Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Chamberlain’s complacency was a danger to the nation. To illustrate how dangerous, Amery took himself back to Africa, telling the story of a friend who had gone lion-hunting and spent the night asleep in a railway carriage, dreaming of hunting his lion in the morning – but in the night the lion ‘clambered on to the rear of the car, scrabbled open the sliding door, and ate my friend. That is in brief the story of our initiative over Norway.’

  Those baying their approval were ready to perceive a connection between Amery’s devoured friend and Amery’s fellow Conservative MP from Birmingham – his colleague of thirty years, the man who had got him into Parliament, whose father and brother had been Amery’s mentors, whose son was Amery’s godson – and they had a thrilling presentiment that Amery was about to savage him. Blythe wrote: ‘There are few sights more quelling – a cannibal banquet perhaps – than one Tory slaying a fellow Tory for the good of the country in the parliamentary arena at Westminster.’76 Geoffrey Howe’s assault on Margaret Thatcher is a recent example of a rare species. Yet even that assassination pales before Amery’s attack on Chamberlain.

  Amery had addressed the Chamber on numerous occasions since 1911. He knew how hard it was to gain what he called the ‘ear of the House’.77 ‘All that can be said is that there is no satisfaction equal to that feeling that you are carrying the House with you on some subject about which you care deeply. For no other audience has such power to influence the mainsprings of action.’

  On hardly any other previous occasion had Amery enjoyed the House’s ear, but he had it now. As he warmed to his speech, and his audience with him, ‘I found myself going on to an increasing crescendo of applause.’78

  Members remained still and strained as they witnessed for the second time that day a well-known tedious speaker metamorphose into an eloquent hatchet man. Louis Spears felt as if Amery were hurling stones as large as himself at the government glasshouse. ‘The crash of glass could not be heard, but the effect was that of a series of deafening explosions.’79

  In an increasingly tense atmosphere, Amery arrived at his conclusion. His implacable sentences, Spears noted, gave ‘the impression of volleys fired into sandbags’.80 Amery said: ‘We cannot go on as we are. There must be a change.’ This was war, not peace. The time had come for ‘a real National Government’. Amery still refused to be drawn into ‘a discussion on personalities’, but he felt that victory required a new leader with ‘vision, daring, swiftness and consistency of decision’.

  At this point, Amery hesitated. ‘I could only dare to go as far as I carried the House with me.’81 To go beyond would be a fatal error of judgement. ‘In no little doubt, I had left it open to the inspiration of the moment. Now I felt myself swept forward by the surge of feeling which my speech had worked up on the benches round me.’ So evident was this feeling ‘that I cast prudence to the winds and ended full out with my Cromwellian injunction’.82

  Oliver Cromwell had directed his injunction at Parliament, not at one individual. In Amery’s case, it is generally assumed that he was looking at Chamberlain when, at 8.43 p.m., after speaking for forty-one minutes, he delivered his peroration. But a curious aspect of Amery’s speech is that no one seems to know whether the Prime Minister was present on the front bench to hear it. This uncertainty is the more astonishing given the sheer number of interested witnesses, not only in the House and the Galleries, but in the country beyond. Margery Allingham wrote: ‘The debate in the House was followed by everyone.’83

  If the claims for Moore-Brabazon’s illicit photograph of Amery are true, and his image does capture Amery in the act of making his speech – and not, say, Duff Cooper – then Chamberlain can be seen glancing up from the bench with a taut expression. But what is odd, considering the near-universal focus on him, is that no one mentions the Prime Minister’s reaction, not even Amery. In this respect, Amery’s onslaught departs from Howe’s savaging of Thatcher, when a number of memoirists recorded their impressions. The only documentary evidence to survive is a letter that Chamberlain wrote to Amery one month before he died, addressing him as ‘My dear Leo’ and admitting that ‘I have been deeply hurt by some of the things you have done and said which cut just because they came from an old friend.’84

