The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 11

‘THE MOST ADVANCED POLITICIAN OF THE TIME’

Adolf Hitler was so impressed by photographs of the Midland Hotel, Manchester, that he decided it would be the perfect Nazi headquarters in Britain—once Britain had been brought to her knees, and the ruling classes either shot or led off in chains. It is indeed a very fine establishment: a vast ruddy brick fantasy of Edwardian Gothic, with 312 rooms and en suite bathrooms and Michelin-starred restaurants and health suites and Teasmades. I have stayed there several times myself, and used the excellent room service in the small hours. The full English breakfast will keep you going all day.

The hotel was also, once, the temporary address of Winston Churchill. It was here that he came in 1906, when he was fighting for the constituency of Manchester North-West, and here that he hung his hat. Those were the days, you see, when there was no moral pressure on MPs to have a ‘home’ in the constituency; and even in those days—perhaps particularly in those days—the Midland Hotel was the ne plus ultra of luxury. It was just three years old, and had cost £1 million to build; it had its own auditorium, and it made a hell of a contrast with some of the areas of Manchester that the thirty-one-year-old Churchill proposed to represent.

One cold winter evening he sauntered out in the company of his faithful secretary, Eddie Marsh. They found themselves in a slum, not far from the Midland, and Churchill discharged himself of the following aperçu: ‘Fancy living in one of these streets,’ he said, looking around him, ‘never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury . . . never saying anything clever!’

A lot of people have taken exception to this remark. They say it shows condescension to the poor. He seems to reveal himself as a man so out of touch with the real world that he can’t imagine people on low incomes ever saying anything worth hearing; and so ignorant of their lives that he can’t believe they have anything worth eating.

We don’t know whether these were his exact words, though Marsh is unlikely to have made it up; but there is no doubt that this quotation has helped build the case that Churchill was always a bit of a reactionary old elitist.

This is the man, after all, who believed in eugenics; a social Darwinist who at various times wanted penal colonies for vagrants and sterilisation of the unfit. He certainly spoke of humanity being divided into qualitatively different ‘races’—in a way that we find intellectually very dodgy today—and used vocabulary to describe foreigners that was standard for the time, but these days is taboo.

He wrote to Clementine boasting that the children were working ‘like blacks’ to get Chartwell ready for her return; he ignored the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s, saying he had ‘no interest in the quarrels of the yellow peoples’.

He wanted to ‘bomb or machine-gun’ Sinn Fein, whose representatives are now feted at banquets at Windsor Castle. He said the Bolsheviks were ‘baboons’, and that communism was a ‘horrible form of mental and moral disease’. Indeed, he once said that ‘one might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks’; an observation that looks a bit topsy-turvy today.

No one would appoint Churchill to any public office in modern Britain, not unless he toned it down a good deal. He said that making concessions to Mahatma Gandhi—now venerated as the father of modern India—was like ‘feeding cat’s meat to a tiger’ (especially inapposite, given that Gandhi-ji was a devout veggie).

How much more right-wing can you get? Well, try this: as Home Secretary in 1910 he was alleged by the Labour Party to have sent armed troops against striking miners at Tonypandy in Wales; and in 1911 he certainly did authorise the troops to fire on striking dockers in Liverpool. During the General Strike of 1926 he used a scab battalion of printers and journalists to produce a work of stirring government propaganda called The British Gazette; he proposed that the BBC be closed down for the duration, said that ‘a bit of bloodshed would not go amiss’ and that he wanted to get the transport workers ‘by the throat’. His ‘whiff of grapeshot’ approach was condemned by Labour and the unions, and by his fellow Liberals.

Now take all this together and ask yourself—does this man sound like a lefty-liberal milquetoast? Banning the BBC? Shooting at striking dockers, just for rioting and smashing things? There are aspects of Churchill that make him sound like a chap who has had a few too many at a golf club bar. And yet this is the same Churchill who was the begetter of some of the most progressive legislation for the last 200 years. Together with Lloyd George, he deserves the title of Founder of the Welfare State.

His achievements in the Second World War are so famous that they have all but eclipsed his record as a social reformer: a record that deserves to be burnished and celebrated today. Churchill was heavily influenced by Lloyd George—indeed, the Welsh solicitor was one of the very few human beings to whom he deferred—but the measures he produced were his own, and driven by his own frantic energy.

