‘
Make a success and if you do I will advocate your getting much more.’ It is also worth bearing in mind that he was not wholly wrong in his prophecies: the end of British rule, when it finally came in 1948, was indeed accompanied by appalling intercommunal violence in which about a million people died; and the problems of the caste system persist to this day.

But that is not a good enough defence of a policy that now looks quixotically retrograde. Let’s give the Indian misjudgement a
FIASCO FACTOR
of 5 and a
CHURCHILL FACTOR
of 10.

By 1935 Baldwin was back as Prime Minister—but this time Churchill had gone too far in his rebelliousness, not least over India, and there was no place for him in the cabinet. Clearly there was scope for him to make mischief again. Could he find another campaign, another cause by which he could thrust himself to centre stage? Could he manage another cock-up? He sure could!

The Abdication Crisis.

In the late autumn of 1936 it became widely known that the King, Edward VIII, was having an affair with an American divorcee by the
name of Wallis Simpson. Peculiar as it may seem to us today, this was thought to be a quite indefensible way to behave. Churchy, pipe-puffing Stanley Baldwin was quietly horrified. He decided that the King could indeed marry a divorcee—but that he would have to abdicate.

The young King’s plight was desperate. He could feel the ice floes shifting under him. He knew that his time on the throne could be running out. He needed someone to guide him, someone with experience, someone with weight in public affairs. He went—where else—to Churchill. The two men knew each other already: the King had been to stay at Blenheim; Churchill had got on well with him, and had even written a couple of speeches for him.

He had dinner with the King at Windsor, and then wrote a hilarious (and probably drunken) letter explaining how to survive, including the sensible observation that now was not the time to leave the country. Churchill became the unofficial leader of the ‘King’s Party’, and on 8 December, after a jolly good lunch at some Anglo-French binge, he decided to give the House of Commons a piece of his mind.

The heart of the matter, in his view, was that this was a matter of the heart, and the King was the King; and that if ministers had a problem with Mrs Simpson, then they, not the monarch, should step down. Alas, he completely misread the mood of the Commons. He was howled down by MPs, most of whom had spent the last few days listening to the peevish and puritanical mutterings of their constituents.

The yammering grew so loud that eventually he had to sit down, without finishing what he was going to say. Harold Nicolson said: ‘
Winston collapsed utterly in the House yesterday . . . He has undone in five minutes the patient reconstruction works of two years.’ Many people—even friends of his—concluded that this time he really was finished. Let’s give the Abdication crisis a
FIASCO FACTOR
of
6 and a
CHURCHILL FACTOR
of 10, even if modern taste would award the argument to Churchill, of course.

Today’s electorate wouldn’t give a hoot if their monarch decided to marry a divorcee (come to think of it, the heir to the throne and his wife have both been married before). But that is emphatically not how it was seen at the time. Yet again, Churchill was written off: a progressive and compassionate instinct was seen as somehow ultra-monarchist and toadying.

He was by now sixty-one, and he looked obsolete, washed up, a great Edwardian sea creature flapping helplessly on the shingle and spouting empty nothings from his blowhole. Hardly anyone would have believed, at that point, that within three and a half years he would be Prime Minister.

—

L
ET US REVIEW
this list of debacles—the richest and most jaw-dropping to be borne on the battle honours of any politician. What do they tell us about the character of Winston Churchill? Most obviously, we see that he had just that—what they used to call character. Any one of these fiascos, on its own, would have permanently disabled a normal politician. That Churchill kept going at all is tribute to his bounce-back-ability, to some Kevlar substance with which he insulated his ego and his morale.

It helped that he was so extrovert, so naturally self-expressive. He did not internalise his defeats, and with the exception of Gallipoli he did not gnaw his innards with self-reproach. He did not allow these abundant and picturesque prangs to change his fundamental view of himself; and it is a comment on the natural laziness of human beings that other people tend to judge you mainly according to your own judgement of yourself.

He bounced back so often because he had so much to believe in.
Many people have observed glibly and slightly infuriatingly that if Churchill had missed his moment in 1940, he would have gone down as a ‘
failure’, a man who never achieved very much. That is absurd.

