Duff Cooper was a step ahead in the other line, poker-faced.
On either side of the narrow opening stood the Tellers. Spears recognised the commanding figure of David Margesson, telling for the government. ‘It was very painful.’22 Spears had fought in the last war in the same regiment as Margesson, ‘to whom I was indebted for much kindness’.
Duff Cooper stepped past, and the Chief Whip called out the new total ‘151’ with an expression of ‘implacable resentment’.
Spears was next. He bowed his head, squeezed through.
‘152,’ continued Margesson in a level voice.
Spears returned to the Chamber. ‘153, 154 …’ Margesson’s voice counted on, until Spears lost it in the general hubbub of the House as he regained his seat.
Disgusted, Chips Channon watched Cooper and Spears file back in, followed by Hubert Duggan. ‘My heart snapped against him for ever.’23
Some MPs emerging from the No Lobby shouted their names up to reporters to make sure that their identities would be printed. Government supporters began to hurl insults. Channon joined in. ‘Quislings!’ he shouted. ‘Rats!’
‘Yes-men!’ the dissidents yelled back.
No one present ever forgot the scene in the House before the figures were announced. The Chamber, Maisky wrote, ‘buzzed like a disturbed bee-hive’.24 The packed benches were so tense that they seemed to Spears ‘to be vibrating like taut wire.25 Members were standing in every corner. Every seat in the Peers’ and public galleries was occupied.’
The tension reached its peak when the Tellers appeared and fanned out in a line at the Bar of the House. The Chief Whip moved to the right, indicating that the government was not beaten. ‘We are all right,’ Channon heard one relieved voice say.26 But if the government had won, by what margin?
The four Tellers stepped stiffly forwards towards the Table and bowed low to the Speaker. A few feet away, Churchill’s fists rested on his parted knees while he waited for the result.
In dead silence, Margesson read out the figures. ‘The Ayes were 281; the Noes, 200.’
Baba Metcalfe sat with her mouth agape. ‘I don’t think anyone expected such a shock.’27
Nicolson wrote: ‘The Government’s majority dropped from the 213, which it expected, to only 81.28 There was a gasp of astonishment from every bench.’ Another few seconds passed in silence as the numbers sank in. Nicolson watched Margesson hand the division slip to the Clerk. ‘Then from the Opposition rose a great howl.’
The cry came from the throat of Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood – the first, bald register of understanding that what appeared on Margesson’s buff-coloured slip to be a voting victory was in every other respect a fatal moral defeat. ‘It took five seconds before I recognised the significance of the figures and shouted “Resign!” Then pandemonium broke loose.’29
Maisky wrote: ‘Triumphant roars erupted like a storm from the Opposition benches.’30 Labour and Conservatives below the gangway leapt to their feet, prancing, waving order papers, yelling out the concluding words of Amery’s speech: ‘In the name of God, go!’
Baba Metcalfe was appalled. ‘The cries of “Go, go,” “Resign,” “Get out” were dreadful and shaming.’31
‘Then followed a scene I shall never forget,’ wrote Violet Bonham Carter.32 ‘Prim respectable Conservatives like Harold Macmillan – with his high white collar & tightly fixed pince-nez yelling “Go! Go! Go!” like inspired baboons.’
Macmillan sat beside Wedgwood below the gangway. ‘We ought to sing something,’ said Macmillan, who had once burnt an effigy of Chamberlain on a bonfire at his country house, Birch Grove.33 Wedgwood started singing ‘Rule Britannia’. Macmillan joined in, but ‘as neither of us could sing it was not a very successful effort’.34 Reith was repelled by this ‘scene of disgusting jubilation’ – and Euan Wallace found himself ‘quite unable to go out into the Lobby afterward as I felt certain that I should have struck Harold Macmillan’.35, 36
All this while, Chamberlain sat in his place, wrote Maisky, ‘white as chalk’ and looking stunned at the continuing shouts of ‘Go! Go! Go!’ Not in an unlike manner had Gielgud made his entrance at the Old Vic – ‘Howl, howl, howl’ – with Cordelia in his arms.37 Boothby recalled how ‘for a moment he blanched, but quickly recovered himself, and smiled at some of his supporters’.38 John Simon leant over and patted his back. Then Chamberlain stood abruptly up and picked his way, alone, without visible emotion, over the stretched-out legs of the frontbenchers, past the Speaker’s Chair.
