That was precisely his problem. His independence had become a point of political vulnerability. Of all the major prewar public men, he alone had survived; as A. G. Gardiner put it, “Like the camomile, the more he is trodden on, the more he flourishes.” Yet after nearly three decades in public life he still floated free of any power base. Epping was a mere convenience. Unlike most senior members of the House, he had no national following, controlled no political hierarchy. Party discipline has always been taken more seriously in Britain than in the United States, and Churchill had been a disciplinary problem all his life. Beaverbrook noted that he “neither tied the Liberals to him nor conciliated the Tories.” Gardiner wrote in 1926: “If he changes parties with the facility of partners at a dance, he has always been true to the only Party he really believes in—that which is assembled under the hat of Mr. Winston Churchill.” Gwynne’s Morning Post, now more generous in tone, observed: “Mr Churchill is still his own Party, and the chief of the partisans. He still sees himself as the only digit in the sum of things, all other men as mere cyphers, whose function it is to follow after and multiply his personal value a million-fold.” Harold Nicolson saw him as “the most interesting man in London. He is more than interesting: he is a phenomenon, an enigma. How can a man so versatile and so brilliant avoid being considered volatile and unsound?” Arthur Ponsonby, who had switched allegiance from the Liberals to Labour, wrote Eddie Marsh that Winston was “far and away the most talented man in political life…. But that does not prevent me from feeling politically he is a great danger, largely because of his love of crises and faulty judgment. He once said to me years ago, ‘I like things to happen, and if they don’t happen I like to make them happen.’ ”226
The Conservative party’s rank and file didn’t want anything to happen, ever. They could identify with Neville Chamberlain, not with Churchill. Winston could have won their loyalty at the Treasury had he pursued traditional Conservative fiscal policies. Instead, he had alienated them by introducing welfare legislation. In Parliament he was not Scottish, Welsh, or a representative of the Midlands; he was known only as a Londoner who had been elected by none of London’s constituencies. That was a grave weakness in a man who hoped to become No. 10’s next occupant. He seemed completely unaware of the danger inherent in an eminence acquired solely by ministerial talents, parliamentary skills, and Baldwin’s fosterage. The Weekly Dispatch of July 10, 1927, reported that during the past week the chancellor had filled more pages in Hansard than any other six MPs put together; that he, not Baldwin, was leading the party, and doing it adroitly; and that he “also has a way of dealing with the Socialists which, while it never lacks anything in force or directness, yet appeals to their sense of fair play and good humour. ‘Winston is up!’ empties the smoking room quicker than any other announcement.” The piece ended: “Yet with all his talents and his force of character, the main body of conservatives would never follow him as Prime Minister.” Even Baldwin doubted that the Tories would choose Churchill as his successor. “Our people like him,” he wrote a friend in September 1927. “They love listening to him in the House, look on him as a star turn, and settle down in the stalls with anticipatory grins. But for leadership, they would turn him down every time.”227
The real complaint about Churchill’s years at the Exchequer is that for the only time in his life he ignored his instincts. Intuition had warned him to shun the goldmongers, but, uncharacteristically unsure of himself, he learned the rules of fiscal orthodoxy and, for the most part, followed them. His policies were not wholly unimaginative; he established a reparations pool, whereby the Treasury would be enriched by German goods sold in Britain, and—over the strong objections of Neville Chamberlain—he introduced the rating apportionment bill of 1928 (actually young Harold Macmillan’s idea), under which industry and agriculture were provided with local tax relief, the gap in income being plugged by cuts in defense and a gasoline tax which brought in £15,000,000 a year. Because England’s economy had been crippled by the general strike, he had little room for maneuver in the two budgets following it. The deficits were met by a temporary tax on rubber tires and increased levies on wines, matches, and tobacco; by taking £12,000,000 from the Road Fund; by reducing the brewers’ credit period by a month; and by rescheduling property taxes. But it was all legerdemain—“jugglery and deceit,” as Snowden called it. Winston himself acknowledged that he had drawn on his “adventitious resources.” Grigg pointed out that “in spite of all the Keynesian gibes, his main object was always the reduction of unemployment.” Tinkering wouldn’t do the job, however, and Churchill shied away from the deficits and bold governmental intervention Roosevelt would introduce within a few years in the depressed United States. Amery summed up Winston’s financial program in a letter to Baldwin: “A few hand-to-mouth dodges for picking up odd windfalls, a hope that better trade and a few millions saved by cheese-paring here and there may ride matters over the next year: that is the beginning and end of it.”228