He began in 1908 with a Trades Board Bill, designed to help low-paid workers—mainly female—who were engaged in ‘sweated labour’. They were working making garments in the East End of London, in Leeds, and in Manchester. Their wages were being undercut by immigrants, notably from eastern Europe (plus ça change); and the Trades Boards were there to set legally enforceable minimum wages for certain jobs. It was a concept that was alien to the theories of the classical Liberals—the Gladstonians who were still to be found in the cabinet. But Churchill and Lloyd George were New Liberals—or Radicals.

Explaining why the measure was necessary, Churchill said:

It is a national evil that any class of her Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions. Where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad and the bad by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes up the trade as a second string . . . where these conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.

Those are some of the arguments still made for the living wage today. To help combat unemployment (then running at about 8 per cent—and with virtually no benefits to support the victims), he was instrumental in setting up the first Labour Exchanges; and by early 1910 he and Clementine were able to tour seventeen of them. Just think, next time you look at a Jobcentre Plus: Winston Churchill started those.

He was the man who first hired William Beveridge—who was to go on and build the post-war welfare state in the 1940s; and Beveridge paid tribute to the force with which Churchill drove things through in that early epoch of reform. Writing of the first Labour Exchanges, Beveridge said they were ‘a striking illustration of how much the personality of the minister in a few critical months may change the course of social legislation’.

Next, Churchill was the progenitor of unemployment insurance—the precursor of the dole. It was a contributory scheme, whereby the worker put in 2.5p a week, the employer put in 2.5p a week and the taxpayer put in 3p a week. It meant that if you were unemployed, or you fell ill, and provided you had made your contribution—then you were entitled to a payment that in today’s money would be about £20 a week—not much, but a start. ‘Insurance brings the miracle of averages to the rescue of the masses,’ he said.

In the long run, of course, these averages provided no such miracle. The taxpayer now coughs up for the dole. The contributory principle has been more or less forgotten; but today’s Jobseeker’s Allowance is the direct descendant of Churchill’s scheme.

All this was controversial stuff, and got the Tories hot under the collar—but it was nothing compared to his role in the Great Budget War of 1909 and 1910. The People’s Budget of David Lloyd George was one of the decisive events of modern British history. It was a naked attempt at redistribution of wealth. It was an attack on inequality; and it was seen, inevitably, as an attack on the dukes and the very landed class from which Churchill emerged. Lloyd George wanted to pay for the various Liberal social protection schemes by whacking up taxes on the very rich, and above all by taxing land. He wanted a 20 per cent tax on the gain in value when land was sold.

The Tories were deeply hostile; the Tory peers threatened to block the budget. Churchill was all for it—and he and Lloyd George teamed up, criss-crossing the country like a vaudeville double act.

We find Churchill in 1909 lamenting the unfairness of the division of land in Britain. Of course there should be land taxes, he says. He has recently been to Germany (to see the German army on manoeuvres and to meet the Kaiser). It strikes him that class inequalities are nothing like as pronounced as they are in Britain: he sees countless small German farms—and no walls around the estates of the nobs. He contrasts it with Britain. ‘All this picture makes one feel what a dreadful blight and burden our poor people have to put up with—with parks and palaces of country families almost touching one another and smothering the villages and the industry . . .’

Huge parks, crushing the villages of the poor! Huge palaces! Isn’t this all a bit rich from the scion of Blenheim? A lot of people thought so, and when Churchill warned that inequalities would lead to class warfare, the King caused his Private Secretary to write to The Times to protest. Churchill bashed on. When the Lords tried to throw out the budget, he directed his fire at an institution that contained a fair few of his relatives. By January 1910 the budget crisis was still not over—and he described the Lords as a ‘survival of a feudal arrangement utterly passed out of its original meaning, a force long since passed away, which only now requires a smashing blow from the electors to finish it off forever’.

It is now more than a century since Churchill denounced this infamy—of men sitting in Parliament by right of heredity—and there still are hereditary peers in the House of Lords. That shows he was either monstrously radical or far ahead of his time.

In the end the budget passed, after a gripping constitutional showdown. The King agreed that he would if necessary create enough Liberal peers to ram the benches of the House of Lords and outvote the Tory reactionaries; the landowning peers backed down. Lloyd George and Churchill got their way. Britain embarked on a century of redistribution of wealth.

