Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
My mother’s two favourite poets were Byron and Shelley, and this extract from Shelley’s Ozymandias pretty well sums up her views of her least favourite politician, Winston Churchill. Here was another hero turned villain (or perhaps villain turned hero), yet more statues with ‘feet of clay’ (see previous blogpost). ‘Churchillian’ values are rather freely and inaccurately proffered to us just now by our bombastic Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. No hero he, just clay all the way through, and a woefully inaccurate and self-serving historian of Churchill to boot. Conventional historical accounts of Churchill tend to lionise him. A recent Channel 5 documentary on Churchill, interesting because it deployed substantial personal and family archives, gives an exceedingly partial account by glossing over many of the events that do him little credit: Churchill’s role in supporting the use of the brutal and infamous British military ‘Black and Tans’ as a virtual terror gang in Ireland in 1920; his strong opposition to women’s suffrage; his gleeful encouragement of a type of real class war during the General Strike of 1926; his dismissively racist attacks upon Mahatma Gandhi and the whole notion of Indian independence; and his utterly shameful 1945 election claim that Labour, led by the man, Clement Attlee, who contributed so much to Churchill’s successful prosecution of the 1939-45 war, would, if elected, behave like the Gestapo.
My mother could tell you about any of these glaring faults, but was most angered by the attacks on working class miners by a man born into privilege and preferment. She didn’t have a good word to say for him, even less for the mine-owners who were his natural class allies: as an Historical Association pamphlet about the General Strike of 1926 by Margaret Morris puts it: ‘no-one has ever had a good word to say for the coal-owners and their leaders’. Moreover, the bellicose Churchill had disseminated accusations that Soviet style unions were trying to take over the country, a sort of ‘red peril’ scare; yet many of the men marching in protest at their abysmal working and living conditions were seen to be wearing their war medals. Churchill had already shown his aggression to ordinary workers when in 1910, as Home Secretary, he sent in the military to put down a miners’ strike in Tonypandy in Wales, and he again responded with force to the strike by protesting transport workers in Liverpool in 1911. Mum was nothing if not a class warrior, and she had not forgotten or forgiven these slurs and enmities.
The rejection of Churchill by the British electorate in 1945 was not just a shock to Churchill himself, but to the many people for whom he was a war hero, ‘the greatest living Englishman’. In 1963 I was staying with a well to do German family in Hamburg. They might have been excused for being hostile to a man who had presided over the brutal firebombing and virtual destruction of their beautiful city, with the loss of some 67,000 lives, most of them civilians. But no, they were partly Jewish and generally pro-British. A family Aunt Gisela, who had excellent English, demanded an explanation from me: “Why? Why? How could your country behave in such a way, voting against the leader who had won the war for them? We were deeply shocked by this, Winston Churchill was our hero too. We just did not understand this.”.
Well, people like my working class parents understood all too well. Churchill had been a brutal and aggressive class warrior for most of his political life, and the ruling class he represented and had been born into (in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, home of his adored ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough). With this pedigree it is perhaps unsurprising that he would show little sympathy for the working classes who had suffered grievous blows not only in the First World War trenches, but in the economic depression that followed in a land that was certainly not fit for heroes. The children of that generation, like my own parents, were shaped by the privations their families had suffered then, and in the often depressed 1930s. They did not intend to let the same story be repeated again and took their political revenge once the 1939-45 war was safely over.
Churchill was not unused to political reverses, for if you leave aside the glories of successful war leadership in 1939-45, his political career is littered with mistakes and mismanagement, and betrays a volatile and unstable temperament. He had few clear political principles, rather a set of knee jerk responses based in the fundamental beliefs and values of his patrician class and time, that would become increasingly anachronistic. Doubtless fearful of what he discerned as a real threat from rising working class militancy, he was quick to see communism and revolution around every social and political corner. An academic failure, and probably damaged by a deeply flawed relationship with his cold and bullying father, Lord Randolph Churchill, he sought an early escape into imperial soldiering. This background may have accounted for the militaristic rather than diplomatic impulses which would characterise so much of his political life. Quickly realising what a dead end a military career might be (and fundamentally how boring), he turned to politics, where easy preferment offered easier pickings. In the complicated politics of the end of the nineteenth century, after an initial flirtation with the Conservative Party as MP for Oldham, he switched to the Liberal Party as the likeliest ladder to success at a time of declining Conservative Party fortunes.
