The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 15

PLAYING ROULETTE WITH HISTORY

It hardly bears thinking about, really. Winston Churchill had plenty of narrow squeaks—but when he agreed to loiter in the tearoom of a Munich hotel, he had no idea of the risk he was running. He was almost caught in the photo-opportunity from hell: the one handshake that was likely to prove most damaging to his long-term reputation.

It was July 1932, and he had come to Germany to research the battlefield of Blenheim, with a view to adding some colour to his life of Marlborough. He was staying at one of the swishest hotels in the city, the Regina Palast—the same place, incidentally, that was to accommodate Neville Chamberlain and his wretched delegation when they came to the summit of 1938.

Already there were parades of fascist youths down the streets of Munich—right outside the hotel. Conjure up in your mind brown leather shorts and rippling thighs; oom-pa-pa marching bands and red and black swastika bunting floating in the breeze. Think beaming girls in dirndl serving foaming steins in the hotel biergarten, their blond hair whorled in strange pastry shapes around their ears.

Then add Churchill with his lively eyes and puckish curiosity, watching it all from an open window, drinking it in, working it out. His journalist son Randolph was with him on the trip, keen to find out about the Nazis; and he introduced his father to a curious geezer by the name of Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl. This Putzi was a tall, gangling German-American businessman in his mid-forties. He had been educated at Harvard—so he spoke excellent English. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt he had been a member of the Hasty Pudding club, where he had developed his talent for the piano. Indeed, he was the author of some of the famous Harvard songs.

He was talkative, jokey, sardonic, with tweeds and a kipper tie that came, in the fashion of the day, only halfway down his shirt front. He was also a leading Nazi and intimate of Hitler, for whom he acted as a kind of international spin-doctor.

One night Winston, Randolph and Putzi Hanfstaengl stayed up round the piano; and though it is not clear whether Churchill followed his normal practice of singing lustily and tunelessly along, he was certainly pleased to find that Putzi knew many of his favourite tunes. At the end of this enjoyable recital, Putzi started rhapsodising about Hitler, and his successes in revitalising Germany.

Churchill immediately asked about Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Putzi tried to allay his fears. As Hanfstaengl later wrote: ‘I tried to give as mild an account as I could, saying that the problem was the influx of eastern European Jews and the excessive representation of their co-religionists in the professions.’

Hmmm, said Churchill: ‘Tell your boss from me that anti-semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.’ This is a racing expression. It is a polite, upper-class English way of saying that in bashing the Jews, Hitler was backing the wrong horse.

I tell you what, Putzi told Churchill. He should meet Hitler. It would be a piece of cake, perhaps literally. It seemed that Hitler came to this very hotel, every afternoon at 5 p.m. They could bond over a couple of slices of Black Forest gateau. Putzi was sure that the Führer would be ‘very glad’ to meet the English party.

Churchill’s natural journalistic curiosity was aroused—and indeed Randolph was almost certainly angling for just such a meeting. As Churchill said later in his memoirs: ‘I had no national prejudices against Hitler at this time. I knew little of his doctrine or record and nothing of his character.’

For two days Churchill and Randolph waited; sometimes in the American bar, sometimes in the sunny biergarten outside. It is eerie to think of our hero, kicking his heels like a stringer correspondent in some Munich hotel, and waiting to be favoured with an audience by a man fourteen years his junior who was to go on to become his bitterest enemy.

Imagine if they had met. Churchill would have joined the embarrassing roll-call of British MPs and aristocrats to be pictured with a leader who was to become a universal by-word for evil. Halifax; Chamberlain; Lloyd George; Edward VIII; they all made that goof.

(The only man to come through it with colours flying was Churchill’s parliamentary aide Bob Boothby, MP, who famously replied to Hitler’s megalomaniacal greeting of ‘Heil Hitler!’ with the only logical response: ‘Heil Boothby!’ said Boothby.)

If Hitler had come into that hotel tearoom or bar, Churchill would have been forced at the least to be courteous, if not cordial—and that would not have looked good in 1940.

The interesting question is why Hitler chose not to come. He met plenty of other people in Munich. He dazzled Unity Mitford, for instance, and even bought her tea. Why shouldn’t he have seen a man who was famous throughout England, had held most of the great offices of state, and who had a formidable reputation for foreign affairs?

