I shall be glad when this election business is over,” Churchill had said. “It hovers over me like a vulture of uncertainty in the sky.” He did not like elections but had waged them most of his life. He liked to quote his father in this respect: “Never . . . be afraid of British democracy.” But it disappointed him. Some people threw stones; a squib nearly hit him in the face. And he was exhausted—more so, he said, than he had ever been since the Boer War.
On Election Day, July 26, 1945, Churchill was seen in his siren suit holding a cigar. He appeared impassive; the only emotion he showed was when he was told that the king had sent word to say how much he would be missed. The British people had defeated his party and turned him out of office.
“Keep alert,” he advised some young friends of one of his daughters. “It’s your turn now. I’ve thrown the reins on the horse’s neck. . . .”
“But you won the race, sir,” one of them interjected.
“Yes . . . and in consequence I’ve been warned off the Turf!”
Beaverbrook had predicted the result: “Winston is a great war P.M., but he is not the man for the peace.” Or as Churchill put it, he would not be the one to “bring the magic of averages to the aid of millions,” and would not even be on hand through the end of the Potsdam Conference—code-named “Terminal.” He was replaced there by Clement Attlee.
It is not difficult to imagine how he must have felt. He had given a sense of it, some decades earlier, in a biographical sketch of King Alfonso XIII of Spain. In it he made a distinction between monarchs and politicians, noting that the latter should be prepared to be tossed out at any time, but if this happened to the former, the damage was spiritual as well as political. For him at this moment, though, the two roles and sets of emotions must have blurred. Poor Alfonso: “To begin life again in middle age under novel and contracted conditions with a status and in a state of mind never before experienced. . . . Surely a harsh destiny!” Now the portrayal came closer to home: “To have given his best, to have faced every peril and anxiety, to have accomplished great things, to have presided over his country during all the perils of the twentieth century . . . and then to be violently rejected by the nation of which he was so proud, of whose tradition and history he was the embodiment, the nation he had sought to represent in all the finest actions of his life—surely this was enough to try the soul of mortal man.” Even, or especially, if he were warned to expect it.
Maybe his defeat would turn out, to repeat his familiar riposte, to be another blessing in disguise, “quite effectively disguised,” but for now he felt right back in 1922 and all the other dark times: rejected and rebuffed.
On July 30 “at 7 p.m. he said quaintly to [Captain] Pim: ‘Fetch me my carriage and I shall go to the Palace.’” There he submitted his resignation. The king recorded that “it was a very sad meeting.”
I told him I thought the people were very ungrateful after the way they had been led in the War. He was very calm. . . . I asked him if I should send for Mr. Attlee to form a government & he agreed. We said good bye & I thanked him for all his help to me during the 5 War Years.
The next day he wrote:
Your breadth of vision & your grasp of the essential things were a great comfort to me in the darkest days of the War, & I like to think that we have never disagreed on any really important matter. For all those things I thank you most sincerely. I feel that your conduct as Prime Minister & Minister of Defence has never been surpassed. You have had many difficulties to deal with both as a politician & as a strategist of war but you have always surmounted them with supreme courage.
The king’s point is well taken. There were few recorded disagreements between the two, apart from the rather silly D-Day affair. Where the king found Churchill’s logic wanting, he generally asked for more information or for a clarification, that is, to be persuaded, which he almost always was with a bit of his own contribution. The lack of disagreement may be taken as resulting from deference to Churchill, but it was not doctrinaire.
So, in the end—did the king matter to the war? Operationally, probably not. There is not a single major decision or policy that Churchill and his government changed solely on his advice or only to satisfy him. He was no hidden hand, nor sought to be one. But the operational question is the wrong one; it does not solve the puzzle posed at the outset of this book. A better conclusion is found by asking whether their alliance mattered for Churchill and his own capacity as leader. Here the answer must be yes. It had as much to do with the character of the king as it did with the deficiencies of Churchill, if that’s what they were. No matter how much he was in demand in the spring of 1940, Churchill was regarded in some critical corners of British society as something of a foreign body: he was mistrusted and always would be, not merely for who he was but also for what he did over the course of his turbulent political career.