Margesson leapt to his feet and signalled with his order paper for Conservative MPs to rise. John Reith complied. ‘We stood up as he left and gave him a cheer.’39
Harold Nicolson watched the Prime Minister’s solitary figure disappear down the blacked-out corridor. He described the final scene to his readers in Montreal. ‘Neville Chamberlain with his jaw set fiercely walked slowly from the Chamber amid the applause of his immediate supporters.40 We knew he was beaten, but those of us who had fought him since Munich did not join in this jubilation. We were glad to see that the lone grey wolf walked out with his jaw set and his head erect.’
Chamberlain wrote to his sister that the Norway Debate ‘was a very painful affair to many besides myself and in particular for its exhibition of personal and party passion’.41 He had asked for friendship from those who were his friends, and he had not got it. Aside from a brief appearance the following day, he would never go back into the Chamber as Prime Minister.
PART FIVE
THE AFTERMATH
18
A TERRIFIC BUZZ
‘It is not a principle of the Conservative Party to stab its leaders in the back, but I must confess that it often appears to be a practice.’1
ARTHUR BALFOUR, 1922
The events of the next forty-eight hours have been recounted and recounted, yet historians have not been able to establish a reliable narrative any more definitively than the participants. This is not surprising: allegiances changed minute by minute as Chamberlain mulled over whether to resign or stay put, and others manoeuvred to take his place. In this atmosphere of profound chaos, a swarm of MPs suddenly discovered that they were Men of Destiny.
David Faber can testify how all previous loyalties dissolve at such a moment. ‘At the end of the day, you’re there for one purpose – to achieve power, and that would have been more pronounced then.’ Joseph Kennedy looked down from the Diplomatic Gallery with a mighty sense that ‘the maelstrom of war’ was about to cast up new parliamentary leaders – the division result acting as a starting gun, in the words of the Daily Worker’s lobby correspondent, for ‘every shallow cynical egotist’ to press his claims and extol his own virtues.2, 3 ‘Old admirals remove the moth balls from their uniforms and parade the House in an effort to explain they can kill quicker and better than the new jacks in office. Churchill grabs his chance to swim now that Chamberlain sinks, Hore-Belisha and Duff Cooper again dream of office and power.’ The division had transformed Barry’s elegant Gothic halls into ‘the green-eyed jungle’, as Hugh Dalton famously called Westminster, a place where a man’s character and ambitions were laid out naked to his enemies.4
Immediately after the House adjourned at 11.13 p.m. a ‘terrific buzz’ could be heard in the Lobby as Members speculated on the next step and balanced their chances.5 An over-excited Dalton announced that ‘the Old Man’ must go to Buckingham Palace and resign. Vitriolic slanging matches took place between Conservatives. Kenneth Pickthorn snarled at Richard Law, son of the former Prime Minister Bonar Law: ‘Well, I expect you’ll get your reward!’ Maurice Hely-Hutchinson compared Somerset de Chair and his friends to German parachutists at Stavanger, dropped behind the lines in Conservative uniforms.6 In the same choleric language, David Margesson carpeted John Profumo the following day. ‘And I tell you this, you utterly contemptible little shit.7 On every morning that you wake up for the rest of your life you will be ashamed of what you did last night.’ Almost at once, Quintin Hogg began to feel
‘like a traitor’.8 In the slow train next morning back to his regiment in Lincoln, Hogg sat opposite the local MP who seized the opportunity to tell him ‘at intervals of five minutes that I had made a decision which I would repent for the rest of my life.’
