by Simon Schama
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 the
m 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.
That, at least, was the idea inaugurated with such idealistic energy in 1945. Earlier generations had been taught that the British Empire would last for ever. My own generation, born with the welfare state, was taught that this new empire of British social benevolence would also last for ever. This conviction became even stronger when successive Conservative governments in the 1950s and 1960s, including Churchill’s own from 1951 to 1955, and from 1957 to 1963 that of his old disciple Harold Macmillan (he who had spoken of British miners as ‘the salt of the earth’ and who in 1938 had published a little book, The Middle Way (1938), advocating, among other things, the abolition of the Stock Exchange), decided against reversing most of the essential institutions of this new Britain: the National Health Service created by Bevan in 1948; the public ownership of railways, steelworks and mines; and especially the commitment to building publicly owned, rented council housing. Seen from the perspective of 1970, it seemed a good bet that this reinvented Britain would see out the 20th century.
But the British welfare state turned out to be much more ephemeral – lasting perhaps two generations – than its founders and tutors, like Professor Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, could possibly have imagined, and the answer to why that was the case is not just Margaret Thatcher. From the very beginning, the Labour government was not insulated from the perennial headaches and imperatives of 20th-century British government – monetary viability, industrial over-capacity and, especially, imperial or post-imperial global defence. The odd thing was that it showed no signs of wanting to be liberated from those constraints. What choice, after all, did it have? The only option, other than shouldering these familiar burdens with a sigh and getting on with the new Jerusalem as best they could, was to plunge into a much more far-reaching programme of collectivization, Keynesian deficit financing, disarmament and global contraction, as indeed those like Laski heartily recommended. But that was never actually on the cards, for the reason that the members of this Labour government, like those of the Liberal administration of 1906, were not cold-blooded social revolutionaries; nor in the sense of a Lenin-like Brest–Litovsk (the treaty that took newly Bolshevik Russia out of the First World War), committed to a wiping of the slate. The slate was Britain; its memories, traditions, institutions, not least the monarchy. Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison were emotionally and intellectually committed to preserving it, not effacing it. They were loyal supporters of what Orwell called The Lion and the Unicorn (1941).
Ernest Bevin, the Somerset farm labourer’s boy risen to be foreign secretary, turned out to be almost as much of an imperialist as Churchill and at least as much devoted to the chimera of British military independence from the United States. The decision to keep an independent nuclear deterrent, and to sustain the projection of British power in Asia (through Hong Kong) and even more significantly in the Middle East, came at a huge price: $3.5 billion, to be exact – the amount of a US loan. Britain was estimated to have lost in the region of £7000 million ($10.5 billion in American numbers) or a quarter of the economy as a result of fighting the war. Now that defence costs had risen to fully 10 per cent of gross domestic product – incomparably higher than for any other European state – that American help was desperately needed. So Bevin’s goal of keeping independent of the United States had the effect of actually deepening long-term dependence. But the capital infusion, it was thought by Cripps and others, would jump-start the economy as well as pay for investment in new infrastructure, after which surging economic growth would take care of the debt burden. The most idealistic assumption of all was that public ownership of key industries, the replacement of the private profit incentive by cooperative enterprise, would somehow lead to greater productivity. There were periods in 1948 and again in 1950 when, in export-led mini-surges, it looked as though those projections were not as unrealistic a diagnosis of human behaviour as they were, alas, to prove in the long term. Britain was benefiting from the same kind of immediate post-war demand that it had experienced after 1918; the eventual reckoning with the realities of shrinking exports was merely postponed rather than structurally reversed.
The American loan and backing for the stability of the pound – an indispensable condition for the preservation of London’s continued dominance as a world centre of finance – came with strings of steel attached. Its condition was that Britain should continue to play a leading (that is, cripplingly expensive) part in the Atlantic Alliance but also bear its share of costs and responsibilities for resisting the communist threat, or nationalist threats that looked like communist threats, in the regions of its old imperial dominance. Hence the obligation to take part in the Korean War of 1950–3 and to combat communist insurgents in Malaya in the 1950s; and, above all, to remain active in the Middle East where Britain and the USA had become corporate partners in the exploitation of oil. That fateful switch that Churchill had made from coal to oil as the fuel of choice for the Royal Navy in 1914 was now bearing bitter fruit.