He was no less of a lefty—at least in Tory eyes—when he got to the Home Office. He shortened prison sentences, when most holders of that office find themselves trying to lengthen them. He reduced the use of solitary confinement. He created a distinction, in British jails, between political prisoners and ordinary criminals—a distinction that still sticks in the craw of many right-wingers today. He may have been rhetorically tough on both Bolshevism and sodomy, but when it came to the application of the law itself, he was mercy personified. Throughout his life Churchill showed a benign indifference to people’s sexual preferences (indeed, Eddie Marsh was himself gay, as Churchill surely knew), and he tried to limit sentences for acts that were then criminalised. On being told that a man had been sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude for sodomy, he wrote to his officials: ‘The prisoner has already received two frightful sentences of seven years’ penal servitude, one for stealing lime juice and one for stealing apples. It is not impossible that he contracted his unnatural habits in prison.’ That minute shows his natural instinct for clemency—and the barbaric nature of justice in Edwardian England.

When the Tories said he was being soft on young criminals, he would even play the class card. A right-wing Tory called Lord Winterton was assailing him in the Commons for refusing to incarcerate some young offenders, and Churchill replied: ‘I wanted to draw the attention of the country . . . to the evil by which 7000 lads of the poorer classes are sent to gaol every year for offences which, if the noble Lord had committed them at College, he would not have been subjected to the slightest degree of inconvenience.’ You can imagine some MPs seething at the idea that their champagne-fuelled university high jinks were being bracketed with mere criminality—and this from a fellow who hadn’t even been to university. Most sensible people, of course, would have completely agreed with Churchill.

As for his handling of the strikes and riots that preceded the First World War, he has been grossly traduced by the modern Labour Party. In 1978 the Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, said the Churchill family had a ‘vendetta’ against the Tonypandy miners. As recently as 2010 a South Wales council tried to stop a local military camp being named after him; and there are still Labour MPs who will tell you that in 1910 Churchill brutally sent the army against defenceless working people. This is all tripe.

The record clearly shows that the troops at Tonypandy behaved with restraint. Indeed, Churchill was actually attacked by the Tories for being too soft, and holding the troops in reserve. It was true that he sent troops to try to contain the dockers rampaging through Liverpool in 1911, and true that they fired. But the destruction being caused was immense; the situation had to be brought under control and Churchill’s own personal sympathies were with the strikers—as they had been with the miners at Tonypandy. ‘They are very poor, miserably paid, and now nearly starving,’ he said. Of dockers striking in London, he told the King they ‘had a real grievance, and the large addition to their wages which they have secured must promote the health and contentment of an unduly strained class of workers, charged as has been realised with vital functions in our civilisation’.

Time and again we find him impatient with the boss class and siding with the unions. When he was Minister for Munitions in 1917 he faced a strike by armaments workers on the Clyde—and got them in for tea and cake at his ministry. He sorted it out by bunging them 12 per cent. He presented a Munitions Bill to allay some of the workers’ grievances, and said ‘no worker would be penalised for belonging to a trade union or taking part in a trade dispute’.

As for the General Strike of 1926, he certainly worked hard to bring the crisis to an end—but if anything he was on the conciliatory wing in his approach to the detail of the disputes. Throughout the summer and autumn he tried to bring the mine owners to accept that their impoverished workforce deserved a minimum wage, and declared that the capitalists were being ‘recalcitrant’ and ‘unreasonable’. Once again he earned the scorn of the Tories, who felt he was trying to interfere with the right of management to manage.

There is plenty more. If we wanted to justify Churchill’s entry in the great pantheon of lefty legislators, we could add reducing the pension age from seventy to sixty-five (we have just had to reverse this excessive generosity), or his repeated calls for the nationalisation of the railways, his call for a windfall tax on war profiteers and his introduction to British industry of that favourite of bolshy 1970s shop stewards—the tea break.

So which is it? It is time for the real Winston Churchill to stand forward in his true colours. There is a line in Gilbert and Sullivan to the effect that ‘Every boy and every gal/ That’s born into the world alive/ Is either a little Liberal/ Or a little Conservative’.

The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb hailed him, along with Lloyd George, as ‘the most advanced politicians of the time.’ At almost the same time his fellow Liberal MP Charles Masterman proclaimed him an ‘aboriginal and unchanging Tory’. One or other view was misguided, surely?

Of course there are and were plenty of people who explain the mystery simply: that he was a weathervane, who said so many different things at different times that, in the words of Beaverbrook, he ended up holding all views on all questions. Or, as Asquith put it, ‘Winston has no convictions’.

