Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The House remained in a state of suspense, uncertain if any dramatic developments would follow. Harold Nicolson felt the initiative inching back towards the government. ‘Up to that moment there was no indication that the debate was likely to become critical.’35

  A deflated Bob Boothby took Baffy Dugdale to tea, gloomily predicting that there would be no change of government, that Lloyd George and the Labour leaders were ‘determined not to take charge of affairs at this juncture, that the mess is so great, and the disasters to be expected in the next six weeks so terrible, let those who have sown the wind, reap the whirlwind.36 That was Bob’s story about 5.30 p.m.’

  Nicolson recorded the first sign of tension at 5.43 p.m. when the Speaker called on a diehard Chamberlain yes-man, Brigadier General Sir Henry Page Croft. ‘This active and high-minded Baronet is not popular with the Labour Party.37 Protests which they emitted when he caught the Speaker’s eye indicated that their blood was up.’ Page Croft stood to a loud moan from the opposition benches.

  Leo Amery had also leapt up, after two hours of ‘agonised discomfort’, but the Speaker ignored him.38 Earlier, Amery had talked to Captain FitzRoy when he met with his secretary to decide on a rough running order, and Amery has to be the leading candidate for the ‘very distinguished ex-Cabinet Minister’ accused by the Deputy Speaker of delaying the Speaker’s procession by a few minutes – FitzRoy had to march at double-pace to catch up.39 A Privy Counsellor since 1922, Amery, though a backbencher, had ‘a certain customary right to be called’.40 Yet the Speaker gave no hint when this might be. Amery then realised ‘that he meant to postpone me to the dinner hour – deliberately, I suspected, because he knew that I was out to make trouble’.

  Amery’s suspicion that the Speaker was trying ‘to kill the debate’ by calling on Page Croft – who proceeded to deliver what Baba Metcalfe called ‘a dreary and not impressive tirade in favour of the Government’ – was shared by Labour MPs.41, 42 The following afternoon Aneurin Bevan stood up and voiced the ‘great resentment’ felt in the House concerning ‘the absence of impartiality from the Chair’.

  Page Croft was followed by Josiah Wedgwood, ‘a veteran Socialist, much loved by the House’, wrote Nicolson.43 Wedgwood’s speech was provocative, indiscreet and rambling. One of the lessons of Norway, he suggested, was that ‘an army of the future must always move by night’.

  At one moment, Wedgwood asked whether the government had prepared any plan to prevent the invasion of the country.

  Vice Admiral Ernest Taylor, Conservative MP for Paddington South, rose to interrupt with the remark that the navy would see to that.

  Wedgwood countered immediately by saying that the navy had gone to the other end of the Mediterranean ‘to keep itself safe from bombing’.

  Nicolson believed that it was this ‘incidental, impulsive, excitable rejoinder which marked the point where the debate ceased to be an ordinary debate and began to be a tremendous conflict of wills’.

  Moments after Wedgwood made his remark, the short, stocky figure of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes strolled into the House, causing a stir. He was dressed in the gold-braided uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet. He wore six rows of medal ribbons, and the Grand Cross of Bath, with neck badges for his KCVO and his CMG. ‘Questionable taste,’ thought Chips Channon, ‘but it lent him dignity.’44

  Nicolson seized a piece of paper, scribbled on it the remark Wedgwood had just made, and handed it to Keyes who had squeezed onto the bench behind him.

  Keyes at once left his place and went behind the Speaker’s Chair. He begged Captain FitzRoy to call him next, as the honour of the navy had been placed in question.

  Wedgwood sat down shortly afterwards. The Admiral rose, clutching his order paper in which he had concealed his speech.

  ‘Sir Roger Keyes,’ said the Speaker.

