A History of Britain, Volume 3 (71 page)

But before any of this could be realized, a war had still to be won. And it was exactly the circumstances of
how
it was eventually won that caused trouble for the vision of the new 20th-century Britain: one that attempted to reconcile the romance of back-to-the-wall island history with the obligations of a welfare state. Not everyone was enamoured by Beveridge. The Employers’ Confederation felt it had to say that the war was being fought not to set up social insurance but to secure the country’s freedom from German tyranny. And even Churchill wondered out loud just what the bill for the Beveridge reforms might be, especially since British foreign reserves had all but disappeared: ‘The question steals across the mind whether we are not committing our forty-five million people to tasks beyond their compass and laying on them burdens beyond their capacity to bear.’ As long as the issue was just endurance, all the contradictions could just be set aside. Once endurance was no longer in question, the difficulties in the way of reaching Albion–Jerusalem, especially the matter of who should shoulder the fiscal burden, were already apparent.

In this odd sense 1940 had been both the hardest and the easiest year of the war, because the reborn community of the nation was so incontrovertible. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, for all the sorrow and genuine sympathy Churchill showed Roosevelt he was secretly exultant, for he knew in his bones that victory was in sight. ‘So we had won after all,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end.’ But if he were right that ‘England would live’ – even right, as far as he could see, that ‘Britain would live’ – Churchill’s equally confident assumption that ‘the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire [for him interchangeable] would live’ was misplaced. For whilst Churchill thought Britain’s
future
depended on imperial revival, Roosevelt believed it depended on something like the opposite.

In the lead up to the Atlantic Alliance, of course, he was innocent of all this. When he and Franklin D. Roosevelt met in Placentia Bay on board HMS
Prince of Wales
in August 1941, as American and British sailors standing together sang hymns chosen by Churchill, the dream of a true Atlantic democratic partnership, the partnership Churchill carried in his own blood, seemed gloriously at hand. But it was indeed just a dream. There was a telling moment during his visit to Washington in June 1942 when Roosevelt asked Churchill to think of the relationship with India in the light of what had happened to the British 18th-century empire, meaning that Britain should grant India independence before that country was forced to fight for it. Churchill flared up into full imperialist fury. It was still on his mind at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet that year, when he stated bulldoggedly that he had not been made His Majesty’s prime minister only to preside over the demise of the British Empire. What Roosevelt had in mind was the granting of immediate dominion status to India to pre-empt the possibility of Subhas Chandra Bose’s pro-Axis volunteer Bengal Tigers from triggering something like the great rebellion of 1857 but on an even larger scale. Needless to say, Churchill wouldn’t hear of it.

But the demise of empire was happening anyway with the fall of first Hong Kong and then, more catastrophically in February 1942, of Singapore, where the commander-in-chief in southeast Asia, Archibald Wavell, had been ordered, rather bizarrely, by Churchill to instruct his troops to fight to the end over the ruins of the port city. Instead, the Japanese took into captivity 85,000 men, of whom 57,000 would die. HMS
Prince of Wales
, on which the two leaders had met, had been sent halfway round the world to cow the Japanese, only to end up ignominiously sunk in the China Sea. Whether Churchill imagined it or not, the Commonwealth that emerged from the Pacific war would emphatically not be the one that had existed in 1940.

Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, launched against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, was another double-edged sword for Churchill and Britain. The most famous anti-Bolshevik in the land found himself in alliance with a Soviet leader who really did embody all of Churchill’s ferocious stereotypes about satanic communist monsters. But, as he said of Stalin, he would make friends with the devil himself if it helped win the war. Whilst Barbarossa would be the nemesis of the Third Reich, the chumminess between Stalin and Roosevelt at the conferences, in Teheran in November 1943 and Yalta in 1944, made Churchill depressingly aware
of
Britain’s suddenly shrivelled place in the scheme of things. Tying down German manpower on the Russian front had allowed the British Eighth Army to take north Africa, first from the Italians and then (after the initial disaster at Rommel’s hands at Tobruk, where 30,000 Allied prisoners were taken) from the Germans as well. For a brief moment when Churchill ordered bells to be rung to celebrate the victory at El Alamein in November 1942, or when he sat beneath the palms with Brooke at Siwa Oasis in January 1943,
en route
from Cairo to Turkey, eating dates and sipping mint tea, listening to the local sheikhs complaining about the Italians eating their donkeys, it must have seemed that all was well with the empire of palm and pine.