I am not sure I attach much weight to criticism from ineffectual mutton-like Asquith—a man who repeatedly shafted Churchill, and who spent cabinet meetings writing pathetic love letters to Venetia Stanley, and who was so drunk that he often had to get Churchill to take over for him. Churchill’s career covered a huge chunk of British history. He held high office more or less continuously from 1905 to 1922—a seventeen-year stretch that comfortably eclipses most modern politicians: and yet that was only his first period—before he had even become Chancellor, let alone Prime Minister.

Of course he sometimes said things that seemed to sit oddly with something he had said in response to another problem in another age. But those who accuse him of political inconsistency have underestimated the depth and subtlety of his political thought. My own view is that Churchill had a very clear political identity, and an unvarying set of principles.

He was both a reactionary and a liberal because he was essentially a buccaneering Victorian Whig. He believed in the greatness of Britain, in the empire, and the preservation of roughly the established order of the country in which he grew up. He also believed in science and technological progress and that government could and should intervene to help improve the condition of the people.

Above all he believed that there was a connection between those two objectives—the promotion and protection of Britain and the empire, and the promotion and protection of the welfare of the people—and that the second would help advance the first. That was the essence of his Whiggish Toryism.

Think of the kind of lives he would have seen when he walked out that night in wintry Manchester. In 1902 he had read Seebohm Rowntree, on the fate of the poor in York, and he said it had ‘made his hair stand on end’. By 1906 the population boom meant that the squalor in the Manchester slums, if anything, was even worse.

He and Marsh saw houses with no running water, with no sewerage system, and with families living ten to a room. Here your baby had no more than a one in four chance of living to see its first birthday. In these slums Churchill saw people who were not just relatively poor—enduring poverty in the sense that we understand it; but absolutely poor: crushingly, grindingly, hopelessly poor in the sense that they were deprived of whole categories of things that most poor people these days would take for granted.

Seebohm Rowntree was very strict in deciding who could fairly be called poor. You could only be classed as poor, he said, if you couldn’t afford any kind of transport at all, and if you had to walk if you wanted to visit relations or go to the countryside. To be poor, you had to be unable to buy postage stamps to write letters; you had to be unable to buy any tobacco or alcohol whatever; you had no money to buy dolls or marbles or sweets for your children, and no money to buy any clothes except the barest essentials. To be classed as poor, you had to be unable to afford to miss a single day’s work. Those were the urban poor when Churchill began his political career—living in filth and destitution that would be unimaginable today. They made up fully 25 per cent of the population.

When Churchill made that remark about their lives, he was actually reflecting his own shock at the immensity of the gulf between their lives and his, and trying—as far as he could—to put himself in their broken shoes.

He had all sorts of reasons for caring about them, and wanting to help. Some of those reasons were selfish, some of them less obviously so. The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.

He wanted to do something about the condition of the poor because, as I say, he believed in Britain and in the empire. He had seen how German systems of paritatisch—cooperation between bosses and workers—were delivering results, and like all members of the British ruling class he could see Germany’s growing industrial strength. He could see that the British economy would need a workforce that was fit and healthy and motivated, if the country as a whole was to compete.

He had fought in the Boer War, and he knew that in 1899 the army’s recruiting officers had been stunned to find that 50 per cent of working-class volunteers had been simply unfit—through childhood disease or malnourishment—to be soldiers. Churchill wanted an army physically able to run an empire.

What is more, he wanted to improve the condition of the poor as a political precaution, because he could see that if poor people continued to be so humiliated, they would refuse to take it any longer. The early years of the twentieth century were a period of alarming political instability. There were great numbers of strikes, many of them violent, and with running battles between working men and the police.

Lenin said that in 1910–14 the spirit of revolution stalked England. Lenin was right; and Churchill was the very opposite of a revolutionary. He knew how precarious was the position of the minority to which he belonged. ‘It was the world of the few,’ he said of the society he grew up in, ‘and they were very few.’ Or, as he might have put it, never in the field of social conflict was so much owed to so many by so few.

He was radical precisely because he was conservative. He knew what all sensible Tories know—that the only way to keep things the same is to make sure you change them; or as Burke puts it, a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. He grasped that. He saw that the only way to be successfully and effectively reactionary was to be more than a little bit liberal. As Charles Masterman said: ‘he desired in Britain a state of affairs where a benign upper class dispensed benefits to a bien pensant and grateful working class’. Which, by the way, is still the unspoken position of quite a few good-hearted metropolitan liberals today.