  The Hero of Zeebrugge had shaved that morning with a copy of Kipling’s poem ‘If’ propped up before him. He had put on his ostentatious uniform after consulting with a former First Lord, Duff Cooper, who strongly advised him to wear it.fn1 He had written out what he intended to say on the recommendation of Harold Macmillan, who had been given the same tip by Lloyd George in 1923. Keyes had a reputation second only to Leo Amery for his lack of parliamentary charisma – ‘I am not very quick with my tongue,’ he admitted to Churchill. To overcome this, Macmillan told Keyes to ignore the etiquette that he speak from notes, and to read out his speech once he had rehearsed it thoroughly.45

  A meeting with General Carton de Wiart a few hours after his return from Namsos had steeled Keyes in his determination to criticise ‘the whole campaign’. He was aware that this meant attacking the Admiralty and his long-standing friend, the First Lord. Yet Keyes felt that he had no choice after learning about the situation in Namsos from the mouth of the commander in charge, who had not minced his words. Carton de Wiart was furious at the evacuation – and ‘very disappointed’ by the ‘non-appearance of the Navy’, which had ‘knocked out all idea’ of attacking Trondheim.46 When Keyes rose to his feet at 7.09 p.m., he was ready to defend the navy’s traduced reputation against what he perceived as the cowardice of Whitehall.

  Seated on the bench immediately below him, Nicolson had a ringside view of Keyes’s performance, which he had in part provoked. ‘Now the Admiral, although the bravest man in England, is usually a nervous speaker.47 It is his diffidence and modesty coupled with his heroic qualities that endear him to the House. But in his opening phrases he forgot that diffidence, since at that moment he was enraged.’

  Keyes referred to Wedgwood’s remarks and said that they constituted a ‘damned insult’.

  The House roared its applause.

  Lloyd George, who had just come in, ‘slapped his little thighs in ecstasy and roared louder than anyone else’.

  Nicolson detected that a feeling of intense drama had suddenly entered the already tropical atmosphere. ‘The temperature of the House rose from 99 to 101.’

  In the Diplomatic Gallery, bunched in alongside the newly evacuated Norwegian Foreign Minister and the French and American Ambassadors, Maisky watched Keyes lumberingly read out his lines. ‘He stumbled, got confused and agitated, and for precisely those reasons produced a very moving speech.’48 This was the first time that Keyes had worn his Admiral’s regalia in the House, yet not even Duff Cooper who had encouraged him could have anticipated the effect which his uniform produced. ‘The sincerity that lay behind his words gave them life,’ Cooper wrote.49 ‘Those who listened knew that here was no scheming politician, no seeker after office, no captious critic and, although all his principles were Conservative, no party hack. The loyalest of men, he could no longer offer his loyalty to the Prime Minister. He knew that it was no little thing that he was doing, and in order that others might understand what it meant to him he put on for the occasion the uniform that he had so nobly earned the right to wear – the livery of glory.’

  In a low voice, Keyes began to tell the story of how he had offered to seize Trondheim if only he could be placed in command of a few old ships. ‘The capture of Trondheim was essential, imperative and vital.’ But his suggestions were not welcome at the Admiralty. There were whistles of shocked surprise when Keyes revealed that the Admiralty had told him that it was not necessary to go into Trondheimsfjorden ‘as the Army was making good progress’. This story ‘made a deep impression’, wrote Nicolson.

  In salvo after salvo – so it seemed to his audience – Keyes blasted the government with the firepower that he had hoped to deploy on Trondheim. To Maisky, ‘Keyes’s words had the effect of shells fired from 16-inch guns.’50 Baffy Dugdale was mesmerised by his broadside. ‘It knocked the House in the very pit of its stomach.51 Impossible to say what the reaction will be, but never have I seen the speech of a back-bencher change history, as I think this must.’

  Keyes stumbled on, his every phrase devoured by a silent, engrossed Chamber. Baba Metcalfe realised that she had read many of these phrases before – with Halifax at the Dorchest
er. She reported back to the Foreign Secretary that the Admiral spoke ‘on the lines of his letter to Winston.52 He had the riveted interest of a packed House and obviously a lot of sympathy.’

  The result of not using our sea power vigorously had been little short of catastrophic. ‘The Gallipoli tragedy has been followed step by step.’ The lack of naval cooperation had doomed the Namsos force to failure. General Carton de Wiart had advanced from Steinkjer in the hope of finding British ships to assist him. He had found, instead, two German destroyers which opened fire on his flank and defeated the whole expedition. ‘It is a shocking story of ineptitude, which I assure the House ought never to have been allowed to happen.’

