Darkest Hour Read online

  Chamberlain’s failure to grasp the magnitude of the situation facing the nation only deepened the fury of his opponents in the House, and soon members from both sides were leaping to their feet, attempting to catch the Speaker’s eye for their turn to speak. Shouts of ‘Go!’ and ‘Resign!’ echoed around the Chamber, but still Chamberlain was unmoved. Clearly, one last devastating attack was required, and the perfect man to deliver it rose to his feet. The raucous Chamber fell silent. David Lloyd George, the former Liberal wartime Prime Minister himself, slowly at first but then in a more and more visceral fashion, set about chastising Chamberlain for exposing Britain to ‘the worst strategic position in which this country has ever been placed’. The climax came with a call directly to Chamberlain’s conscience: ‘Give an example of sacrifice, because there is nothing that can contribute more to victory in this war than that he should sacrifice the seals of office.’

  Watching from the gallery above, nodding in approval, was the speaker’s wife, Dame Margaret Lloyd George, who would later write:

  I am so glad my husband had a hand in turning Chamberlain out. I have never seen such a scene, the House was determined to get rid of him & Sir John Simon & Sam Hoare . . . The howl that followed him out was awful & the shouts of ‘Go, go’. I have never seen a P.M. retiring with such a send off. He has brought a plight, & the Tory party always said after Munich, ‘He has saved us from War’. Poor things, they must have had an eye opener.

  The debate raged on into the night. Chamberlain would not go gently. He was just weeks away from admitting for the first time in his diary that he was in ‘considerable pain’ from the bowel cancer that would lead to his death in just a few short months. Perhaps, in his heart, he knew that this moment was his last chance to avoid being blamed for the collapse of Europe, democracy and the British way of life. And perhaps there was another, more recondite reason for his reluctance to go.

  A few seats down the front bench from him sat a man who, in reality, was far more culpable in respect of the previous month’s Norway campaign, which had seen the loss of 1,800 men, one aircraft carrier, two cruisers, seven destroyers and a submarine.

  Winston Spencer Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had been the principal architect of the country’s disastrous naval strategy. But with attentions diverted entirely onto the PM, and his own turn to speak yet to come, Churchill remained out of the firing line, biding his time, keeping his fingerprints off the murder weapon.

  Winston was not popular. Indeed, he was something of a joke figure at this time, an egotist, a ‘half-breed American’ who, in the words of one Conservative MP, Sir Henry (‘Chips’) Channon, stood for only one thing: himself. Hard to imagine, now, with Britain having a reported 3,500 pubs and hotels, over 1,500 halls and establishments, and twenty-five streets bearing his name, and with his face emblazoned on everything from beer coasters to door-mats – not to mention his bust sporadically appearing in the Oval Office of the President of the United States – but in May 1940 his was the furthest thing in most people’s minds from a safe pair of hands.

  Still labelled a turncoat by many in the party for ‘crossing the floor’ – switching political allegiance from Conservative to Liberal in 1904, and then back to Conservative again in 1924 – Churchill had nonetheless proven himself startlingly loyal to Chamberlain. So he was on this day too, when, in the midst of Lloyd George’s speech, he offered himself for punishment in the PM’s stead: ‘I take complete responsibility for everything that has been done by the Admiralty, and I take my full share of the burden.’

  Lloyd George, whose flow Churchill had interrupted, deftly replied, ‘The right hon. Gentleman must not allow himself to be converted into an air-raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues.’

  Churchill’s mea culpa was but the first instalment of a faux rescue mission, one calculated to fail but also to win over his colleagues with a moving display of loyalty – a golden opportunity then to show how ‘prime ministerial’ he could be when he tried, and to thereby pencil his own name in as a dark horse in the race.

  When his turn finally came to speak, and speak at length, the rebels leaned forward, expectant, hopeful for immortal phrases of condemnation, but he uttered nothing immortal, nothing indeed that Chamberlain couldn’t have inscribed himself upon his own headstone. Instead Churchill offered praise so exquisitely faint that it delivered just what he wanted: too little, too late. The rescuing verbiage Winston might have uncorked was clearly being saved for another day, another hour. For he had speeches already fermenting, phrases being silently rehearsed that would serve another, more spectacular, purpose in the days to come, and they would not be wasted here.