I owe to my cousin Tom Minogue the sources for a fascinating glimpse into Churchill’s early political life, in the form of an article in the main Dundee newspaper, The Courier, assessing Churchill’s 14 year reign as Liberal MP for Dundee from 1908 to 1922. The respectable burghers of Dundee no doubt were glad to have this modern Vicar of Bray as their representative in Parliament, someone actively influential at the highest levels of government, even though he was seldom to be seen in Dundee except at election times. But he would often meet a less welcoming response lower down the social scale. Early on he aroused the ire of suffragist supporters, one of whom, Mary Malone, regularly protested at his election meetings about Churchill’s clearly expressed opposition to votes for women; she would ring a large hand bell to drown out his speeches. Later he would lose much support from ordinary workers for his anti-union actions while Home Secretary, for his dismal failures while First Lord of the Admiralty during the Great War, and not least for his perceived antagonism to the Irish and Home Rule: indeed in 1921 the Dundee Catholic Herald described him as ‘a dangerous, double-dealing, oily-tongued adventurer’. It was said that in the 1921 election, suffering from ill health after appendicitis, he had to be carried around in a sedan chair, and that while locals were paid £1 per hour to do this, they were offered £2 by their fellow workers to drop him. Perhaps it is no surprise that he finished fourth and last in this election. He quipped that he left Dundee “without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix”.
This period seems to sum up all Churchill’s personal contradictions and shortcomings, even though he enjoyed several ministerial positions, and increasing political prominence. In his first (junior) ministerial post, as an Under Secretary for the Colonies, his most notable claim was to have shot a white rhinoceros in Uganda. His equally aggressive actions a few years later as Home Secretary left organised labour with a deep-seated and long standing distrust of him. Given his eventual success as a war leader it may seem surprising how inept he was as First Lord of the Admiralty during the 1914-18 War, aggressively pushing his ambitious but poorly conceived pet project for a naval campaign against Turkey. This ended with disastrous defeats in the Dardanelles. The failure of the initial naval attack was not entirely surprising, as some of the ships were obsolete (HMS Indomitable and HMS Indefatigable proved anything but, though HMS Inflexible may have lived up to its name). In the subsequent, much delayed military invasion, hundreds of thousands of casualties resulted. Prime author of this inglorious defeat, Churchill had to resign, and decided to take an active military role in the war, spending several months on a quiet part of the Western Front; becoming bored, he wanted to return home but his wife Clementine told him in a stern letter to stay where he was, it would look bad if he were to scuttle back home too soon.
On returning to active politics, Churchill held relatively minor positions in the Lloyd George coalition, but as Colonial Secretary had fingers in several pies, though his interventions have not been well regarded. He had always strongly opposed Home Rule for Ireland and was always prepared to use force, but at this time largely had to take a back seat to Lloyd George. In the Middle East, a disturbed part of the Imperial framework in the post-war period, he oversaw that artificial creation of Iraq which would cause endless future problems, and advocated the use of gas war against local insurgents (a precedent that would be followed by Saddam Hussein in due course). And as a committed pro-Zionist, he also supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, regardless of the claims of indigenous Palestinians.
On the resignation of Lloyd George in 1922, and the loss of his Dundee seat in Parliament, Churchill (after three unsuccessful attempts to win a Liberal seat) flipped politically again in 1924 to Baldwin’s Conservative administration, nominally holding the seat of Epping as a ‘Constitutionalist’. He was given, to general surprise, the Chancellorship of the Exchequer; to no-one’s surprise he made a hash of this job too. His controversial decision to return Britain to the Gold Standard proved deeply damaging, exacerbating economic depression and seriously damaging the coal industry (John Maynard Keynes wrote a critique in a pamphlet titled The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill.)
The political consequences of Mr Churchill thereafter scarcely improved his reputation, or his standing with ordinary working people. The economic effects of his financial decisions led on directly to the General Strike of 1926, a situation which brought out all Churchill’s worst instincts, treating Britain’s trade unionists as if they were revolutionary enemies of the state. Enraged by the unions’ ability to close down newspapers, he proposed the publication of a Government newspaper, The British Gazette, and did his utmost to control the content. Much given to informal editing, he often slipped in inflammatory comments. He also insisted on the printing of deliberately falsified information (which current politician and former journalist does this remind you of?) and refused to print a statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other religious leaders that called for a negotiated settlement. He even contrived to arouse opposition from King George V, for what the King thought were blatant incitements to violence. Lloyd George pronounced that the Gazette was “a first class indiscretion, clothed in the tawdry garb of third rate journalism”. Undeterred, Churchill continued incendiary calls to class warfare, which encouraged scores of middle and upper class undergraduates to volunteer to take the place of striking railway men and bus drivers. Churchill described the journal as ‘a monument’; the New Statesmen in May 1915 said “it was a disgrace alike to the British Government and to British journalism”.