In any case, though, Bevin and Anthony Eden after him turned out to be eager partners for US secretaries of state Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles in fighting the Cold War and resisting any attempt at contraction in the Middle East. It was almost uncanny how exactly the map of Middle Eastern oil reserves resembled the old Disraeli-ite map of strategic links between the Mediterranean and India; and how ardent Bevin was to keep that map red or at least pinkish. Bases were built or consolidated along the Persian Gulf and round to the southwestern tip of the Arabian peninsula, from Iraq to Aden. Until 1948 Palestine was still under the British mandate set up after the First World War and, despite everything that had happened to the Jews of Europe and the terrible distress of the survivors in refugee camps, Bevin did his level best to reverse Churchill’s commitment to a Jewish homeland as a way of strengthening the strategic ties with the oil states of the Arab world. He even proposed that former Italian colonies in Libya and Somalia be put under British trusteeship as a way of extending this zone of influence. And it was Attlee’s government that created the ‘Persia Committee’ to consider the implications of the Iranian prime minister Muhammad Mossadeq’s nationalization of the country’s largely British-owned oil industry. The Americans were encouraged to think of some sort of defensive response – the kind that led, two years later in 1953, to a CIA-engineered overthrow and the reinstatement of the Pahlavi ‘imperial’ monarchy.
So even though the Labour government did live up to its obligation to see the Union Jack come down on the flagstaff of the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, and to hand over, as if in a Macaulayite dream of redemption, Lutyens’s and Sir Herbert Baker’s great ensemble of parliament and secretariat buildings to Jawaharlal Nehru and his government in August 1947, welfare-state Britain was deeply committed to replacing an old empire with a new one. The far-flung stations of Bevin’s empire, to be sure, were called things like the Overseas Food Corporation and the Colonial Development Corporation, but it was designed to finance the British economy in ways that did not look all that different
from its 19th-century predecessors. The flow of crucial raw materials, now including oils of all sorts – palm from West Africa, ground nut from East Africa, petroleum from the Gulf and Iran – would be guaranteed in return for the blessings of receiving Morris Minors; Sanderson’s wallpaper; Liberty soft furnishings; sterling payment accounts; an aircraft fleet, humming with Rolls-Royce engines, on which the countries could paint their ‘flagship’ colours; for the sheikh a Bentley, also humming with a Rolls-Royce engine; a visit from Yehudi Menuhin, courtesy of the British Council; and good seats at the coronation in 1953. Charles Trevelyan would have had no difficulty recognizing this at all.
As the bill for maintaining pseudo-great power status and welfare-state benevolence mounted, so did doubts and misgivings about the premises on which it had been thought the armed new Jerusalem could be funded. Stafford Cripps, who had once been the most ardent of the collectivizers, became, after 1949, an equally determined advocate of the mixed economy. A hard pound, that other fixture of the inter-war period, likewise became orthodoxy after the decision had been taken not to float it in 1951. The decision of the next Labour party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, to oppose nationalization and Harold Wilson’s pragmatic switch from Bevanite advocate of unilateral disarmament to determined opponent of it were bound to put a hold on any return to the socialist idealism of 1945–8. It also meant that the threshold of post-imperial panic, whenever ‘vital interests’ (the buffer between Britain and late 20th-century reality) were threatened, was much lower.
For the Conservatives, the temptation to invoke the great days of post-Munich defiance (conveniently forgetting the part they had played in Munich in the first place) became irresistible every time Britain was faced with an inconvenient nationalist who threatened to repatriate imperial assets like the Suez Canal. Egypt’s president Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser was thus absurdly portrayed as a Levantine Mussolini, whose violation of treaty agreements and ‘grab’ of the canal must at all costs be resisted if the torch of freedom were not to go out in the Middle East. The result, of course, was the pseudo-empire’s most ignominious fiasco, a farcical replay of Gladstone’s worst moment in 1882, when, in the name of preserving free trade and civilization from the threat of ‘anarchy’ unleashed by a nationalist revolt, a British military occupation was imposed on Egypt. In 1956 the fraud was even more egregious, for the pretence was that red-beret paratroops would be loftily ‘separating’ the belligerent armies of Israel and Egypt from a confrontation that the British and French had planned in the first place. So aghast was even the Republican administration of Eisenhower at this independently planned campaign that an exercise which had been planned to demonstrate how the British lion could still roar retreated in a mouse-like squeak in the face of a US-led United Nations ultimatum.
