CHAPTER 4

THE RANDOLPH FACTOR










At the age of seventy-three Winston Churchill wrote a curious little essay that he did not intend for publication—at least not until after his death. It is all about a spooky experience that he had in the winter of 1947. The glory days of the war and the premiership are over, and he finds himself in his studio in the cottage at Chartwell.

He is getting ready to paint, when he feels an odd sensation—and turns round to see his father sitting in an armchair. Randolph’s eyes are twinkling and he is fiddling with his amber cigarette holder, just as Churchill remembers him from those rare moments when he was both charming and loving to his son.

There then takes place a poignant conversation. The conceit is that in the fifty-two years since he died—in political isolation and syphilitic despair—Randolph does not know what has happened in the world. So Churchill fills him in.

He tells him that King George VI is on the throne, and that they still race the Derby, and that the Turf Club is ‘OK’ and that ‘OK’ is a new American expression. He tells Randolph how the former Tory leader Arthur Balfour eventually came a cropper—a pleasing reflection, since neither of them really got on with snooty old Balfour. He relates the rise of socialism. He explains that there have been two world wars in each of which about thirty million people have died, and how the Russians have a new type of tsar, more fell and murderous than any that has gone before.

The trick of the piece is that Randolph never quite understands what his son has accomplished. The father gathers that the son is now a part-time painter, of indifferent ability, that he appears to live in a small cottage, and that he never rose above the rank of major in the yeomanry.

At the end of Churchill’s grim exposition of the modern world, Randolph seems vaguely impressed with how much his son seems to know about current affairs. He says, with deafening irony, ‘Of course you are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I really wonder that you didn’t go into politics. You might have done a lot to help. You might even have made a name for yourself.’

At this he smiles and strikes a match, and in the flash the apparition vanishes. Many historians have taken this sketch—which Churchill’s family called ‘The Dream’—to be immensely and deliberately revealing about the psychological make-up of Winston Churchill. So it surely is.

It is elegiac; it is wistful; it is in one sense a great sorrowful sigh of yearning from a man who always wanted to impress his father and never succeeded. As Winston Churchill used to tell his own children, he never had more than five conversations with his father—or not conversations of any length; and he always had the feeling that he didn’t quite measure up to expectations.

He spent his youth in the certainty, relentlessly rubbed in by Randolph, that he must be less clever than his father. Randolph had been to Eton, whereas it was thought safer to send young Winston to Harrow—partly because of his health (the air of the hill being deemed better for his fragile lungs than the dank air by the Thames) but really because Harrow, in those days, was supposed to be less intellectually demanding.

Randolph had been to Merton College, Oxford, and had almost got a first in law. He could quote Horace with fluency. Churchill, on the other hand, had flunked his exams and only scraped into Sandhurst.

As Winston had struggled on his duffer’s career path, he had watched his father’s meteoric ascent, his rise to the Chancellorship, how he dominated the Tory Party; and then it was the cruel fate of young Winston also to watch his father’s decline. He scoured newspapers for accounts of his speeches. He was furiously loyal. He refused to accept that his faculties were dimming, that his diction was slurred and that he lacked his former oratorical fire; and when once he was in the audience and someone let out a catcall, the teenage Churchill whirled round and hissed, ‘Stop that now, you snub-nosed radical!’

When Churchill was twenty his relations with his father had a last golden moment. He found himself invited to lunches with great and famous men such as Joe Chamberlain, Herbert Henry Asquith and Lord Rosebery, and performed creditably. ‘He has much smartened up,’ noted his father, ‘and he has got steadier . . . Sandhurst has done wonders for him.’ By his own account, Churchill dreamed of being politically useful to his old man, of joining him in Parliament, of rallying to his cause—and then he was gone, dead at forty-five, before his son had the chance.

So here he is now in ‘The Dream’, with his father before him, and the moment has finally come to explain to his wrathful parent that the cosmic Head Master has a new end-of-term report for Winston; that he is no longer a wastrel and an idler but the Greatest Living Englishman and the Saviour of his Country—and, puff, Randolph has gone again before he can hear the good news.

We end the piece in a state of melancholy. Churchill feels too tired to go on painting. His cigar has gone out and the ash has fallen among the paints. On the face of it we are meant to feel sorry for him and the hyper-Victorian distance of his relationship with Randolph. But I can’t help thinking that there is also a bit of smugness in this essay.

He is not only seeking his father’s posthumous approval. He is surreptitiously boasting—to Randolph and to the reader—of how he defied those miserable expectations, and actually exceeded his father in virtually every respect.

So there! says Winston Churchill to the vanished shade of Randolph. Put that in your cigarette holder and smoke it, you gooseberry-eyed and walrus-moustached demagogue. You had no right to be so critical—that is the message to Randolph and the subtext of the essay.

What was Churchill trying to do in that studio at Chartwell, when the ghost of his father appeared? He was actually repairing an old oil painting of Randolph, one that had been damaged in some Ulster club. He was taking that image, and he was using his own paints and his own skill to tart it up.