Before Putzi went off to fix the momentous encounter, he asked Churchill to give him something to go on. Were there any questions that the Englishman wanted to ask, so as to serve as the basis for their discussions? Yes, said Churchill. He returned to the point that exercised him.

‘Why is your chief so violent about the Jews?’ Churchill asked Putzi Hanfstaengl. ‘I can quite understand being angry with the Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I can understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in any walk of life; but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?’

With these unimpeachably liberal, humane and Churchillian sentiments in his ears, Putzi returned to the Führer; and got nowhere.

‘What part does Churchill play?’ sneered the Nazi leader. ‘He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.’

To which Hanfstaengl replied: ‘People say the same about you.’

I reckon Hitler decided to swerve Churchill not just because he thought he was washed up, kaput, finito. It was because he didn’t like the sound of this boisterous and opinionated English fellow, who was so fervent about democracy and so mysteriously squeamish about anti-Semitism.

He avoided the Regina Palast hotel until the Churchill party was gone; and for the second time in history—they were apparently only a few hundred yards from each other in the trenches in 1916—the two men came close, but never met. Later, of course, Hitler was to issue plenty of invitations to meet Churchill in public, when such a meeting would have been obviously to the Nazis’ advantage; and Churchill always declined.

Right at the beginning of Germany’s nightmare, before Hitler had even become Chancellor, Churchill spotted the evil at the heart of Nazi ideology. There is something innocent in the way he phrases the question to Putzi: ‘what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth?’ In the months and years that followed, Churchill’s puzzlement was to turn to outrage.

While Nazism remained obdurately fashionable in some parts of British society, Churchill campaigned with growing vehemence against Hitler’s mistreatment of minorities. It helped that he had been to Germany. He had drunk in the atmosphere: he had actually seen the files of young men and women, fit, tanned, full of revanchist excitement.

On 23 November 1932 he made a prescient speech to Parliament. He observed that ‘all these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons.’ When they had the weapons, he prophesied, they would use them to ask for the return of their lost territories. France, Belgium, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia—they were all in peril, said Churchill. A ‘war mentality’ was springing up across Europe. It was time to tell the British people the truth about the danger, he said. They were a tough people, a robust people, the British: they could take it, he said. Others, of course, said he was being alarmist: a warmonger.

Six years later he was to be proved crushingly and overwhelmingly correct in his analysis. That was the basis of much of his prestige in 1940—that he had made the right call about Hitler, almost from the start. He put his shirt on a horse called anti-Nazism, and he did it early, at a time when no one much fancied the nag, and his bet came off in spectacular fashion.

To some extent all politicians are gamblers with events. They try to anticipate what will happen, to put themselves ‘on the right side of history’, to show off their judgement to best advantage. In 1902 Churchill observed that a politician needs ‘the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability to explain afterward why it didn’t happen.’

He loved staking his reputation in the way that he loved all risky activities—flying a plane, riding along the front at Malakand, crawling around no man’s land. It gave him the chance to test his egocentric thesis that he was special, that somehow the bullets would whistle past him; that a guardian angel or daemon hovered over him, that Lady Luck was on his side and really rather doted on him. He gambled for money, at the tables of Deauville or Le Touquet, and one of his secretaries describes him leaping out of a taxi and rushing into the casino at Monte Carlo—shirt-tails flapping—and returning a short time later with enough to buy their rail fare home.

No other politician had taken so many apparently risky positions; no other politician had been involved in so many cock-ups—not only living to tell the tale, but flourishing in spite of them. The surprising thing, by the time he lounged in that Munich hotel in 1932, was that he had any reputation left to wager.

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NOW IS THE moment to look in a bit more detail at the lurid series of disasters that traditionally landmark accounts of his pre-1940 career. We need to consider the interaction between Churchill and these events: the extent to which he was responsible—and, indeed, the extent to which they were really disasters. Let us begin with:

The Antwerp Blunder.