  Amery would have been intensely conscious of the blow that he was about to deliver. Up until recently, he had regarded himself as someone ‘so consistently helpful to the Government and so old a personal friend’ of the Prime Minister that it is impossible to believe that he would be so vague about his target.85 Yet when thinking about it afterwards, Amery could not swear whether the colleague he was about to fell, and ‘not without real distress’, was in the Chamber.86 Amery did recall ‘the pained faces of the front bench and even more vividly the look of amazed admiration on L[loyd] G[eorge]’s face’, but as he wrote to Clement Davies: ‘I cannot remember myself whether Neville was actually there.’87

  Cecil King in his diary next day reported that ‘both Chamberlain and Churchill looked all-in last night … Chamberlain fidgeting his right foot nervously’ – but King gave no indication of the timing.88 Martin Gilbert has Amery looking towards Chamberlain when he made his attack, but historians like Laurence Thompson believe that Chamberlain was still absent from the Chamber, and that the Prime Minister was informed of it by the Chief Whip. This is the view of Amery’s biographer. David Faber says: ‘Chamberlain would have had to come back in especially (as the rest of the crowd did, into an initially empty Chamber) from the bar/dining room/Palace (who knows), and it seems incredible that he would have consciously done so knowing he was almost certainly in for a hammering.’

  Harold Nicolson was one of a tiny handful who claimed to have witnessed Chamberlain receiving Amery’s final blow. In his article for the Montreal Standard, Nicolson has the Prime Minister sitting on the ‘glum and anxious’ front bench when Amery turned to address the government, encouraged to go on by the gusts of laughter that had greeted his quotation about old serving-men and tapsters.

  Amery continued: ‘I have quoted certain words of Oliver Cromwell. I will quote certain other words. I do it with great reluctance, because I am speaking of those who are old friends and associates of mine, but they are words which, I think, are applicable to the present situation. This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.”’

  Amery’s concluding note struck a gong, Nicolson wrote. ‘His last words were highly dramatic.89 In almost a whisper he said, pointing at Chamberlain: “In the name of God, go.”fn2

  ‘The Opposition broke out into violent cheering.’

  If Chamberlain was present to hear Amery whispering his terrible words for him to go, then it was at the King’s suggestion.

  Chamberlain had entered Buckingham Palace at 6.30 p.m. in the belief that he had more or less got away with the debate. This impression was shared by Alexander Hardinge, the King’s Private Secretary, who advised George VI: ‘There is little doubt that the Government will get through the debate on the Norwegian campaign without much trouble …’

  Chamberlain smiled to the King that he was not coming to offer his resignation.90 Moreover, he had not given up hope of reorganising his government along the lines of a National coalition, as Hardinge had advised ‘for some time past’.91 Chamberlain revealed how he had seen Attlee and Greenwood that morning ‘and had asked them about their coming into the Govt’.92 He admitted that their response was disappointing. ‘They had said nothing.’ At this, George VI offered to intercede with Attlee, who had dined at Buckingham Palace the night before, when the King ‘had found him easier to talk to’. Chamberlain was grateful for his offer, but suggested that a royal appeal for Labour to ‘pull their weight and join the National Government’ might be much more effective coming after the Labour Party conference, convening in Bournemouth on Friday. Attlee would be unable to give any defin
ite answer before then, said Chamberlain, as he was unsure of his party’s feelings. The King accepted this. He and his wife got on well with Chamberlain. The Queen’s future lady-in-waiting Frances Campbell-Preston says: ‘Neville Chamberlain had sort of protected them.93 They were very young, and to them Chamberlain was like a godfather’ – a feeling which Chamberlain reciprocated, confessing to Halifax on his deathbed that ‘he felt he had been in a sense their Godfather’.94

  The King then told Chamberlain that he did not like the way in which, with all his worries and responsibilities, the Prime Minister ‘was always subject to a stab in the back from both the House of Commons and the Press’, and he encouraged him to return to the debate, which drifted on for another three hours.95

  Whether Chamberlain’s government was savaged beyond rescue when the House adjourned that night at 11.30 p.m., or merely mauled, depends on which memoir or diary is consulted. The Transport Minister Euan Wallace registered the gamut of moods. ‘Harold Macmillan and his friends were jubilant over what they regarded as the certain overthrow of “the worst Government which this country has seen since the war and probably for 100 years.”96 The Chief Whip on the other hand thought we had had a reasonably good first day in an admittedly difficult situation.’

