The Liberal Lion

Churchill returned to the Conservative Party after the 1922 collapse of Lloyd George's coalition -- the subsequent disintegration of the Liberal Party and the rise of Labour left him no alternative. As a Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, he continued to advocate the policies of sound money and financial retrenchment that Gladstone would have welcomed and returned to his prewar advocacy of tight rations for the military.

Churchill was 55 when he left the Exchequer in 1929; another ten years would pass before he returned to the Admiralty in 1939, and he was 66 when he finally reached 10 Downing Street in May of 1940. The conventional view is that Churchill remained an imperialist through his "wilderness" years, but that he left his liberalism behind. The coalition government that Churchill led from 1940 through 1945 is usually seen as a basically Conservative government, with the Labour members there primarily for decoration and to keep the trade unions happy.

This is a view that Jenkins wants to challenge. Up to a point, he is right. Those "wilderness" years, Jenkins reminds us, were fundamentally the result of Churchill's unpopularity with the Tories. Jenkins shows that some of the few allies Churchill had in the grim fight against appeasement were Liberal supporters of the League of Nations. Conventional Conservative Party leaders such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain never trusted him; in this they reflected the profound feelings of his fellow Tory members of Parliament. In May 1940, the Conservative caucus would never have made Churchill prime minister; Labour's Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood put Churchill in 10 Downing Street by making clear that they would not enter a coalition under either Chamberlain or the Conservative caucus' preferred successor, Lord Halifax.

Those familiar with John Lukac's Five Days in London (whose conclusions Jenkins accepts as probable though not proven) will know the significance of this event. It was Lord Halifax (kept on at the Foreign Office by Churchill due to Conservative Party pressure) who sought to persuade the War Cabinet to open peace negotiations with Hitler at that critical time. Once again, it was Attlee and Greenwood who sided with Churchill against Chamberlain and Halifax and helped prevent the British capitulation that, left to its own devices, the Conservative Party leadership (along with Lloyd George) might well have accepted. Jenkins' history of the war years emphasizes Attlee's role: while Churchill traveled from summit to summit, Attlee presided over the War Cabinet and provided the administrative continuity that Churchill could not give.

This is an unusual but not unjustified light in which to cast the wartime cabinet. Attlee (who gave the young Jenkins his first taste of political office) was part of the moderate Labour movement that Jenkins, like many of his generation, saw as the true heir of the British Liberal tradition. Though obscured by a confused political landscape, Jenkins tells us, the old Liberal tradition continued under the surface to guide the country through the darkest days of World War II.

COMING HOME

Churchill is a much less interesting figure for Jenkins after his 1945 decision to accept the leadership of the Conservative Party. Indeed, the conventional view that minimizes Labour's wartime role, and especially Attlee's, can claim Churchill as its author. Churchill's own memoirs make no mention of Halifax's flirtation with a negotiated peace in 1940, nor of Chamberlain's sympathy with it -- a gesture widely seen as attesting to Churchill's generosity, but also an example of party loyalty in the charged partisan atmosphere of Attlee's stormy postwar government. The Tory Party reinvented itself after World War II in the image of Churchill; it was Churchill that Margaret Thatcher consciously sought to evoke as the essence of solid Tory England. Jenkins succeeds in showing this picture to be much too simple and in many respects deeply misleading; his desire to separate Churchill from the Conservatives, however, causes him to underrate Churchill's role in rebuilding and rehabilitating the postwar Tories. Jenkins' account would have us see Churchill as a passive King Log both after a Labour landslide swept him out of power during the Potsdam Conference of 1945 and after his return to office as a Tory prime minister from 1951 to 1955.

Perhaps, but within a year and a half of taking office, his successor as prime minister, Anthony Eden, had engineered the Suez crisis -- the greatest humiliation in modern British history. Even given Churchill's failure to persuade U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to negotiate more seriously with the Soviets in 1953 and 1954, British foreign policy ran far more smoothly in his hands than in Eden's. That the appeasing, socially purblind Tories of the prewar years showed the flexibility to accept Labour's postwar social legislation and also made a transition from empire to ally surely owes something to Churchill's years as party leader.

Churchill's final contributions to the modern Tory Party can be seen as an act of filial piety. As a young man, Churchill wrote an impassioned biography that successfully rescued his ancestor John Churchill, the great military commander, from the obloquy in which Thomas Macaulay's devastating but inaccurate portrait in the History of England had buried him; Churchill's life of his father sought, less successfully, to redeem Lord Randolph's reputation from the low ebb to which his political irregularities had brought it. As an old man, Churchill had the great satisfaction of leading the party that rejected his father, and what is more, by committing the modern Tories to the welfare state, he brought the party around to the direction his father had first proposed for it.

PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC MEN