There, surely, is the metaphor that sums up the whole exercise. Churchill said that he set out to ‘vindicate’ his father, and that is true. But he also means to go one better. He takes that battered and nicotine-stained canvas and he embellishes it.

It was Randolph who began the family tradition of making money from journalism. As Churchill notes in ‘The Dream’, Randolph went off to South Africa for the Daily Graphic, and earned the colossal sum of £100 an article. So how does Churchill launch himself upon the world?

He goes off to South Africa, among other places, and becomes the most highly paid journalist of his age; and like Randolph, he makes a bit of a habit of cheesing off the people who help him in his ambitions.

And what kind of lesson did Randolph offer his son, about how to get on in Parliament? He displayed a shocking disloyalty to the Tories, and set up a group called the ‘Fourth Party’, whose mission was to bash Gladstone but also to wind up the Tory Party leadership, in the form of Sir Stafford Northcote.

Randolph and chums called him ‘the goat’, and after a while the goat could take it no more, and wrote to Randolph, begging him not to be such a tosser. Randolph wrote back, with blissful condescension, saying: ‘Since I have been in parliament I have always acted on my own account, and I shall continue to do so.’

There, too, is young Churchill’s cue: and when he gets to Parliament in 1900 he begins by setting up his own group of rebellious young Tories—called the Hughligans, in honour of Hugh Cecil, one of their number—and razzes the Tory high command, with Randolphian brio and insolence.

It was Randolph who showed the first and programmatic disdain for the very idea of party loyalty. As his son later described it, his father’s preferred strategic position was ‘looking down on the Front Benches on both sides and regarding all parties in the House of Commons with an impartiality which is quite sublime’.

So how does Churchill treat his political parties? As he once said—with the kind of candour that would be simply intolerable in today’s desiccated politics—choosing a political party is like choosing a horse: you just go for the nag that will take you farthest and fastest. As we have seen, he chooses one, and leaps off just before it is about to die; leaps on a Liberal horse; and when that, too, is obviously about to cark it (or possibly dead on its feet), he leaps back on a new Tory steed. No one, before or since, has been so magnificently and unrepentantly disloyal.

Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it—a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.

And he gets it from Randolph. Randolph’s formula was called ‘Tory Democracy’. The idea was a bit vague (asked to define it, Randolph said it was ‘opportunism, mostly’). But Tory Democracy galvanised and invigorated the Tory Party in the 1880s, and the idea certainly invigorated the career of Randolph Churchill.

His son takes up the theme. Randolph campaigned for servants to be entitled to compensation for industrial accidents, and in the same spirit Winston is the author of important social reforms: bringing the pension age down to sixty-five, setting up Labour Exchanges, giving workers the tea break, and so on—while always remaining, on the whole, a steady defender of free markets.

Churchill inherits his political positioning from Randolph; and above all he inherits his style, his self-projection. Randolph became the most famous orator of his day, the man who could clear the tea rooms when he stood up to speak, and whose working-class fans called him ‘Little Randy’ and ‘Cheeky Randy’. ‘Give it to ’em hot, Randy!’ they cried, when the shrimp-like fellow worked himself up into a frenzy of pop-eyed invective—a snarling version of the P. G. Wodehouse character Gussie Fink-Nottle in the great prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School.

He was a phrase-maker of note, who said that Gladstone was ‘an old man in a hurry’. Speaking of Gladstone’s habit of relaxing by chopping wood at Hawarden Castle, he said, ‘the forest laments in order that Mr Gladstone may perspire’. Churchill adopts the same speaking techniques—mostly writing out the whole text in full, before trying to declaim as much as possible from memory—and becomes the most glorious political speaker not just of his age but perhaps of any age.

But where, you may ask, did Randolph get it all from? Who was his inspiration?

Both Churchills, father and son, are avowedly working in the tradition of that greatest of all Tory magicians and opportunists, Benjamin Disraeli. Randolph was Disraeli’s disciple and his vicar on earth. When Disraeli died, Randolph helped to establish the ‘Primrose League’ in his memory, because the primrose was the favourite flower of the great Victorian leader and dandy.

As Randolph tells his son in ‘The Dream’, ‘I always believed in Dizzy, that old Jew. He saw the future. He had to bring the British working man into the centre of the picture.’ The two Churchills—father and son—were, as Winston put it, the ‘bearers of the mantle of Elijah’, the heirs of Disraeli.

The continuities are indeed very striking, and go way beyond an interest in social reform. Disraeli and the Churchills also have in common the journalism (and in Winston’s case, the novel), the love of show, the rhetorical flourishes, the sense of history, the imperialism, the monarchism, the slight air of camp and the inveterate opportunism.

These days it seems that Disraeli is in danger of some sort of eclipse. Douglas Hurd has produced a fine but slightly finger-wagging biography, demanding to know what Disraeli actually achieved by comparison with ‘effective’ plodders like Peel.