No modern politician can hold a candle to his efforts: founding the welfare state, reforming prisons, building the navy, helping to win the First World War, becoming Chancellor, etc., etc.—and we are speaking of the period in which he is said to have been a ‘failure’,
before
the Second World War. He had so many enterprises and initiatives that it is no surprise he had setbacks, and he bounced back from these fiascos because people could instinctively recognise something in the way he conducted himself.

It wasn’t just that you could often make a very good case that he had been right: Gallipoli contained the germ of a sound strategy; Soviet communism was indeed barbaric; the Gold Standard was foisted on him; and so on. What do you notice about the classic Churchillian debacle, the key thing that distinguishes it from the fiascos that finish the careers of lesser men?

Did you spot it? Never did anyone draw the conclusion—as Churchill crawled from the smoking ruins of his detonated position—that he had been in any way personally corrupt.

Never was there the faintest whiff of scandal. None of his disasters came close to touching his integrity. It wasn’t just that he was a pretty safe pair of trousers (though there seems to be some recent doubt about that). That wasn’t the point.

He never seems to have lied, or cheated, or been underhand, let alone been motivated by financial gain. He took his positions because (a) they seemed to him to be right and (b) because he conceived that they would serve to advance his career; and there was no disgrace in making both calculations at once, after all: he thought they would be politically useful because they were right.

He arrived at his decisions not casually, but after massive research
and cogitation—and it was this sheer volume of information flowing over his gills which helped him instinctively to point his nose upstream. In 1911, three years before the outbreak of war, he wrote a long memorandum for the Committee of Imperial Defence, predicting the exact course of the first forty days of the conflict—where and how the French would fall back, where the Germans would come to a halt.

General Henry Wilson said the paper was ‘
ridiculous and fantastic—a silly memorandum’. Every word of it came true, to the very day. Germany lost the Battle of the Marne on the forty-first day, and the stalemate began. This wasn’t science fiction he was writing; he wasn’t just staring out of the window and chewing his pencil.

He said the war would last four years, when others said it would be over by Christmas. He saw the failings of Versailles. He got things right because he was better informed than almost every other politician. By the mid-1930s he was getting secret briefings from men in Whitehall and the military who were appalled by appeasement—Ralph Wigram and others—and who were desperate for someone to raise the alarm about Germany.

Sometimes he knew more than Baldwin himself, and on one occasion he publicly humiliated the Prime Minister by his superior knowledge of the strength of the Luftwaffe (the Nazis had a lot more planes than Baldwin claimed). He followed intently what was happening in Germany; he constantly called the attention of Parliament to the persecution of the Jews—from 1932 onwards—and warned of Nazi ideology. When Hitler got 95 per cent of the vote in November 1933, he said that the Nazis ‘
declare war is glorious’, and that they ‘inculcate a form of bloodlust in their children without parallel as an education since Barbarian and Pagan times’.

Louder and louder he rang his alarm bell, because he could see with terrible clarity what was going to happen. He saw the truth
about Hitler more clearly even than poor old Putzi Hanfstaengl, with whom he had caroused in Munich.

The ivory-tinkling spin-doctor eventually fell foul of Goebbels, and was denounced by Unity Mitford to Hitler—apparently for making unpatriotic remarks. In 1937 Putzi received some terrifying orders: he was to get in a plane, with a parachute, and jump out over war-torn Spain—to go behind the republican lines and work undercover to help the fascist forces of General Franco.

It didn’t sound like a mission from which he was expected to return. He did as he was told, mainly because he assumed he would be shot if he didn’t. The plane took off and headed for Spain, chugging hour after hour through the sky, with Hanfstaengl sitting in the back with his parachute on and in a state of gibbering fear.

It wasn’t just the prospect of the jump. Even if he survived, he was sure the Spanish republicans would capture him—and probably tear him to pieces. Eventually the plane landed with an engine malfunction, and he found that they were still in Germany. They had been going in circles.

The whole thing was a ghastly practical joke by Hitler and Goebbels. Putzi decided understandably that he was giving up Nazism for good, and fled to England and then America. Churchill saw what Hitler’s own spin-doctor had tried to conceal from himself—the fundamental savagery of the regime.