Sometimes posterity can be kinder than your contemporaries. In October 1914 the German armies were devouring the Low Countries. Churchill took it upon himself personally to mastermind the defence of Antwerp—a port so strategically important that Napoleon once called it ‘a pistol pointing at the heart of England’. Afterwards, the media was withering. The Morning Post said it was a ‘costly blunder, for which Mr W Churchill must be held responsible’. The Daily Mail said it was a ‘gross example of mal-administration which has cost valuable lives’. It seemed to his cabinet colleagues that the First Lord of the Admiralty had gone nuts—shooting off to Antwerp, prancing around in a cape and a yachting cap while the Germans bombarded him.

At one stage he asked for the right to resign from the cabinet and take up a military command. He wanted to be General Churchill, he told Asquith—a suggestion, Asquith said, that made his colleagues rock with unquenchable laughter.

In the end Antwerp surrendered, and thousands of British troops were captured; Churchill vamoosed to London, where he got a pretty frosty reception from Clementine—since he had missed the birth of Sarah, their third baby. But was it so mad an idea?

Remember what was happening in the autumn of 1914. The Germans were racing towards the Channel ports. The loss of Ostend and Dunkirk would have been disastrous, since it would have been much more difficult to reinforce the troops in Flanders. The point of the Antwerp mission was to persuade the Belgians to hold out for ten days or so—to win a breathing-space and protect the other ports.

As it was, Churchill was able to hang on for six days. But it was enough. The other ports were saved. So let us rate the Antwerp Blunder out of 10. I would say it had a FIASCO FACTOR of 2, since it was really a success; and that it had a CHURCHILL FACTOR of 9 out of 10, since it is almost impossible to imagine that the Belgians would have stuck it out if he had not been there.

It has always been harder to make any kind of case for:

The Gallipoli Catastrophe.

On the face of things, this was one of the biggest military disasters in a war that had many disasters. By late 1914 the trenches stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel. Churchill was casting around for ways both to use the fleet, otherwise relatively underemployed, and to get round the abbatoir of the Western Front. Where could they go? First they thought of the Baltic, but the Germans were in charge there. Then he hit on the concept that often commended itself to him: the ‘soft under-belly’. He wanted to attack Germany’s ally, Turkey.

He would use the fleet to ram the Dardanelles—a narrow strait between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; capture Constantinople; take the Ottomans out of the war; relieve the pressure on Russia; bring in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania on the Allied side—and bingo! (we may imagine Churchill jabbing triumphantly at the map) the way would be clear to attack the Germans from both sides. Things did not go well.

The whole operation was finally wound up in 1916, by which time there had been about 180,000 Allied casualties, most of whom died of disease on the beaches and the promontories of the Gallipoli peninsula, without getting anywhere near Constantinople.

So many Australians and New Zealanders were sacrificed that Gallipoli became a cause of deep and folkloric bitterness and estrangement from the imperial power. The Irish regiments were so mauled that the episode is said to have encouraged the fight for independence. Churchill was effectively sacked by Asquith in May 1915, and went into a complete decline.

‘I thought he would die of grief,’ said Clementine. ‘I am finished,’ he groaned. Is there nothing to be said for the Dardanelles?

Well, it was at least an attempt to break the stalemate on the Western Front. Someone had to come up with an alternative to ‘chewing barbed wire in Flanders’, said Churchill—and he was surely right.

He was unlucky in his admirals, one of whom had a nervous breakdown; he was unlucky in his colleagues—notably Lord Fisher, the aged and frog-faced First Sea Lord, who blew endlessly hot and cold and then threw a colossal strop, flouncing out of office at the crucial moment. He was unlucky not to be able to control the timing of the operation, or to launch it with the élan it required.

But even if you make allowances for bad luck, we must accept that the whole concept was probably flawed. It seems to rely on a series of heroic assumptions about what would happen if Constantinople was eventually captured; and the surely imponderable outcome of a Balkan campaign. For his wild overoptimism, Churchill must take the blame.

As it was, ships were sunk, admirals dithered, men were machine-gunned on beaches or died of dysentery, and Mustafa Kemal emerged as a hero of the Turkish nation for his role in seeing off the British Empire. We have no alternative but to give the Dardanelles a FIASCO FACTOR of 10 and a CHURCHILL FACTOR of 10, since it would certainly not have happened without him. It could have worked—if a long series of cards had fallen the right way—but the mesmerising disaster convinced many people that Churchill not only possessed bad judgement, but that he was positively unstable in his vanity: in his desire somehow to engage personally in the conflict.