  When Winston sat again, he had achieved perhaps one thing with his speech: his own star, if not yet shining bright, had lost a little of its tarnish at a critical moment when all the others’ stars had gone out.

  Thus, when the Speaker called for the House to divide and vote, most minds were in no doubt. Chips Channon recalled:

  We watched the insurgents file out of the Opposition Lobby . . . ‘Quislings’, we shouted at them, ‘Rats’. ‘Yes-men’, they replied . . . ‘281 to 200’ . . . There were shouts of ‘Resign – Resign’ . . . and that old ape Josh Wedgwood began to wave his arms about and sing ‘Rule Britannia’. Harold Macmillan, next to him, joined in, but they were howled down. Neville appeared bowled over by the ominous figures, and was the first to rise. He looked grave and thoughtful and sad . . . No crowds tonight to cheer him, as there were before Munich – only a solitary little man, who had done his best for England.

  Despite this narrow win, Chamberlain had lost the confidence of his party as a total of forty-one Conservative MPs had voted against the Government. The youngest of these was John Profumo, who, at just twenty-five, had sneaked away from his barracks to attend the vote and was later castigated by the fearsome Tory Chief Whip, David Margesson: ‘you utterly contemptible little shit . . . for the rest of your life you will be ashamed of what you did last night’. With the Conservative majority slashed to just eighty-one, there could be no more debate. What was needed was a public crusade akin to the private thoughts of Chamberlain’s PPS, Jock Colville, who noted how ‘disgusting’ it was ‘that everybody is concentrating their energies on an internal political crisis (à la française) instead of taking thought for the morrow about Hitler’s next move’. A new leader must be found. But who? Who was worthy? And who was ready?

  Political infighting had clouded the desperate situation that Britain found herself in. She needed someone not just to unite the Conservative Party but also to bring together the Opposition parties and Armed Forces, the latter having failed to work together in this first military defeat that so abruptly ended the so-called ‘Phoney War’ of the last eight months initiated by Germany’s invasion of Poland.

  Channon noted in his diary that ‘rumour and intrigue, plot and counter-plot’ were now rife among leading politicians. But it was not Churchill, whom so many had defended and praised in the previous days’ debates, who was garnering the support of the Conservative Party. One name, above all, was emerging as the only natural successor to Chamberlain. It was that of a man who was not even permitted to sit on either side of the Commons. This was Lord Halifax, the current Foreign Secretary and member of the House of Lords, who had been quietly watching the proceedings from the Peers’ Gallery, alongside fellow Lords, ambassadors and leading dignitaries from among Britain’s allies.

  A major roadblock to Halifax taking over from Chamberlain lay in the constitution itself. The unique nature of the British parliamentary system stipulates that anyone with a seat in the House of Lords cannot also stand for or serve as an elected Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. A serious constitutional hurdle would thus arise should Lord Halifax wish to serve as the Prime Minister and parliamentary leader when he was not a parliamentarian himself.

  Halifax’s biographer, Andrew Roberts, describes how the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minis
ter had briefly discussed the previously unthinkable outcome of a Halifax leadership during the second day’s debate, on 8 May. Chamberlain had ‘made it clear that should he be forced to resign he wanted Halifax to take over’, but when business resumed on Thursday, 9 May, Lord Halifax’s response was not as expected. In his diary, he wrote that the Prime Minister asked him to come to No. 10 Downing Street at 10.15 a.m., where Chamberlain told Halifax that ‘he thought the position could not be left as it was by the House of Commons Division, and that it was essential to restore confidence in the Government’. Again, Chamberlain returned to the subject of his replacement, to which Halifax replied (as noted in his diary), ‘if it were myself he [Chamberlain] might continue to serve in the Government. I put all the arguments that I could think of against myself, laying considerable emphasis on the difficult position of a Prime Minister unable to make contact with the centre of gravity in the House of Commons.’