The sense of foreboding on the government front bench was articulated by the Air Minister, Samuel Hoare. Up until even a fortnight before, Hoare had let it be known that he ‘was still planning to succeed Neville when the time came’.9 But speaking in the Norway Debate right after Chamberlain’s damaging riposte to Morrison, ‘Slippery Sam’ gave an extraordinarily lame performance, and according to a member of his own department, ‘muddled all his facts in his speech’ – which was ‘so bad’, wrote Violet Bonham Carter, ‘that he emptied the House’.10, 11 When Hoare admitted that a squadron of Gladiators had been bombed on a frozen lake, one Conservative MP whispered, ‘I suppose he was skating somewhere else.’12 Hoare told his wife Maud as they drove home, with a presentiment that proved correct: ‘That is not only the last speech that I shall make as a Minister, but it is the last speech that I shall make in the House of Commons.’13
The general conviction was that the division result meant a reconstruction at once, shedding unpopular Ministers like Hoare, Simon and Wood, and bringing in opposition leaders, possibly under a new Prime Minister who would be capable of inspiring more faith among all parties. A jubilant Lloyd George told the Soviet Ambassador in the Commons Strangers’ Dining Room: ‘Chamberlain is done for … he might hold on for a few weeks … a duck with a broken leg still flutters its wings, but its fate has been decided.14 The same with Neville.’ The Chief Whip David Margesson braced himself for the transition of power. Colville wrote: ‘I remember David said to me that very night that Chamberlain would have to resign.’15
The Prime Minister had reached the same conclusion, at least in the first instance, according to Hoare. ‘I was not surprised when Chamberlain told me immediately after the Debate that he would resign.’16
Chamberlain wrote to his sister: ‘It did not take me long to make up my mind what to do.’17 On leaving the Chamber, he walked down the darkened corridor to the Prime Minister’s room on the left, which Halifax described as ‘always hideously uncomfortable, as about six more people want to sit round the table than there is room for’.18 Chamberlain asked Churchill to join him, and said that ‘he felt he could not go on’.19 He saw the time had come for a National government in the broadest sense, ‘or we could not get through’.
In a strange piece of theatre, rather than concurring at once, Churchill urged Chamberlain to stay put. As Amery saw the scene, in a letter that he wrote to Halifax many years after: ‘Winston cheers up Neville by telling him not to take things too seriously and that there is no reason why he should not carry on as before (possibly with his tongue in his cheek).’20 Chamberlain was under no obligation constitutionally to resign. A majority of eighty-one was more than ample in normal peacetime circumstances – incredibly, several government insiders had reconsidered their previous minimum figure of one hundred, and now, observed Colville, ‘were fairly satisfied’ by the vote.21 Not only that, but, as David Dilks has demonstrated, Churchill and Chamberlain had formed a partnership of growing strength. Plus, there was Churchill’s special code of loyalty which held that if a Prime Minister tripped, ‘he must be sustained.22 If he makes mistakes, they must be covered.’
Labour’s riotous behaviour in the House had rekindled long-standing grudges, and aroused Churchill’s combative instincts. Just as he had hours before instructed Colonel Gubbins, so he now advised Chamberlain to fight on, as though they were a small force of embattled commandos in the high mountains of Norway. ‘This has been a damaging debate,’ Churchill recalled himself advising Chamberlain, ‘but you have a good majority.23 Do not take the matter grievously to heart. Strengthen your Government from every quarter, and let us go on until our majority deserts us.’
‘Every quarter’ was a Churchillian exaggeration. Chamberlain told John Simon in a private discussion next day that ‘Winston had apparently originally taken the view that the Labour people had nothing to contribute, and that the way to broaden the government was to bring in a selection of last night’s rebels instead, together of course with Archie Sinclair with whom Winston has long been in close relations.’24
Looking back on their conversation from a distance of eight years, Churchill wrote that Chamberlain remained both unconvinced and uncomforted by his encouragement, ‘and I left him about midnight with the feeling that he would persist in his resolve to sacrifice himself if there was no other way’.25
There was a further good reason why Churchill might have wanted to shore up Chamberlain. If the Prime Minister did resign, it was unlikely that Churchill would be chosen as his replacement.
Only five hours earlier, Conservative MP George Lambert had pressed the House to answer a vital question: in the event of a change of government, as many seemed to be proposing, ‘Who is to be Prime Minister? … After all, this is the House of Commons, democratically elected.’ Had Lambert’s question been put to a vote that evening, the result would not have been the First Lord by a long chalk.