It says something about his bomb-proof ego that by the end of 1919 he was at it again, in an episode that has become known as:

The Russian Bungle.

Churchill was almost frenzied in his hostility to communism. He thought of it as a plague, a pestilence, a spiritual deformation. He referred to the ‘foul baboonery’ of Bolshevism, and on 26 November 1918 he had told his constituents in Dundee that ‘civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims’. It makes you wonder what he had against baboons.

Most people have forgotten that for the first couple of years after the 1917 revolution, Lenin and Trotsky had a pretty shaky hold on power. The country was awash with counter-revolutionaries, White Russians, Americans, French, Japanese, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks and Italians, and a substantial number of British troops—with Churchill cheering them on frantically from the War Office.

After some initial caution, he had decided that the war was winnable, and told a deeply sceptical Lloyd George that the communists were on the run. Encouraged by British officers, funded and supported by Churchill, the White Russians were making conspicuous gains. ‘Nothing can now preserve Bolshevism or the Bolshevik regime,’ he boasted to Lloyd George. At one stage he wanted to clinch the matter by issuing British troops with a new variety of—you guessed it—poison gas; and by October 1919 he had become so excited by the progress of the anti-Bolshevik generals that he was on the verge of taking himself to Russia.

The tickets were booked; Churchill was about to arrive like a reverse Lenin to proclaim the splendours of democracy. Then, alas, the whole thing went wrong. Trotsky organised a dynamic counter-attack. ‘I will not submit to be beaten by the baboons!’ Churchill cried—but he was.

The anti-Bolsheviks scarpered. The British troops were ignominiously evacuated. The communist tyranny began in earnest. The baboons went ape.

The great cartoonist David Low produced a portrait of Churchill as an incompetent big-game hunter. ‘He hunts lions but brings home decayed cats,’ said the caption. Four of the cats have names: Sidney Street, Antwerp Blunder, Gallipoli Mistake and Russian Bungle.

But was it such a bungle? He so nearly succeeded. The anti-Bolshevik General Yudenitch had almost reached Petrograd; Denikin was only 50 miles from Moscow. If he had been able to give the expedition the full-throated support he wanted—if Lloyd George and the cabinet had not been so leery—perhaps he could indeed have strangled communism at birth. Then the peoples of Russia and eastern Europe would have been spared seventy years of tyranny; there would have been no gulags, no Red Terror, no murder of the kulaks, no mass exterminations. He may not have succeeded, but it was unquestionably right to try.

So, the Russian expedition gets: FIASCO FACTOR 5; CHURCHILL FACTOR 10. He had the right general idea—which is more than can be said for:

The Chanak Cock-Up.

. . . by which he managed to bring down the government, end the political career of Lloyd George, immolate the Liberal Party that he had joined in 1904 and lose his seat in the process.

In September 1922 a crisis blew up because the armies of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) were threatening the British and French garrisons on the Gallipoli peninsula. These were stationed at Chanak, or Canakkale—the town nearest to the ancient site of Troy. Prime Minister Lloyd George was very anti-Turk and pro-Greek, and was keen to launch a kind of Christian war against the Mohammedans. He thought Chanak would be an excellent pretext to biff Johnny Turk.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Churchill decided to do a U-turn and announce that Lloyd George was right. This was odd, since Churchill was generally rather pro-Turk, like his father. And in foreign policy, as in life, it would be fair to say that he was not motivated by religious considerations of any kind. I am afraid it looks as though his only real reason for wanting a fight with the Turks at Chanak was to avenge the Dardanelles, to erase his personal psychic scar—not a good motive.

Thankfully, both Lloyd George and Churchill managed completely to muff their moment. Churchill issued a portentous press release on 15 September 1922 in which he announced that military action had the support of Canada, Australia and New Zealand—without breaking the news to the governments of those countries. They were not pleased, having no particular zeal to send more men to further Churchill-inspired massacres in the Dardanelles.