  One could be forgiven for suspecting false modesty here, as Halifax, by his subsequent actions, would show that he wished very much to keep his hands on the levers of power. In his diary, he remarked that ‘The conversation and the evident drift of his [Chamberlain’s] mind left me with a bad stomach ache. I told him again, as I had told him the day before, that if the Labour people said that they would only serve under me I should tell them that I was not prepared to do it.’

  A stomach ache? The Conservative MP R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler recorded a rather different recollection of a conversation he had with the wily Halifax after his meeting with Chamberlain:

  He [Halifax] told me that he felt he could do the job. He also felt that Churchill needed a restraining influence. Could that restraint be better exercised as Prime Minister or as a Minister in Churchill’s government? Even if he chose the former role, Churchill’s qualities and experience would surely mean that he would be ‘running the war anyway’ and Halifax’s own position would speedily turn into a sort of honorary Prime Minister.

  Despite Halifax’s protestations, this seems a more credible reason for declining the one role that defines the culmination of success in British politics. Halifax’s reservations were fundamentally caused by his position in the Lords preventing him from sitting as Prime Minister in the House of Commons. So where would that leave Halifax as leader of the nation?

  To be handed the title of leader of Great Britain but to wield no real power, in addition to being consistently undermined by Churchill, whom he knew to be a better strategist and war leader than himself, was hardly an attractive prospect for a man of Halifax’s stature and ego. But how could his fellow politicians have so misjudged his intentions? The Lords wanted Halifax, King George VI wanted Halifax, even Labour wanted Halifax. It seemed they were mustering their support for a man who all of a sudden had little interest in taking the job, at least within the current framework.

  And so it was that Churchill’s name, incredibly, worked itself to the top of the list.

  What a turnaround this was. The unthinkable, just days before, was now being considered as a viable option. But none were easy about the choice, for what a conundrum he was, an amalgam of irreconcilable parts: showman, show-off, blow-hard, poet, journalist, historian, adventurer, melancholic, arguably an alcoholic, inarguably of pensionable age, at sixty-five a man whose primary distinction was as a consistent failure, reliably misreading the writing on the wall, getting things badly wrong too often, and too often when he needed to get them very, very right. Considered a dangerous warmonger for his mistakes as First Lord of the Admiralty during the Great War (principally for the human disaster that was the Gallipoli campaign against the Ottomans in the Eastern Mediterranean, in which 45,000 Commonwealth men lost their lives), he had spent most of the last ten years in a self-described ‘wilderness’ after a catalogue of other mistakes, among them his opposition to Indian Home Rule, and his rough handling of a miners’ strike in Wales.

  It can only be natural that Churchill, after so many mistakes, harboured doubts about his own suitability. Indeed, given the enormity of his mistakes, it would be the more extraordinary claim – and be psychologically untenable – to conclude otherwise. He knew he was flawed. He knew that at this point in his career he was the butt of many jokes and the delight of cartoonists: something that many people today who only know what he became might find startling. While his own ambition to assume the role was not in question – he had desired the role of Prime Minister since childhood, so as to complete a family narrative left unfinished by his late father, Randolph – he knew how poorly he had handled these past crises, and how high the human cost had been. But if he himself deemed self-doubt a negative – speaking often of leadership as the decisive application of an informed vision – there is no reason we should agree with him, for as long as self-doubt is not paralysing, it also allows for alternative points of view to be given their proper weight and consideration and so can be considered a vital step in any sound decision-making process.

  Typical of the general view of Winston at this time was that of Sir Edmund Ironside, Commander of the Imperial General Staff, who noted his ambivalence in his diary: ‘Naturally the only man who can succeed [Chamberlain] is Winston but he is too unstable, though he has the genius to bring the war to an end.’