It is difficult to conceive that two days before he became Prime Minister, Churchill was not viewed as the front runner in what revealed itself to be a continuously shifting pack of potential premiers, almost none of whom enjoyed the necessary cross-party support. Ida Chamberlain wrote to her brother: ‘No one has yet been able to produce the names of wonderful new men who would command at once the confidence of the nation.’26 Euan Wallace despaired that those who had voted simply to remove Chamberlain from office ‘do not appear to agree on, or even to have thought of, an efficient substitute’.27 Cadogan feared that the debate had weakened the government. ‘But what are we going to put in its place? Winston useless.28 Then? Attlee? Sinclair? Sam Hoare!’ Anthony Eden’s Private Secretary had a hunch that Eden himself ‘might step in’.29 The Home Secretary Sir John Anderson, an administrator of the highest ability, was another possibility – promoted by Chamberlain none other, who told Joseph Kennedy: ‘Anderson might be P.M.’ Again and again in these tight inner circles Churchill’s name bobbed up, was contemplated briefly – and dismissed.30
In one of his fireside chats with Ivan Maisky, Churchill admitted to the Soviet Ambassador that ‘the Conservative party won’t let anyone tell it who should be its leader’.31 In November, Beaverbrook had confided to Maisky that ‘Churchill, apparently, has no chance at all’.32 Popular though he was outside Westminster, Churchill enjoyed a divisive and rickety reputation within the Commons, and not merely among opposition Labour MPs – ‘who had publicly pledged themselves’, according to the Communist MP William Gallacher, ‘never to associate with such a villainous character as Churchill!’ Emanuel Shinwell said that most Labour MPs ‘had never forgotten his jibes that “Labour was unfit to govern”’.33, 34 Labour leaders like Arthur Greenwood still saw in Churchill ‘the grim figure’ of ‘the man who tried to beat us in the Great Strike’, and Stafford Cripps told Lloyd George on the morning after the division that ‘many of them were frightened of Winston’.35, 36 The ruling Conservative Party regarded him with equal fear, distaste and mistrust. Shinwell wrote: ‘Along the stone corridor he used to walk, with many Tories ostentatiously turning their backs.’37 A previous Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, acknowledged that ‘our people like [Churchill].38 They love listening to him in the House, look on him as a star turn … But for leadership they would turn him down every time.’ Only ten months earlier, Samuel Hoare estimated that if there was a ballot of Conservative backbenchers, four out of five would vote against a Churchill premiership. This hostility was not limited to the back benches. The War Cabinet was stacked against Churchill – more grittily so following his erratic conduct in the Norway Campaign. The Speaker, Captain FitzRoy, was another obstacle, revealing in a private conversation soon after the division that he ‘did not have much confidence in Winston’s character and was confident he
was unreliable’.39 To cap it all, Churchill did not have the backing of the King, whose prerogative it was to appoint any new Prime Minister. On the first day of the Norway Debate, the King’s Private Secretary wrote in a memorandum to George VI that for Churchill to be Prime Minister of a coalition was ‘very undesirable’.40 How undesirable may be guessed from a letter that Queen Mary wrote to John Colville’s mother, her lady-in-waiting, to say that Colville should refuse to serve under Churchill.
In the aftermath of the division on 8 May, in the eyes of a majority whose backing he required were he to succeed Chamberlain, Churchill was not destiny’s child. If anything, the Norway Campaign had served to reinforce huge reservations about his loyalty, military competence and judgement. Joseph Kennedy wrote to his wife: ‘Churchill has energy and brains but no judgment.’41 Halifax had recently discussed Churchill’s chances over lunch with Anthony Eden – who in April polled 28 per cent as the public’s choice of next Prime Minister, against Churchill’s 25 per cent. Halifax confided that ‘however much people admire Winston’s qualities, that admiration is constantly balanced by fear of him if he was loose!’42 Eden, too, doubted ‘whether Churchill could ever be P.M. so bad is his judgement’.43 Weeks earlier, Peter Fleming’s brother Ian had taken a sounding among MPs. ‘In House of Commons Conservatives say: Winston is all right where he is, but could never stand strain of P.M.’s job, health wouldn’t be good enough.’44 Even a natural ally like Harold Nicolson failed to see Churchill as the next leader, the reason being that ‘Churchill is undermined by the Conservative caucus’ – i.e. those MPs who could neither forgive him for his pre-war criticisms of Chamberlain, nor for having proved to be ‘so abundantly right’ about Hitler.45, 46 Duff Cooper was a strong Churchill supporter, yet even he believed that Churchill’s insuperable problem was that he had ‘so many and such violent enemies’.47
Six Minutes in May Page 36