The press and public were alarmed. The headline of the Daily Mail was ‘Stop This New War!’, which more or less summed up the mood. The Conservatives decided that they had run out of patience with Lloyd George and Churchill. They met at the Carlton Club to pull the rug out from under the Coalition (and gave birth to the 1922 Conservative Private Members’ Committee). Andrew Bonar Law said Britain could not be the policeman of the world; Baldwin put the boot in.

The Chanak crisis was solved by diplomacy, but the British government fell, and Churchill was out. We must give Chanak a modest FIASCO FACTOR of 4, and a CHURCHILL FACTOR of 5, since he shared authorship with Lloyd George. But the political consequences were pretty seismic.

And his recovery was therefore doubly remarkable. When you look at this period—from 1922 to 1924—you really feel that he is an elemental force in British politics, too big to be sunk by the destruction of his Liberal Party, too big to ignore. Soon he was having chats with Baldwin about rejoining the Tories, twenty years after he had deserted them. In November 1924—even though he had just won a large majority—Baldwin reached out to the forty-nine-year-old renegade and made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Dumbfounded, he accepted. ‘I had the greatest difficulty convincing my wife that I was not merely teasing her,’ he said.

It is widely agreed that Churchill’s Chancellorship—whatever its merits—was blighted by wrongly

Going Back on Gold.

. . . and at the wrong rate. Everyone now accepts that this was a catastrophic error. The value of sterling was pegged back at its pre-war rate of $4.87—which meant the pound was overvalued, with fatal consequences for British industry. Exports became too expensive to compete on world markets. Businesses tried to cut costs by laying off staff or cutting wages. There were strikes, unemployment, chaos—and then the crash of 1929, and still no escape from the punishing regime of the Gold Standard.

In the end the pound was forced off gold in 1931 by a series of speculative attacks on the foreign exchange markets—just as it was prised out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Churchill carried the can for the whole disaster, and John Maynard Keynes wrote a denunciation called The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill. It was indeed his decision, and as Chancellor, he cannot escape the blame.

All we can do is enter some crucial mitigating points. First, he was himself instinctively against it. He could see the problem a strong pound would pose for British business and industry. In February 1925 he objected to the plan: ‘I would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content.’ Before he took the decision, he wrote long memos to his officials asking them if they could explain their support for the Gold Standard; and was much displeased by their woolly answers.

The officials talked vaguely of ‘stability’. But how did that help British manufacturers, if their goods were being priced out of the market? He took to quoting, with approval, William Jennings Bryan’s impassioned 1896 criticism of the Gold Standard: ‘You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’

He was absolutely right. The trouble was that he was surrounded by a lot of clever people who thought they knew about economics; and they thought the Gold Standard was a frightfully good idea. The most ineffably self-confident of them all was the Governor of the Bank of England, the nattily dressed Montagu Norman. ‘I will make you the golden Chancellor,’ he told Churchill. But Norman was not alone in his delusions.

The City was for it; the Labour Party was for it; Stanley Baldwin himself thought it would be easier just to get on and do it. In the end Churchill held a famous dinner party at Number 11 Downing Street, on 17 March 1925, and invited Keynes to come and put the contrary point of view. Alas, Keynes had a cold and was off form. Churchill the gold-o-sceptic found himself outnumbered, and reluctantly conceded.

The point is that he went back on gold in spite of his better judgement—and his judgement was better than that of a whole host of supposed financial experts. For those who remember recent British monetary history, he was in exactly the same position as Mrs Thatcher when she was bamboozled (by Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe) into joining the disastrous European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1989.

Both Churchill and Thatcher had the right instincts about the monetary straitjacket of a fixed exchange rate; both, after long resistance, submitted to the view of the ‘experts’. Going back on gold gets a FIASCO FACTOR of 10, in view of the economic mayhem that ensued, but we should surely rate it no higher than CHURCHILL FACTOR 2, since any other minister would have done it without a second thought—and he certainly gave it a second thought.