But until El Alamein, 1942 had been a terrible year: Hong Kong, Singapore, Tobruk. In the House of Commons, Churchill no longer seemed quite so invulnerable. The socialist Aneurin Bevan spoke of the prime minister winning debate after debate and losing battle after battle: ‘The country is saying that he fights debates like the war and the war like debates.’ He had experienced the only serious threat to his leadership – the possibility (strange in retrospect) of being replaced by Stafford Cripps. And although he went conscientiously about his diplomatic travels and errands, travelling, for a man nearing 70, astonishing distances in rugged forms of transport from Washington to Moscow to Cairo to Persia, as the outlook for the war improved he paradoxically seemed to enjoy it less and less. As Roy Jenkins notes in his recent biography, Churchill was almost always the visitor. Suffering from the knowledge that, in the end, Britain would have to defer to American military leadership when the time came to launch an invasion of Europe, he regularly threw tantrums when it came to strategic arguments with the field marshals, Auchinleck, Montgomery and Brooke. Although Churchill was certainly right to argue that 1943 was too soon to launch Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, he became obsessed by the alternative Operation Torch in Italy (reverting to the Dardanelles syndrome) and by the notion that Roosevelt and his generals never thought it anything more than a sideshow.

By 1944 he was also, unquestionably, becoming a more difficult leader of the cabinet. Those closest to him felt he was drinking more and thinking less. The days when he would still look ‘fresh as paint’ to Brooke, after night flights of thousands of miles and a pre-breakfast potion of two whiskies, two cigars and a tumbler of white wine, were no more. He was suffering alarmingly regular bouts of pneumonia. In May that year he seemed to Brooke ‘very old and tired. He said Roosevelt was not well and that he was no longer the man he had been, this he said also applied to himself. He said he could always sleep well, eat well and especially drink
well
but that he no longer jumped out of bed the way he used to and felt as if he would be quite content to spend the whole day in bed.’ Increasingly he would bluff his way through cabinet meetings, muttering into his cigars, focussing bewilderingly on some small detail that had nothing to do with the main task at hand, making the meetings unconscionably long. Often he seemed incapable of making members shut up, so that there were times when everyone was talking at once. Decisions, especially military ones, had to be dragged from him. Alarmed by this loss of grip, Brooke, who had come to the conclusion that Churchill had no grasp whatsoever of basic strategy, was many times on the point of resigning. The quiet Attlee became so dismayed by Churchill’s glaring lack of familiarity with the papers he was supposed to have read that in 1944 he wrote a stiff memorandum of rebuke, rather like a headmaster chastising the class idler. In the House of Commons, too, Churchill’s oratory seemed in danger of degenerating into mere windy bombast. The coalition was already beginning to fray, with differences between Labour and Conservative ministers becoming more substantive. That it didn’t fall apart altogether was probably due to the fact that Bevin and Morrison hated each other more heartily than either of them disliked Churchill. But strikes broke out once again in the old heartland of industrial grief: south Wales and Yorkshire.

Pride in D-Day, when it finally came on 6 June 1944, and the heroic Normandy campaigns that followed, along with the sudden return of terror as unmanned V1 flying bombs, then V2 rockets hit the southeast from the summer of 1944 until March 1945 (killing nearly 9000 people and injuring many more) closed the rifts for a while and made Churchill’s standing as war leader suddenly important again. When on 8 May, VE Day, he stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, with the king and queen, he could take satisfaction in the realization that he had indeed accomplished a task given to very few – he had saved not only his own country but, arguably, the existence of European democracy, which had it not been for British resistance in 1940 would indeed have been overwhelmed by tyranny.