  Keyes concluded his address with a warm tribute to Churchill – ‘I am longing to see a proper use made of his great ability’ – and expressing his fear that he might never be forgiven by his dear admired friend. Churchill, who had sat throughout his speech with bowed head, turned around in his seat and gave Keyes a broad grin of affection, wrote Nicolson. ‘The House notices these things.53 It is Churchill’s generosity of mind which stills petty animosities.’

  But Keyes was not done. In a stirring final barrage, the Admiral assured MPs that there were ‘hundreds of young officers who are waiting eagerly to seize Warburton-Lee’s torch, or emulate the deeds of Vian of the Cossack. One hundred and forty years ago, Nelson said, “I am of the opinion that the boldest measures are the safest,” and that still holds good to-day.’

  For a flashing, glorious moment, the House had an image of Nelson parading up and down his deck with gold braid and epaulettes. The contrast with the absent Chamberlain, at that moment in audience with the King at Buckingham Palace, but seen earlier shrinking on the front bench in his black morning clothes and wing collar, could not have been wider.

  It was 7.30 p.m. when Keyes finished. Nicolson wrote: ‘There is a great gasp of astonishment. It is by far the most dramatic speech I have ever heard and when Keyes sits down there is thunderous applause.’ From then onwards, it became evident to Nicolson that the debate would be not merely an investigation of the Norway Campaign, ‘but a criticism of the Government’s whole war effort’.54

  The Chamber thinned out as Members departed to chew over Keyes’s speech, and to eat. In the third row below the gangway, Amery tried to catch the Speaker’s eye, but this time the Speaker called Lewis Jones. Ten minutes later, Jones sat down. Amery scrambled to his feet, but the Speaker called Captain Bellenger.

  It was now 7.41 p.m. Amery had sat in the same seat for more than four hours, ‘divided between perfunctory listening to unimportant speeches which never seem to end, and vainly trying to remember the all-important points of the all-important speech one hopes to make oneself.’55 He glumly watched as Members ‘steadily dribbled out’ of the Chamber. ‘The whole effect of what I had to say depended on the response of a live House and not on those who might care to read my speech in Hansard.’56

  Bellenger finished speaking at 8.03 p.m. It now being the dinner hour, the Deputy Speaker, Dennis Herbert, was in the Chair. With some hesitation Amery got up. This time he heard: ‘Mr Amery.’

  Amery remained standing. Even so, he was disheartened when he cast his eye over the deserted benches. There were fewer MPs – ‘barely a dozen’ – than for his maiden speech in May 1911.57 Not even his ally Clement Davies, with whom Amery had gone through his talk, had come to listen. If Amery sat down now, he was confident of being called early the next afternoon. ‘I nearly decided to leave the reasoned criticism of the Government to another day.’

  Amery had spent the morning preparing his speech in his library in Eaton Square. The business of writing still came hard. Decades of practice had failed to animate the soporific impact of his prose. In 1932, he had bumped into a friend ‘cherubically asleep’ with Amery’s latest book A Plan for Action ‘open on his tummy’.58 It took Amery back to the scene on deck sailing home from South Africa in 1902 ‘when I saw ten officers simultaneously asleep over Vol II of my S. African history’.

  A slumber-inducing prose style was not Amery’s only drawback. He was a lamentable orator, as Chamberlain’s brother once tried to explain. ‘Austen told me that I put too much material into my speeches, not enough scene-painting and rather too fine work, the result of the habit of writing.59 He also told me that I was too fond of dropping my voice to a mysterious whisper.’ To overcome these shortcomings, Amery had taken lessons on the art of public speaking from a lecturer at Queen’s College London who taught him to vary his pitch and pace, and to use his diaphragm. Amery sent him a postcard after one by-election: ‘Very rowdy meeting last night – diaphragm won.’60 But such occasions were infrequent, and Amery’s prolix speeches in Parliament, delivered with ‘a curious sing-song, parsonical intonation’, rarely rose to the same triumphant pitch.61 Almost Amery’s first speech in the Commons had been on the treatment of syphilis in the natives of Uganda. ‘Spoke with considerable hesitation and awkwardness in view of the difficulty of the subject.’62 Thirty years on, the hesitation and awkwardness remained, and the subject had not grown any easier.