Partly as a result of the economic mess that he helped to create, Churchill and the Tories were kicked out again in 1929; Labour overtook the Tories for the first time in parliamentary seats; and he now spent more than ten years ‘in the wilderness’. He needed a new political fox to chase, a new cause to fight. He soon found a way of infuriating just about everyone, including the Tory Party leadership under Stanley Baldwin. Of all his misjudgements, the one that still looks the worst today is his

Misjudgement Over India.

He decided that it was his mission to resist any move towards Indian self-government—and he did so in a style that to us looks patronising and blimpish almost beyond belief.

In 1931 he memorably denounced Gandhi as a semi-naked fakir. He said it was ‘nauseating’ that this pioneer of non-violent resistance should be simultaneously engaged in organising civil disobedience while engaged in talks with ‘the representative of the King-Emperor’—i.e. Lord Irwin (later to become the Hitler-appeasing Halifax); as if Gandhi were some kind of terrorist. It was an absurd remark from a man who himself had no scruple about negotiating with gun-bearing Irish nationalists.

He prophesied bloodshed. He spoke in apocalyptic terms of the inability of the Indians to engage in self-rule, of the misery of the Untouchables and the inevitability of intercommunal violence. He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics—die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and sip his chota peg and glory in the possession of India.

Polite opinion held that he had slightly lost the plot. All parties were in favour of greater Indian independence—even most Tories. What was he up to? I am afraid his motives were not exactly pure. He was certainly outraged by the prospect of losing India, and the blow to the ‘prestige’ of the British Empire, not to mention the loss of export markets for Lancashire cotton. In that sense, he seemed selfish and chauvinistic in his objectives.

He wasn’t really a passionate lover of India—he hadn’t been there since 1899, when as a young subaltern he had spent most of his time tending his roses, collecting butterflies, playing polo and reading Gibbon. He wasn’t even particularly expert in the subject. Appearing before one House of Commons committee he seemed—most unusually—to restrict himself to rhetorical generalities. The awful truth is that he was engaged in political positioning.

He wanted to succeed Stanley Baldwin as leader of the Tories; he needed to curry favour with the right wing of the party—who did not think much of this floor-crossing ex-Liberal. India was the perfect issue on which to demonstrate his reactionary credentials. He gave long and florid speeches to rallies at which—like the Ukippers of today—he revelled in the way that he and his supporters were treated as fruitcakes and loonies. ‘We are a sort of inferior race, mentally deficient and composed principally of colonels and other undesirables who have fought for Britain,’ he boasted.

The strategy failed. The India Bill was passed. The Labour government got its way, with Tory agreement, in giving greater self-government to what is now the world’s largest democracy and an economic powerhouse. He was marginalised—proved wrong by events. The best that can be said is that he showed characteristic grace in defeat: in 1935 he sent a message to Gandhi, wishing him well. ‘Make a success and if you do I will advocate your getting much more.’ It is also worth bearing in mind that he was not wholly wrong in his prophecies: the end of British rule, when it finally came in 1948, was indeed accompanied by appalling intercommunal violence in which about a million people died; and the problems of the caste system persist to this day.

But that is not a good enough defence of a policy that now looks quixotically retrograde. Let’s give the Indian misjudgement a FIASCO FACTOR of 5 and a CHURCHILL FACTOR of 10.

By 1935 Baldwin was back as Prime Minister—but this time Churchill had gone too far in his rebelliousness, not least over India, and there was no place for him in the cabinet. Clearly there was scope for him to make mischief again. Could he find another campaign, another cause by which he could thrust himself to centre stage? Could he manage another cock-up? He sure could!

The Abdication Crisis.

In the late autumn of 1936 it became widely known that the King, Edward VIII, was having an affair with an American divorcee by the name of Wallis Simpson. Peculiar as it may seem to us today, this was thought to be a quite indefensible way to behave. Churchy, pipe-puffing Stanley Baldwin was quietly horrified. He decided that the King could indeed marry a divorcee—but that he would have to abdicate.

The young King’s plight was desperate. He could feel the ice floes shifting under him. He knew that his time on the throne could be running out. He needed someone to guide him, someone with experience, someone with weight in public affairs. He went—where else—to Churchill. The two men knew each other already: the King had been to stay at Blenheim; Churchill had got on well with him, and had even written a couple of speeches for him.