It was certainly the end of it. Churchill’s last budget, presented on April 15, 1929, after the Tories had lost nine safe seats in by-elections over the past two months, offered little to calm their growing anxieties. His delivery, as always, was masterly. Taxpayers were to be allowed deductions for each child (“Another example of our general policy of helping the producer”). Labour’s demand for deficit spending was “the policy of buying a biscuit early in the morning and walking about all day looking for a dog to give it to.” The Sunday Times called his performance “the most brilliantly entertaining of modern Budget speeches,” and Harold Macmillan would write of the Churchillian style in his Winds of Change that none of the new generation of MPs “had ever heard anything of the kind… such mastery of language, such careful deployment of the arguments, such dexterous covering of any weak point.” But as political nourishment it was poor fare. He abolished taxes on tea, gambling, and railway passage; reduced taxes on motorcycles and bicycles; raised them on telephone service; and introduced new duties on tobacco, beer, and liquor. It was a swan song in falsetto. Grigg thought it not inappropriate. As chancellor, he said, Winston had “tended to overestimate revenue and underestimate expenditure,” had “convinced himself that there was a good deal to be said at that time for respectability… in economic affairs,” was “apt to spoil a brilliant project by not assuring himself in advance of sufficient resources to carry it through to the end,” and was “therefore reduced to all sorts of shifts and expedients in order to avoid having to go back on the policies on which he had perhaps too confidently embarked.”229 Yet it’s fair to add that during Churchill’s Exchequer tenure state benefits had been extended to 344,800 children, 236,800 widows, 450,000 Britons over sixty-five years old, and 227,000 over seventy. He may have been no better at handling Britain’s finances than his family’s, but here, as at home, he had established the right priorities.
In retrospect there is an air of foreboding about the English upper classes’ late 1920s, a feeling that everyone of consequence is wearing tennis whites, gabbling manically, and emptying magnums of Dom Perignon in a Rolls-Royce racing headlong toward the edge of a towering precipice. It is illusion, of course, a vision of hindsight. At the time these years seemed fruitful and teeming with hope. One pictures a typical country weekend, with the Duke of York striding off the eighteenth green, Sir Samuel Hoare immaculate and not even perspiring after winning three straight sets six–love, Rex Whistler absorbed in his painting, Balfour dozing in a leather armchair, Osbert Sitwell laughing his infectious laugh as the Prof describes his recent trip to India, and Churchill and Bernard Shaw arguing over teacups about Shaw’s newly published Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. In other homes Sir Jacob Epstein is sculpturing his Madonna and Child; Virginia Woolf is writing To the Lighthouse; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Trevelyan, his History of England; Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall; and A. A. Milne, to the delight of a much larger if less discriminating audience, Winnie-the-Pooh. In
Washington, Andrew W. Mellon, “the best Secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton,” is spreading his gospel, an echo of Sackville-West, that ostentatious consumption by the rich is a source of great pleasure for the poor. At No. 11 Downing Street a buoyant chancellor of the Exchequer is supplementing his ministerial salary by writing “The United States of Europe” for the Saturday Evening Post, and, for the Daily Telegraph, a series of articles exposing welfare cheats called “The Abuse of the ‘Dole.’ ” T. S. Eliot has become a British citizen. England is preparing to launch an experimental public television service. Bernard Shaw has concluded that in the absence of a world government, the British Empire is best qualified to rule the world. That world is at peace; Britain still dominates world politics. A disarmament conference, with the United States participating, is convening in Geneva. Germany has been admitted to the League of Nations. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, sponsored by the U.S. secretary of state, has outlawed war and provided for a pacific settlement of disputes. Italy has just signed a twenty-year friendship treaty with Ethiopia.