Once the General Strike collapsed, after a mere nine days, the miners continued to strike for another six months, but were defeated by a combination of uncompromising owners, their own internal divisions, and a recalcitrant Government not disposed to make concessions. It was a bitter outcome. Looking at recent accounts, I’m inclined to think that Baldwin is more to be castigated than Churchill for the failure to take on the abysmal coal owners. But I’d have had a hard task to persuade my Mum and Dad of this. Mum’s view of Churchill as ‘Class Enemy Number One’ was only reinforced by her perception of Churchill as ‘Women’s Enemy Number One.’ Churchill had always set himself against conceding the vote to all women, on equal terms with men. He made his attitude clear by telling Parliament that “women were represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands”. He probably feared the electoral consequences of universal suffrage, which lead him in the 1924 Conservative Government to argue strongly against going any further than the limited reform of 1918. And probably he was right, because after the full extension of suffrage in 1928, the Conservatives were defeated in the election of 1929, bringing in Labour for a second term of minority Government under Ramsay MacDonald.
A final charge against Winston Churchill would have to examine what historian Eric Hobsbawm describes as his “diehard imperialism, of which Churchill made himself the spokesman”. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given his birth into an aristocratic elite at a period when Victorian imperialism was at its height, and his early experiences as a soldier fighting in overseas countries to defend imperial power and territory. But his nineteenth century attitudes rapidly put him out of touch with most of his political contemporaries in the 1930s, and fractured his relationship with Baldwin. He campaigned strongly for the retention of the existing British Raj, and openly sneered at India’s most admired activist, Mahatma Gandhi : “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-Regal palace”. We might recall that Churchill strongly resisted the notion that either the Irish or the Indians were fit to govern themselves. Yet thousands of both Indians and Irishmen died fighting for Britain in both World Wars, something that seems to have escaped Churchill’s attention. Notoriously, Churchill refused to provide emergency food relief during the Bengal Famine of 1943 that killed 3 million Indians. His own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, wrote that “Churchill knew as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies.”
My mother told me once that during the Second World War my strongly Labour father patriotically had a photograph of their war leader on the wall, against her wishes. In 1945, Dad would not take the photo down, despite her urgings, but he compromised by turning Churchill’s face to the wall. This seems to me a reasonable judgement of the whole of Churchill’s career, shot through with occasional brilliances, but besmirched by desperately poor judgements and errors, most of them egregious, sometimes costing thousands of lives.
I set out to write this blog to balance a previous analysis of Labour heroes with feet of clay. But I also had in mind the way in which the present British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, consistently invites us to celebrate British heroes, specifically Winston Churchill, a politics of nostalgia that seeks to divert our attention from present failures. Nick Cohen, in The Observer recently, writes that “modern Conservatives are a brothel-keeper’s nightmare: they can never identify the fantasy they want to act out”. Note how often Johnson and his political colleagues use the adjectives ‘world-leading’ and ‘world-beating’ to describe British achievements. This narrative of ‘greatness’ is all too often a political and historical misrepresentation, whether of countries or of men and women, and part of that misrepresentation is to ignore the necessary contribution that ordinary people will have made to whatever glories and successes are being paraded.
I want to be fair to Churchill, though Mum would have snorted derisively at this: whenever were that lot fair to me? In my judgement, he was for the greater part of his long and active political life a failure, often acted like a political opportunist, and was too often driven by personal political ambition. He had serious character flaws. Yet these flaws could also be a strength. At the point in the 1930s where our national survival was at issue, an aggressive war leader was exactly what we needed. And he was exactly what we did not need once the war was over. His final Prime Ministership in the 1950s was a sad and disillusioning affair, the colossus brought low by drink and illness: Roy Jenkins described him as “gloriously unfit for office”. In June 2019, when Boris Johnson was prospective leader of the Conservative Party, but not yet Prime Minister, his old boss as Editor of The Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings, echoed this description, declaring him as “unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification” and presciently suggested that if he became Prime Minister he “could survive for three or four years, shambling from one embarrassment and debacle to another, of which Brexit may prove the least…he supposes himself to be Winston Churchill, while in reality being closer to Alan Partridge.”
He characterised Churchill as “a profoundly serious human being”, Johnson as a morally bankrupt “cavorting charlatan”. My own view, expressed in this post, is that Churchill and Johnson have more in common than Hastings would be likely to admit; that in the past hundred years or so we have had more than our fill of arbitrary and contemptuous political leaders, and need constantly to be on the alert for and resistant to the current versions. We should all beware that “sneer of cold command”.