But the election campaign that followed in July taught Churchill not to confuse heartfelt applause with votes. Pugnaciously over-confident, despite hearing some boos in Walthamstow in northeast London, he ran a campaign of abrasive vilification against the welfare state plans of the Labour party. Executing the plans of a true socialist government, he said in a broadcast on 4 June (strangely anticipating some of the themes of Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
), would necessarily involve ‘some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this
would
nip opinion in the bud … it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. … My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. … a free Parliament – is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire.’ The attempt to demonize socialism as being somehow outside the mainstream of British history was an extraordinary reversion to the polemics of the 1920s, notwithstanding all the collaboration of wartime government and the acceptance by a section of the Conservatives of many of the social reforms outlined in the Beveridge Report. In a quietly devastating, sardonic reply Clement Attlee, still a shadowy figure to most people, told the country that he realized what the aim of Churchill’s travesty of Labour policy had been: ‘He wanted the electors to understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives. He feared that those who had accepted his leadership in war might be tempted out of gratitude to follow him further. I thank him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly.’

Churchill was confident enough of the outcome to go to a summit meeting at Potsdam with Stalin and Roosevelt’s successor, Truman, on 15 July while waiting for votes to be counted from servicemen scattered around the world. These, he felt sure, would make the difference, although an apocryphal story has him asking Air Vice Marshal Park how he thought the airmen would vote and getting the unwelcome answer that at least 80 per cent of them would vote Labour. Back home, just before dawn on 25 July, Churchill woke up with a ‘sharp stab of almost physical pain’, convinced he had lost. How right he was. When all the votes were counted – and the turn-out had been a high 73 per cent – it was apparent that Labour had won a phenomenal and, even to its leaders, shockingly unexpected victory. They would return 393 members to the Conservatives’ 213. Whole areas of traditional Tory strength like the Midlands Unionist constituencies – Chamberlain-land – had been wiped out. Churchill put the bravest face he could on the disaster, although when Clementine tried to say at lunch on results day that perhaps a defeat would be a blessing in disguise Winston growled back: ‘If this is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised.’ When the time came to leave the prime ministerial country retreat, Chequers, the family all signed the visitors’ book; Winston signed last of all, adding below his signature ‘Finis’.

It was not, of course; neither for Churchill, nor for the country he recognized as his home. His disastrously ill-judged, ill-tempered election campaign had been fought on three assumptions: first, that the obligations
of
gratitude (although he was never complacent about this) might return him to power; secondly, that there could not be a socialist Britain that would still recognizably
be
Britain; and thirdly, that the nation’s continued existence was conditional on the survival, in some meaningful form, of the empire. He was wrong on all three counts. It had in fact been Churchill’s own wartime government that had set out the blueprint for a welfare state, had led the public to expect one and that had given Labour ministers the confidence and experience (unlike the previous Labour administrations of 1924 and 1929) to make it happen. In the summer of 1945 the vast majority of the electors punished Churchill for walking away from the better life that they had assumed he had shared. Had not Eden talked about a programme of social reform?

Instead, what they heard were the kinds of noises about a Trojan horse for communism that some of them at least remembered from the 20s, and which, even in the nippiest days of the subsequent Cold War, did not seem to make much sense. However hard the Tories tried, they failed to make Clement Attlee look like a British Stalin. The Labour government was, in any case, at pains to make its collectivist economic programme look patriotically legitimate. Taking 20 per cent of the economy into public ownership was called ‘nationalization’. The proposed new public enterprises were likewise to be given patriotic corporate identities: British Steel, the British Overseas Airways Corporation, British Railways. The effort was to recast the meaning of being British as membership of a community of shared ownership, shared obligations and shared benefits: co-op Britain. And because the Labour party had such huge majorities in Wales, Scotland and the most socially damaged areas of industrial England, it would at last be a Britain in which rich southern England did not lord it over the poor-relation regions. This time, in Orwell’s terms, the
right
family members would be in control.