  Many were tempted when they raked over Amery’s speech, like the Liberal MP Dingle Foot, to suggest that it marked the pivotal point of the debate. ‘Members began seriously to consider the possibility that the Government might be overthrown.’97 Afterwards, Macmillan was convinced that Amery’s speech ‘effectively destroyed the Chamberlain Government’.98 This was Amery’s opinion. ‘It settled the fate of the Government, for apparently it seems to have impressed our Members who read it in Hansard quite as much as those who heard it.’99 General Smuts wrote to him from Pretoria: ‘Your great speech in the Commons at the final inquest made me literally sit up.’100 Six months later, Amery was already commemorating it as the speech ‘which tipped the scale against Neville’.101

  In fact, the issue was not decided when Amery sat down. What was evident to the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent J. E. Sewell was that ‘the Government had undergone the most damaging assault since before the war, but it was still far from clear that the inner defences had actually been penetrated.’102 Harold Nicolson remained to be convinced when he joined Baffy Dugdale for dinner in the Strangers’ Dining Room, telling her that he did ‘not want a change of Government now, but gradually’.103 Still, he admitted to feeling apprehensive. ‘There is no doubt that the Government is very rocky and anything may happen tomorrow.’104

  Amery went on to a combined late-night meeting of his Conservative Group with Clement Davies’s All Party Group. He and Davies agreed on MPs to speak in the debate next day. In a significant move, they decided not to press for a division, Amery having gathered from Davies, after the latter’s non-committal interview with Attlee, that ‘the Labour leaders themselves were doubtful of its advisability’.105

  Amery’s speech had raised the temperature to beyond fever point, but it is important to bear in mind that it was one of several combustible elements. There could be no explosion, no avalanche, without Labour’s participation. Maisky, gauging the atmosphere in the Smoking Room, reported that it ‘was still unclear whether Labour was going to request a vote of no confidence’.106 Harold Macmillan urged the Labour leaders to do so, but in vain. ‘Even the usually militant Hugh Dalton was doubtful.’107 A vote might benefit the government, worried Dalton, a Cambridge-educated barrister, with party discipline ensuring a massive majority. Or else, if Chamberlain used the pretext of a vote to call an election, ‘the Old Man would win hands down and we would be wiped out further than in 1931’.108

  A large, bald, clerical-looking figure, Dalton was on good terms with Macmillan – both had been to Eton. Dalton told him that the Labour Executive would meet in the morning to decide their course. But most lobby correspondents left the Commons that night convinced that the opposition had already decided against dividing the House. Collin Brooks wrote in his diary: ‘Labour is not to press for a vote of confidence,’ and the political correspondents of the Daily Herald and the Star, each of whom had close links with Dalton and Morrison, were of the same opinion.109

  In the darkness, MPs, journalists and diplomats picked their way past the sandbags and plane trees, past the lifeless buildings which Maisky likened to menacing cliffs, through the blacked-out streets, to catch the last trains home.

  The American war correspondent Webb Miller had covered the debate for the United Press. There was international speculation about Miller’s mysteriously fractured skull when his body was found next morning beside the tracks at Clapham Junction. A coroner eventually concluded that the forty-nine-year-old journalist – who had seen ‘more death and destruction than almost any man alive’ – had stepped out when his train stopped in a tunnel and not at a platform, but the German press detected the sinister silhouette of ‘Sir Joe Ball’, and reported that Miller had been murdered by the British Secret Service ‘on account of his report about Mr Chamberlain in the Commons’.110, 111

  16

  WEDNESDAY 8 MAY

  ‘If it’s piracy you want, with broadsides, boarding parties, walking the plank and blood on the deck, this is the place.’1

  DAVID LLOYD GEORGE MP

  ‘If Lady Alexandra Metcalfe cannot get a place in the box of Peers’ Married Daughters could another seat be kindly found for her?’

