The Liberal Lion

Walter Russell Mead is Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

When a critic charged that Oliver Goldsmith had written The Vicar of Wakefield for the money, Samuel Johnson is said to have replied, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything else."

Roy Jenkins -- chancellor of Oxford University, former Labour chancellor of the Exchequer, and prolific author -- is no blockhead. And the enduring public interest in the greatest and most interesting Briton of the twentieth century gave him confidence that the public would welcome yet another biography of the man who beat Hitler. But Jenkins had more than money on his mind when he began work on his Churchill. This engaging, intelligent, and more than thousand-page-long life of Winston Churchill is the capstone of perhaps the most ambitious project in modern British biography: a triptych composed of lives of the three statesmen whose careers spanned the climax and fall both of the British Empire and of the Liberal Party. Jenkins' biographies of the British prime ministers William Gladstone, Herbert Asquith, and now Winston Churchill -- together with Mr. Balfour's Poodle, his 1954 account of the struggle between the House of Lords and Asquith's government from 1909 to 1911 -- give us one of the most accessible and comprehensive accounts we have of the ideology and the politics of America's great predecessor on the world stage.

AGE OF EMPIRE

This body of work is, above all, a history of Liberal Britain. Gladstone assembled the Liberal Party in the mid-nineteenth century from the remnants of the pro-free trade Peelites, aristocratic Whigs, and reform-oriented Radicals. Under Gladstone's leadership, the Liberals dominated British politics through much of Queen Victoria's long reign and were primarily responsible for the extension of the franchise to virtually the entire adult male British population. Under Asquith, who was prime minister from 1908 to 1916, the Liberals laid the foundation of the modern welfare state, prepared the groundwork for Irish independence, and reined in the power of the House of Lords.

The great contribution of Jenkins' Churchill is to place Churchill where he belongs: as part of this fissiparous and crisis-ridden Liberal tradition. Churchill entered political life as a "Tory Democrat," following his father's erratic footsteps to the far left of the Tory Party, which took up many of the ideas of the more moderate Liberals. Churchill left the Conservatives in 1904 when Joseph Chamberlain succeeded in persuading the party to abandon free trade in favor of a preferential tariff system. This was the same issue that split Gladstone and the Peelites from the Conservatives.

The political label that describes the young Churchill best is probably that of "Liberal imperialist." As a Liberal, he was committed to free trade, free markets, basic social legislation on behalf of working people and the very poor, restrained government spending, moderate and measured constitutional reform, and a government that interfered as little as possible in the lives of British subjects. As an imperialist, he was devoted to the maintenance of his country's great power position and of the British Empire.

To sum up a century of British politics, both the country and the Liberals prospered when Liberal imperialism was possible. Increasingly, however, the nation was forced to choose. Liberal principles could scarcely be reconciled with the realities of British rule in Ireland, and Gladstone's Liberals split in 1886 over home rule for Ireland, with Liberal unionists voting with the Conservatives in the House of Commons.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, office-hungry Liberals put the divisive home rule issue on the back burner and focused on more traditional Liberal issues such as efficiency in government and domestic reform. On the Conservative side, far-sighted imperialists were already sensing that the sun might be setting on the British Empire. The problem was less the restiveness of what the British still unselfconsciously called "the natives" of their overseas colonies than the increasingly independent-minded governments of the "white dominions" -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, given the constitutional arrangements of the time, South Africa. British strategists seeking to hold the empire together saw a preferential tariff system as the best way to strengthen the dominion leaders who wanted to maintain tight links with the home country.

Conservative imperialists could embrace this logic; most Liberal imperialists, including Churchill, could not. Their concept of the British Empire was of a system that grew stronger by cooperating with the underlying logic of the international economy -- a system that drew its strength above all from the vitality of a deregulated British economy toughened and invigorated by both the challenges and the opportunities of free trade.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

The Liberal Party gave Churchill his first taste of high office. As home secretary in Asquith's government, Churchill prepared some of the sweeping social legislation more widely identified with his successor in that post, David Lloyd George. He also joined with Lloyd George to oppose what as late as 1909 he denounced as excessive naval spending to counter the German threat. Within the Admiralty, his wartime advocacy of alternatives to the grisly deadlock on the western front, including the ill-fated Dardanelles expedition, can also be seen as an expression of the traditional British strategy of shunning continental commitments in favor of a naval strategy.