Among those gulled by the Italian dictator, now in his fifth year of power, was Winston Churchill. Once the coal strike had ended he had plunged into his third Crisis volume and accepted an invitation from Roger Keyes, now an admiral, to join a week-long cruise on the Mediterranean. “On leaving you,” he wrote the admiral, “I am going to stay in Rome for a few days to see Mussolini (while he lasts), and I am taking with me my brother Jack, whom you know, and my boy Randolph.” After Christmas at Chartwell they departed aboard the Esperia. On January 4, 1927, he wrote Clementine from Genoa that he was greatly taken by the Fascist society: “This country gives the impression of discipline, order, smiling faces. A happy strict school—no talking among the pupils. Great changes have taken place since you & I disembarked [here] nearly 6 years ago.” The local Fascists and the employees at his hotel were particularly attentive: “They have been saluting in their impressive manner all over the place, &… gave us a most cordial welcome.”230
Correcting proofs until 2:30 A.M. in his hotel room, he sent them off to his publisher “under threats of vengeance from Mussolini if anything goes wrong.” In Rome he saw the Duce twice and then held what can only be described as an unfortunate press conference. It was perfectly clear, he said, that his host “thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understands it, of the Italian people.” Indeed: “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” Englishmen had “not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form,” but when the time came “we shall succeed in grappling with Communism and choking the life out of it—of that I am absolutely sure.” In his opinion the Duce had “provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Here after, no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against cancerous growths, and every responsible labour leader in the country ought to feel his feet more firmly planted in resisting levelling and reckless doctrines.” As a consequence, “Externally, your movement has rendered a service to the whole world.”231
Work: In London
The text of these remarks was published in The Times of January 21, 1927. Liberals and Labourites were choleric. The New Leader stormed: “We have always suspected that Mr Winston Churchill was a Fascist at heart. Now he has openly avowed it.” C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian was so incensed that he all but lay down and drummed his heels on the floor. Clementine wrote Winston: “Scott is I see vexed over your partiality to ‘Pussolini.’ ” Her husband was unruffled. He took the classic view of British foreign policy: England should support any continental regime which was hostile to England’s greatest enemy—in this case, at that time, Soviet Russia. Later, when the Duce became a piratical adventurer, Churchill would scorn him as “Mussolini the swine,” and “Mussolini the jackal.”232
Vesuvius obligingly erupted when Winston, Jack, and young Randolph visited Naples. Churchill played his last polo game on Malta (“It is dreadful giving it up for ever,” he wrote), reported to Clementine on their son (“The Rabbit is a very good travelling companion,” he disclosed, adding with relish: “We have played a great deal of chess in which I give him either a Queen or two castles, or even castle, bishop and knight—and still wallop him”), and, with Randolph, was received by Pope Pius XI. The audience was preceded by much wrangling over protocol. As an important minister serving under a Protestant monarch, Winston absolutely refused to kneel. They compromised on three bows as he entered the pontiff’s reception hall. Randolph later wrote in his memoirs: “The early part of the conversation was a little sticky. Then my father and the Pope got on to the subject of the Bolsheviks and had a jolly half hour saying what they thought of them.” After stops at Athens, Paris, Dieppe, and Consuelo’s villa at Eze, Churchill and his party arrived at Newhaven aboard the night ferry on January 29. A box of Treasury papers from Grigg awaited him in his car; he studied them on the way to Chartwell.233
Play: At Chartwell