He had dinner with the King at Windsor, and then wrote a hilarious (and probably drunken) letter explaining how to survive, including the sensible observation that now was not the time to leave the country. Churchill became the unofficial leader of the ‘King’s Party’, and on 8 December, after a jolly good lunch at some Anglo-French binge, he decided to give the House of Commons a piece of his mind.

The heart of the matter, in his view, was that this was a matter of the heart, and the King was the King; and that if ministers had a problem with Mrs Simpson, then they, not the monarch, should step down. Alas, he completely misread the mood of the Commons. He was howled down by MPs, most of whom had spent the last few days listening to the peevish and puritanical mutterings of their constituents.

The yammering grew so loud that eventually he had to sit down, without finishing what he was going to say. Harold Nicolson said: ‘Winston collapsed utterly in the House yesterday . . . He has undone in five minutes the patient reconstruction works of two years.’ Many people—even friends of his—concluded that this time he really was finished. Let’s give the Abdication crisis a FIASCO FACTOR of 6 and a CHURCHILL FACTOR of 10, even if modern taste would award the argument to Churchill, of course.

Today’s electorate wouldn’t give a hoot if their monarch decided to marry a divorcee (come to think of it, the heir to the throne and his wife have both been married before). But that is emphatically not how it was seen at the time. Yet again, Churchill was written off: a progressive and compassionate instinct was seen as somehow ultra-monarchist and toadying.

He was by now sixty-one, and he looked obsolete, washed up, a great Edwardian sea creature flapping helplessly on the shingle and spouting empty nothings from his blowhole. Hardly anyone would have believed, at that point, that within three and a half years he would be Prime Minister.

—

LET US REVIEW this list of debacles—the richest and most jaw-dropping to be borne on the battle honours of any politician. What do they tell us about the character of Winston Churchill? Most obviously, we see that he had just that—what they used to call character. Any one of these fiascos, on its own, would have permanently disabled a normal politician. That Churchill kept going at all is tribute to his bounce-back-ability, to some Kevlar substance with which he insulated his ego and his morale.

It helped that he was so extrovert, so naturally self-expressive. He did not internalise his defeats, and with the exception of Gallipoli he did not gnaw his innards with self-reproach. He did not allow these abundant and picturesque prangs to change his fundamental view of himself; and it is a comment on the natural laziness of human beings that other people tend to judge you mainly according to your own judgement of yourself.

He bounced back so often because he had so much to believe in. Many people have observed glibly and slightly infuriatingly that if Churchill had missed his moment in 1940, he would have gone down as a ‘failure’, a man who never achieved very much. That is absurd.

No modern politician can hold a candle to his efforts: founding the welfare state, reforming prisons, building the navy, helping to win the First World War, becoming Chancellor, etc., etc.—and we are speaking of the period in which he is said to have been a ‘failure’, before the Second World War. He had so many enterprises and initiatives that it is no surprise he had setbacks, and he bounced back from these fiascos because people could instinctively recognise something in the way he conducted himself.

It wasn’t just that you could often make a very good case that he had been right: Gallipoli contained the germ of a sound strategy; Soviet communism was indeed barbaric; the Gold Standard was foisted on him; and so on. What do you notice about the classic Churchillian debacle, the key thing that distinguishes it from the fiascos that finish the careers of lesser men?

Did you spot it? Never did anyone draw the conclusion—as Churchill crawled from the smoking ruins of his detonated position—that he had been in any way personally corrupt.

Never was there the faintest whiff of scandal. None of his disasters came close to touching his integrity. It wasn’t just that he was a pretty safe pair of trousers (though there seems to be some recent doubt about that). That wasn’t the point.

He never seems to have lied, or cheated, or been underhand, let alone been motivated by financial gain. He took his positions because (a) they seemed to him to be right and (b) because he conceived that they would serve to advance his career; and there was no disgrace in making both calculations at once, after all: he thought they would be politically useful because they were right.

He arrived at his decisions not casually, but after massive research and cogitation—and it was this sheer volume of information flowing over his gills which helped him instinctively to point his nose upstream. In 1911, three years before the outbreak of war, he wrote a long memorandum for the Committee of Imperial Defence, predicting the exact course of the first forty days of the conflict—where and how the French would fall back, where the Germans would come to a halt.