  And so, while elevation to the top job was far from a certainty, one thing Winston clearly had over Halifax was his first-hand experience of war. His military credentials – he had served in both the Boer War and the First World War, and observed several other skirmishes as a journalist – were, for all his missteps, superior in every respect to those of the Foreign Secretary, who knew little of battle or even military strategy, and had only a month before revealed his ignorance of matters military: Roberts writes how when Halifax was asked if ‘an attack on Trondheim might have been more effective than one on Narvik, he was forced to admit that he was not competent to answer the question’.

  Another minus in Halifax’s column, blemishing his standing with the public, was his backing for the policy of appeasement. Even when Hitler proved insatiable, Halifax had persisted in his belief in peace, and peace at almost any price.

  The field, then, was unusually empty of other viable contenders. Even Anthony Eden’s popularity had fallen by the wayside. In March 1939, Eden had the support of 38 per cent of the public in an opinion poll of who they would like to see as the next Prime Minister, compared to Churchill and Halifax’s paltry 7 per cent. Having resigned as Foreign Secretary over Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, he had rejoined the Government as Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, but this lower-ranking position eliminated him from any potential leadership bid at this juncture.

  Thus, with Halifax shrinking for now from the task, Churchill assumed the strut and mien and talk – above all the talk – of a leader.

  To subtly advance his cause without appearing to do so, Churchill met several of his close allies on the morning of 9 May. Eden joined him at the Admiralty, and while Churchill shaved he ‘rehearsed to me [Eden] the events of the previous evening. He thought that Neville would not be able to bring in Labour and that a national Government must be formed.’

  Next Churchill saw his old friend Lord Beaverbrook, the powerful newspaper baron, who tried to elicit a clear answer on the question of leadership. Again, Churchill gave nothing away, saying, ‘I will serve under any Minister capable of prosecuting the War.’

  Churchill had lunch with Eden and the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Kingsley Wood, that day. There, Wood made it clear he supported the First Lord of the Admiralty for leader and urged him ‘that if asked he should make plain his willingness [to succeed]’. As Eden recalled, he had been ‘surprised to find Kingsley Wood there giving a warning that Chamberlain would want Halifax to succeed him and would want Churchill to agree. Wood advised: “Don’t agree, and don’t say anything.” I was shocked that Wood should talk in this way, for he had been so much Chamberlain’s man, but it was good counsel and I seconded it.’

  Chamberlain, with his mind made up to step do
wn, summoned Halifax and Churchill to Downing Street at 4.30 that afternoon.

  The contradictory accounts of this history-altering meeting have become something of a legend. What we do know is that in attendance were Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Winston Churchill and the Chief Whip, David Margesson. The PM had gathered them all together to inform them of his decision to step down and to decide upon whom the task of leading the country should fall. The most immediate account of events comes from Halifax’s diary. He recalls how Chamberlain affirmed his decision to step down but did not indicate a preferred replacement, only that ‘he would happily do service under either man’. As the leaders of the Labour Party – who held the whip-hand in any talks about the composition of a unity government – were due to travel to Bournemouth that night for their conference, the Government’s concession that any new administration must feature them in prominent positions meant any decision had to be made swiftly.

  The tension was unbearable for Halifax. Recalling that his ‘stomach ache continued’, it seems that his body was physically rejecting the idea of leadership. His thoughts were not just of Winston’s ‘qualities compared to [his] own’, but they also returned to the question of what exactly his position would be were he to assume the leadership: ‘Winston would be running Defence . . . and I [as a Peer] should have no access to the House of Commons. The inevitable result would be that being outside both these points of vital contact I should speedily become a more or less honorary Prime Minister, living in a kind of twilight just outside the things that really mattered.’ This poignant assessment of the situation was followed by a somewhat scathing opinion of Winston’s ‘suitable expression of regard and humility, [he] said he could not but feel the force of what I had said, and the P.M. reluctantly, and Winston evidently with much less reluctance, finished by accepting my view’. This account is corroborated by the diary entry made the same day by the Permanent Under-Secretary to the Foreign Office and Halifax’s right-hand man, Sir Alexander Cadogan.