Between the Exchequer and his publishers’ deadlines, nearly all his holidays were working holidays. He meant to take most of the summer of 1927 off, painting at Chartwell, entertaining friends there, and sweating over walls, dams, and ponds, but then he decided to start writing an account of his youth. It is his most delightful book. Subsequently serialized in the News Chronicle and published by Thornton Butterworth as My Early Life, it sold 13,753 copies in Britain, was issued by Scribner’s in the United States under the title A Roving Commission, appeared, condensed, in the Reader’s Digest, and was translated into thirteen languages and Braille. Not all his conceptions reached full term. He planned a book on socialism with the working title The Creed of Failure but abandoned it after outlining the first five chapters. Then T. E. Lawrence, now 338171 Aircraftman Shaw, suggested Churchill’s major biographical work, writing him from his RAF base: “If the Gods give you a rest, some day, won’t you write a life of the great Duke of Marlborough? About our only international general… and so few people seem to see it.”234
Winston’s immense output—he was still writing regularly for magazines and newspapers—was possible because of his extraordinary methods of work. Like Dr. Johnson producing his dictionary, he assembled a committee of researchers and secretaries and guided them as they tackled one topic after another. Asked about the thread of narrative, he said, “Oh, I have all that in my head.” And he continued to work all hours. However late his Chartwell guests had retired, he would pace his study, dictating; one visitor recalls wakening to hear “the sounds of footfalls on the boards and his familiar voice clearly audible.” In one month, he told Clementine, he had banked the equivalent of $72,414: a £6,000 advance for the Marlborough, £5,200 in stock dividends, £1,700 in World Crisis royalties, and nearly £2,000 from magazines—“a small fortune,” he wrote, of which he was “trying to keep 2,000 fluid for investment & speculation with Vickers & McGowan. This ‘mass of manoeuvre’ is of the utmost importance & must not be frittered away.” It seemed sound. But most of his investments were in the New York stock market. And the year was 1929.235
A few months earlier, during a finance bill debate, he had been stricken by influenza, and his slow recovery suggested a weakened constitution. Those around him were worried; they were afraid he was driving himself toward a nervous collapse. The only way to divert him from public or private work was to put him on a ship or a hunt, in front of an easel, or in the midst of a crowd. Beaverbrook persuaded him to spend five days sailing to Amsterdam and back on his private yacht; the Duke of Westminster induced him to fish and hunt stags in Scotland; by royal command he hunted grouse with George V at Balmoral and painted the Highland scene from his window there. (The painting was subsequently auctioned for £120.) He wrote a friend: “I had a particularly pleasant luncheon with the King when we went out deer-driving, and a very good talk about all sorts of things. I am very glad that he did not disapprove of my using the Mi
nisterial room as a studio, and I took particular care to leave no spots on the Victorian tartans.”236 Especially sweet was a return trip to Belfast, where, on his last visit, he and Clementine had narrowly escaped a lynch mob. This time Queen’s University awarded him an honorary degree, and cheering students, after presenting him with a shillelagh and a “paddy hat,” rode him around on their shoulders.
The older Churchill children were in boarding school now, with only Mary at home, but Chartwell was never lonely. As a host he was as affable as ever. Convoys of friends arrived, some as early as Thursday, for long weekends. He greeted them eagerly and was genuinely sorry to see them leave. One guest wrote in his diary: “He was in a marvellous mood and just would not let us go. I played the piano and we talked on cricket, on music and politics.” The toys of war still fascinated him. James Lees-Milne, a friend of young Randolph’s, told Martin Gilbert of one evening when “we remained at that round table till after midnight. The table cloth had long ago been removed. Mr. Churchill spent a blissful two hours demonstrating with decanters and wine glasses how the Battle of Jutland was fought…. He got all worked up like a schoolboy, making barking noises in imitation of gunfire and blowing cigar smoke across the battle scene in imitation of gun smoke.”237
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