General Henry Wilson said the paper was ‘ridiculous and fantastic—a silly memorandum’. Every word of it came true, to the very day. Germany lost the Battle of the Marne on the forty-first day, and the stalemate began. This wasn’t science fiction he was writing; he wasn’t just staring out of the window and chewing his pencil.

He said the war would last four years, when others said it would be over by Christmas. He saw the failings of Versailles. He got things right because he was better informed than almost every other politician. By the mid-1930s he was getting secret briefings from men in Whitehall and the military who were appalled by appeasement—Ralph Wigram and others—and who were desperate for someone to raise the alarm about Germany.

Sometimes he knew more than Baldwin himself, and on one occasion he publicly humiliated the Prime Minister by his superior knowledge of the strength of the Luftwaffe (the Nazis had a lot more planes than Baldwin claimed). He followed intently what was happening in Germany; he constantly called the attention of Parliament to the persecution of the Jews—from 1932 onwards—and warned of Nazi ideology. When Hitler got 95 per cent of the vote in November 1933, he said that the Nazis ‘declare war is glorious’, and that they ‘inculcate a form of bloodlust in their children without parallel as an education since Barbarian and Pagan times’.

Louder and louder he rang his alarm bell, because he could see with terrible clarity what was going to happen. He saw the truth about Hitler more clearly even than poor old Putzi Hanfstaengl, with whom he had caroused in Munich.

The ivory-tinkling spin-doctor eventually fell foul of Goebbels, and was denounced by Unity Mitford to Hitler—apparently for making unpatriotic remarks. In 1937 Putzi received some terrifying orders: he was to get in a plane, with a parachute, and jump out over war-torn Spain—to go behind the republican lines and work undercover to help the fascist forces of General Franco.

It didn’t sound like a mission from which he was expected to return. He did as he was told, mainly because he assumed he would be shot if he didn’t. The plane took off and headed for Spain, chugging hour after hour through the sky, with Hanfstaengl sitting in the back with his parachute on and in a state of gibbering fear.

It wasn’t just the prospect of the jump. Even if he survived, he was sure the Spanish republicans would capture him—and probably tear him to pieces. Eventually the plane landed with an engine malfunction, and he found that they were still in Germany. They had been going in circles.

The whole thing was a ghastly practical joke by Hitler and Goebbels. Putzi decided understandably that he was giving up Nazism for good, and fled to England and then America. Churchill saw what Hitler’s own spin-doctor had tried to conceal from himself—the fundamental savagery of the regime.

The difference between Churchill and others was that he acted on his insights. He not only meditated on what was happening; he tried to change it. Most politicians go with the flow of events. They see what seems inevitable, and then try to align themselves with destiny—and then (usually) try to present matters as well as they can and try in some feeble way to claim credit for whatever has occurred.

Churchill had a few fixed ideas about what should happen: the preservation of the British Empire, the encouragement of democracy, the boosting of British ‘prestige’—and then he used his Herculean strength to bend the course of events so as to conform to those ideals. Think of him dredging and damming a river so as to find his father’s watch.

That was why he was associated with so many epic cock-ups—because he dared to try to change the entire shape of history. He was the man who burst the cabin door and tried to wrestle the controls of the stricken plane. He was the large protruding nail on which destiny snagged her coat.

The last thing Britain or the world needed in 1940 was someone who was going to sit back and let things unfold. It needed someone with almost superhuman will and courage, to interpose themselves between the world and disaster. He spoke of his relief when he took office in 1940, because this time—unlike with Gallipoli or the Russian bungle—he had full authority to direct events; which is why he chose to be both Prime Minister and Minister of Defence.

Our argument so far has been that Churchill, in comparison to his rivals at home and abroad, was like some unbeatable card in a game of Star Wars Top Trumps. He was the best for work rate, for rhetorical skills, for humour, for insight. He beat his rivals for technical originality and sheer blind bravery. If you have ever played that excellent game, you will know what I mean when I say that he was also the character with the greatest ‘Force Factor’. It is time to see how he played that card in the Second World War.