This is unfair on Disraeli, of course, but also on a crucial tradition in modern British politics. If it hadn’t been for Disraeli, we would not have had Randolph Churchill, and if it hadn’t been for the example and model provided by Randolph, we would never have had Winston Churchill. What was Churchill’s delighted reaction, when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made him Chancellor of the Exchequer? ‘I still have my father’s robes!’

I do not mean to suggest that Churchill was identical to his father, or some kind of mini-me. In all sorts of important ways, he was very different, and a very much better man.

Randolph was a serious cad, in a way that Churchill never quite managed. It is hard to imagine Winston contracting syphilis. Both his parents were ‘famous for sex’, in the phrase of Muriel Spark, in a way that Churchill wasn’t.

You can’t see Churchill getting so deranged with anger as to assault his valet, as Randolph did, and you can’t imagine him writing such dreadful letters to his children. And Winston would never have behaved in the demented way that Randolph did in 1873, when he tried to blackmail the Prince of Wales, and then challenged him to a duel.

This bizarre and revolting story has now faded into a dusty crevice of the library; but when Winston Churchill was beginning his career, there were people who remembered it—and they must have wondered how far the apple had fallen from the tree.

It all began because Randolph’s older brother, the Earl of Blandford, was having a major extramarital affair with a woman called Lady Edith Aylesford. This Edith seems from her photo to have had a longish nose, but she must have been a sex bomb. She was simultaneously involved with Blandford, with her husband, and with ‘Bertie’—the portly and underemployed heir to the throne. That was how they carried on in those days, you see.

Edith decided that she wanted to divorce her husband, Lord Aylesford, and shack up with Blandford. For reasons that are not quite clear, Randolph decided that his older brother should be party to no such thing. It would bring disgrace on the family even to be cited in a divorce case, he said.

So he came up with a wheeze to get the Prince of Wales—who set the moral tone for society—to forbid the divorce. He found some letters from Prince Bertie to Edith. They were hot stuff, said Randolph. They implied intimacy between the Prince and Lady Edith, and if they were exposed—why, then Bertie would never sit upon the throne!

He threatened to publish. An epic scandal impended. The Queen was informed. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, had to step in. An incandescent Bertie challenged Randolph to a duel, to which Randolph wrote back by figuratively sticking up two fingers to the heir to the throne, by pointing out that no subject could be asked to risk the life of a future monarch.

In the end the whole Churchill family had to be banished to Ireland, with the Duke of Marlborough going as Viceroy and Randolph serving as his Private Secretary; which is why Winston spent his early years in Dublin. As for the various marriages and love affairs, they all came to grief in one way or another.

I dig up this unhappy tale as evidence of that quality of Randolph’s that Winston certainly did inherit—and that is not the caddishness, but the recklessness, or rather, the willingness to take risks. It was loopy of Randolph to think he could stop the divorce of his brother by blackmailing the Prince of Wales.

It was loopy of him, at the end of his career, to think that there was no one who could replace him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that he was safe to threaten to resign. ‘I had forgotten Goschen,’ he said, once they put Goschen in instead. (Indeed, George Goschen, the first Viscount Goschen, is only remembered for being forgotten by Randolph.) But that gambler’s temperament he passed on to his son—and it is vital that he did.

By the time Winston Churchill came to power in May 1940, there were many people who were amazed, and many who were appalled—but also many who thought it was inevitable. In 1936—even as he was denying him a place in the cabinet—Stanley Baldwin remarked that they would need to keep Churchill in reserve to serve as a war prime minister.

By 1939 there were poster campaigns in London, with the slogan ‘What Price Churchill?’ Candidates began to stand in by-elections on a ‘Bring Back Churchill’ ticket. In May 1940, shortly before the Norway debate, his acolyte Harold Macmillan approached Churchill in the lobby and said, ‘We must have a new Prime Minister and it must be you.’

As Churchill said about the moment when he finally took over, ‘I felt as though I was walking with destiny. All my life was a preparation for this hour and this trial.’ He did indeed seem somehow predestined for the job, and not just in his own eyes.

No one else had such long experience of fighting—both as a politician and a soldier. No one else seemed built on the same scale as Churchill, or equal to the level of events—and there was a further reason why so many people looked at him in this way, as the natural man for the moment.

They knew that throughout the amazing snakes-and-ladders of his life he had followed the pattern of Randolph not just in his ducal disdain for party or his Homeric desire for glory but in his willingness to back himself and his ideas—to take risks that no one else would take.

In peacetime, such behaviour can be disastrous. But you can’t win a war without taking risks, and you won’t take risks unless you are brave. That, finally, was the quality that people sensed in Churchill; that was why some people yearned for him in 1940, in spite of all the sneering of the Tory establishment and the appeasers.

His whole career so far had been a testament to that primordial virtue—the virtue, as he pointed out himself, that makes possible all the others. Of the immense physical and moral courage of Churchill there can be no doubt.

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