  To inject spice into his speech on the Norway Campaign, Amery had looked up ‘my favourite old quotation of Cromwell’s’ when Prince Rupert’s cavalry was beating the Commons’ troops as Hitler’s pilots had pursued their successors out of Norway.63 Cromwell had chastised the leading Parliamentarian: ‘Your troops are most of them old decayed serving-men, and tapsters, and such kind of fellows … We are fighting to-day for our life, for our liberty, for our all; we cannot go on being led as we are.’64 Amery then remembered Cromwell’s other quotation when he dissolved the Rump Parliament in 1653 after it had been in power for thirteen years. Amery wondered if this was not ‘too strong meat’, but he decided to keep it up his sleeve ‘in case the spirit should move me to use it as the climax to my speech, otherwise preparing a somewhat milder finish’.65

  When finally called upon to speak, Amery was ‘doubtful whether I should make the whole speech I had prepared … I did not feel like talking for more than a few minutes.’66

  Nicolson watched him stand up. ‘The temperature continued to rise,’ he wrote.67 ‘Amery’s speech raised it far beyond the fever point.’

  The Chamber which Amery addressed was almost empty, but it was loaded with the elements which were to produce what Andrew Roberts has called ‘a case of parliamentary spontaneous combustion’.68

  If Keyes had supplied the first spark, then Clement Davies provided the second. In a letter to Amery in October 1954, Davies’s recollection was that Lloyd George had asked Davies to dine with him, ‘and naturally I accepted his invitation, but I told him that the moment that I knew you were up I would be leaving him.69 I knew that you would be called only by Dennis Herbert and you would have to wait until he was in the chair. I then heard the annunciator and saw that you were up and told LG that I was off and asked him to come in. I ran to the House, came behind you and urged you to make your full speech and then crossed the floor to the other side.’

  In Amery’s recollection, Davies ‘murmured in my ear that I must at all costs state the whole case against the Government, and went off to collect an audience from the Smoking Room and Library’.70

  Davies’s letter continued: ‘In the meantime, the House was filling and, as you say, Lloyd George came in within a few minutes and sat at his usual corner on the Front Bench, leaning forward with great interest.71 Though it was the dinner hour, the House was filling rapidly.’

  David Faber was a Conservative MP before he wrote Amery’s biography. ‘I’ve seen it happen.72 Members start drifting in from the dining room, the Members’ bar, the Strangers’ bar. Members who’ve eaten might be in the Library or entertaining guests, or rush across from Lord North Street or their clubs.’

  It became one of the most famous speeches in parliamentary history. From the moment that he opened his mouth, Amery was ‘far beyond his usual form’.73 He ceased to be an ambitious backbencher with a grudge. In the crucible of the Comm
ons, he transformed into his forester father, standing before an ancient tree which had crumbled to decay.

  He began slowly, talking in a quiet, clear, level tone, his small figure growing imperceptibly in stature with every indignant phrase and with the appearance of each new Member who streamed in to listen, ‘a tribute less perhaps to my eloquence than to the thought that I might be saying something of moment’ – until, as Ronald Blythe put it, ‘a squashed little man with the minimum of presence, suddenly seemed, to the hallucinated eyes and strung-up nerves of the House, to loom over Parliament like a monolith’.74, 75

  Amery claimed to have no loyalties ‘except to the common cause.’ He played for time, glancing up from his notes to assess the mood and extent of his audience. He had wanted Chamberlain to be there, but the Prime Minister was still at the Palace. ‘I fully understand the good reason for his absence.’

  With the first strokes of his axe, Amery laid into the government for its woeful deficiencies in the initiative, planning and execution of the Norway Campaign. Encouraged by the murmurs of approval from the steadily filling Conservative benches, Amery directed attention away from Norway and towards the absent Prime Minister, who this afternoon had once again ‘expressed himself as satisfied that the balance of advantage lay on our side’.