  Pencilled note from LORD HALIFAX

  ‘I accept this challenge, I welcome it indeed.2 At least I shall see who is with us and who is against us and I call on my friends to support us in the Lobby tonight.’

  NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 8 May 1940

  ‘I was the first person from this Force to reach London.’3 Captain Martin Lindsay strode into the House on Wednesday morning, the second day of the debate, and briefed Clement Attlee while still in his ‘battle-stained service dress’.4 The government might reasonably have expected the prospective Conservative candidate for Brigg to call in at the Chief Whip’s office, but instead Lindsay had contacted Paul Emrys-Evans, using his ‘private friendship’ with the dissident Conservative MP to effect an introduction to the Labour leader, ‘and I gave him a memorandum about the appalling improvisation and deficiencies in Norway because I was quite convinced that we should lose the war if we went on like that’.5, 6

  Peter Fleming’s last act in Namsos had been to type out a message and half-burn it, to suggest that the Namsen bridge had been wired up with dynamite. Fleming never knew if his ruse had worked, but there was no concealing the repercussion of Lindsay’s document on Attlee. In a short history of the House of Commons which Lindsay published after the war, he described how Guy Fawkes had planted twenty barrels of powder in the House of Lords’ cellars. His son Colonel Oliver Lindsay attributed to Lindsay’s three-page memorandum a punch scarcely less explosive. ‘His first-hand information helped to bring down the Chamberlain Administration.’7

  Up until that morning, David Margesson believed that he had an understanding with the Labour Chief Whip Sir Charles Edwards that if either party planned to vote, the other would be informed. Margesson had noted the critical undercurrent of Peter Fleming’s leader in Tuesday’s Times, but the coverage of the debate in Wednesday’s newspapers, though unfavourable, had set off no further alarm bells. Labour frontbenchers Morrison and Dalton had given their assurance that there would not be a division to Maurice Webb of the Daily Herald, the mouthpiece of the Labour Party. Webb had written in his column on 8 May that it would be ‘an unwise tactic’ for the Labour Party to put down a vote of censure. ‘The view taken by the most experienced critics of the Government is that the debate should be allowed to end without any direct challenge.’ But Webb had not spoken to Attlee.

  The Labour leader had listened with great care to the speeches of Keyes and Amery the night before. These revealed ‘that discontent had gone far deeper than we thought’.8 A deciding factor was the arrival in Attlee’s office
of one more disgruntled Conservative – a combatant, moreover, who had served as General Carton de Wiart’s staff officer. For melodramatic impact, Martin Lindsay in the soiled uniform of a ‘Maurice Force’ veteran eclipsed even the spectacle of Admiral Keyes with his medal ribbons. When Attlee read Lindsay’s confidential typescript, it persuaded him to reconsider Labour’s previous decision.

  A meeting of Labour’s Parliamentary Executive was held in an upstairs committee room at 10.30 a.m. To everyone’s surprise, Attlee recommended that a division be forced at the end of the debate that evening. Hugh Dalton was one of four Labour MPs not in favour, arguing that fifteen Conservatives at most would vote against the government.

  Attlee overruled Dalton. At a second meeting that morning, his recommendation to vote against the adjournment motion was put to the party and accepted.

  Over lunch, Attlee grilled Lindsay further about the contents of his memorandum. Attlee learned how the large British troop ships had been ‘quite useless’ in the small Norwegian ports; how ‘not a single unit arrived properly equipped’; how ‘the only aircraft we ever had were 15 Goliaths 1929 model which are slower than the German bombers’; how one squadron of Spitfires ‘would have changed the campaign’; how ‘the enemy was fully equipped in every respect’; how ‘absolute chaos reigned at the base and in the lines of communication’; how Chamberlain’s statement ‘as to the limited objectives was untrue’ – the operation order ‘stated specifically that the object of the force was the capture of Oslo’; how it was no exaggeration to say that ‘Maurice Force’ was ‘not an army but a rabble’; how ‘the German Army showed itself an efficient and formidable force’, and how its communiqués over the last few days had been ‘strictly accurate’.9

  According to Lindsay, Attlee gave his memorandum to Herbert Morrison ‘to help him open for the Opposition that afternoon’.10