And then there is the final reason why Churchill championed social reform. He didn’t just do it because it was in the interests of the economy and the army and the empire and, of course, in the interests of the poor themselves. He did it because it was in the interests of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. From the very beginning of his political career we find him ‘triangulating’—developing a centrist position that enables him to call on the broadest possible support. In 1902 he wrote that the answer to the country’s political problems was a great central party, ‘free at once from the sordid selfishness and callousness of Toryism on the one hand, and the blind appetites of the radical masses on the other’. On another occasion he said the key thing was to be ‘Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy’.

This is partly how he felt about the world, and partly positioning. He saw how he could himself incarnate this coalition, how he could be the giant straddler, the colossus with one foot on either side of the entrance to the harbour. He dreamed of that role from the beginning. The Second World War gave him his cue.

It is unfair on Churchill to say he swung around with the wind. If anything, he showed more consistency than the Tory Party itself. When he wrote to Hugh Cecil in his famous and unsent letter of 1904, saying that he hated the Tory Party, their men and their methods, it was largely because they were abandoning the cause of free trade—which was then seen as essential for providing cheap food for the urban poor. The Tories were ditching his father Randolph’s concept of ‘Tory Democracy’, which, if it meant anything, meant stitching together a coalition between the moneyed classes and the working people.

He was a free trader more or less without deviation (apart from a wobble in 1931, and some insignificant protectionist flourishes such as a duty on imported American films), and only returned to the Tory Party once the Tories had themselves returned to free trade. He was not just a free trader; he was a capitalist. As he said in 1924, ‘the existing capitalist system is the foundation of civilisation and the only means by which a great modern population can be supplied with vital necessities’. He spoke out repeatedly against the pointless persecution of the rich. But he believed in capitalism with a human face, or compassionate conservatism.

At the very beginning of his career he emerges as a man determined to palliate the suffering that free markets and capitalism can cause. Yes, he was a tough antagonist of rioters and strikers, but he was also a noted conciliator, using his charm and grasp of detail to get a deal.

By the 1950s that suppleness had become perhaps less desirable. The country was richer than it had been when Churchill began in politics; the gap between rich and poor had been greatly reduced. It has been argued that Churchill’s second premiership was too relaxed about union dominance, and therefore helped create the sclerosis of the 1960s and 1970s.

But if we think back to the state of the country in the years before the First World War, we can see that his instincts were right for the time. Look at the shambles in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s: a murderous communist revolution in Russia, and other communist uprisings in eastern Europe, and then a great rash of fascist dictators across the continent.

There was hardly a country that did not suffer some major upheaval or constitutional abomination. Italy had Mussolini, Portugal had Salazar, Poland had Piłsudski, Austria had Dollfuss, Croatia had some Ustasha creep or other, Germany had Hitler—and Britain had good old avuncular Stanley Baldwin, with his air of a small-town bank manager.

All sorts of factors prevented Britain from suffering the fate of its continental counterparts. The country had not been invaded for almost a millennium. Its institutions had deeper roots. Parliamentary democracy was longer established. The English invented cricket, and so on. But surely in the mix we must add the wisdom and foresight of the young Winston Churchill and his friend Lloyd George; in seeing that it was time to allay discontent; to abate the anger of the dispossessed; to help stave off revolt by providing the first state-financed response to the manifest social injustice that he saw.

In that sense, you could argue that he helped save Britain from fascism not once, but twice. It was important, that walk around the slums of Manchester in 1906. Go there today and you see chic little bars and trendy young people in cool gear who look as though they must be something to do with the city’s burgeoning tech sector. Ask them what they believe in, politically, and I expect it will be some variant of capitalism with a human face.

Churchill adopted this strategy not just because it was right for the empire or the economy or for himself as a politician, but because he was genuinely compassionate. He was never a brute, whatever Labour myth may say.

Then there is a further point we must now settle about the psyche of the man; a question that goes to the heart of the whole debate about Churchill that sputters on to this day. We need to be absolutely sure of the purity of his motives, as he prepared to steer the country in 1940.

I mean we need to know what he thought and felt about that primal act in which our species was probably born—and yet which seems so alien to most of my mollycoddled generation. There are some (perhaps many) who say that a crucial part of the Churchill Factor was his sheer willingness to make war.