The king augmented Churchill’s authority and, in a curious way, contributed an aspect of humility that he otherwise would have found difficult to feign, especially among the classes that were coolest toward him. It underwrote Churchill’s sense of prerogative and gave him a freer hand to cast himself as his nation’s selfless savior. This might have happened anyway, Britain being as desperate as she was at the time and Churchill being so indomitable. However, after reconstructing the history of the two men in tandem it becomes very difficult to imagine Churchill succeeding in that without the full support of the king, and certainly not if the two had worked deliberately at cross purposes. This was the outer gift. The inner one has already been discussed—that is, the degree to which the two men helped to clarify each other’s thinking and strengthen each other’s spirit through the exercise of a professional and personal alliance against multiple adversaries, including their own fears and deficiencies. This is their primary lesson for leadership: it must have the capacity to work in combination and in concert, or it will not work at all. Prerogative, like adversity, has a fungible value. Anchor it too firmly in one person and it will almost certainly obstruct and destroy him.
—
“[I]s it true,” Churchill’s young grandson Nicholas Soames once asked, “that you are the greatest man in the world?” “Yes,” came the reply, “and now bugger off.” Roy Jenkins, who has related that story, agreed. At the very end of his long biography of Churchill, the last book he would ever write, he concluded:
Of more importance than a comparison of the different obsequies is a judgement between Gladstone, undoubtedly the greatest Prime Minister of the nineteenth century, and Churchill, undoubtedly the greatest of the twentieth century. When I started writing this book I thought that Gladstone was, by a narrow margin, the greater man, certainly the more remarkable specimen of humanity. In the course of writing it I have changed my mind. I now put Churchill, with all his idiosyncrasies, his indulgences, his occasional childishness, but also his genius, his tenacity and his persistent ability, right or wrong, successful or unsuccessful, to be larger than life, as the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.
Greatness is difficult to measure. It tends to dissipate. With Churchill it took a long time to do so, and he would go on to serve another term as prime minister after 1951. The king, however, had less time left in his reign. The war had exhausted his already frail health. In September, Churchill told his own doctor that he was “shocked by the King’s appearance.” Moran reassured him that the king’s doctors would limit his suffering. “That is all very well with an ordinary patient,” Churchill replied, “but it does not apply to the Monarch. Under the Constitution, the duty of the king’s doctors is to prolong his life as long as possible.”
On September 23, Churchill “did a thing this morning that I haven’t done in many years—I went down on my knees by my bedside & prayed.”
The king lingered for a few more months. At dinner on February 5 he “was relaxed and contented. He retired to his room at 10.30 and was occupied with his personal affairs until about midnight when a watchman in the garden observed him affixing the latch of his bedroom window. . . . Then he went to bed and fell peacefully asleep.”
By the following morning he was dead.
—
Churchill’s private secretary found him “in bed, with papers scattered all over the blankets, a chewed cigar in his mouth. He said, ‘I’ve got bad news, Prime Minister. The King died last night. I know nothing else.’ ‘Bad news? The worst,’ said Churchill. . . . He threw aside all the papers on his bed, exclaiming, ‘How unimportant these matters are.’” He was later seen “sitting up with tears in his eyes, staring straight ahead.” “Seeking to reassure him, [Colville] said that he would find the new Queen charming, attractive, intelligent and immensely conscientious.”
“I hardly know her, and she is only a child.”
Churchill was called to broadcast the news. Often before making broadcasts he would joke about having another brandy or somesuch. Not now. “What is the time?” he demanded. “We must hurry.” He had worked all day on his remarks but broke down while reading them. After delivering the broadcast, he shut himself inside the Cabinet Room. At the funeral, he attached a small card in his own handwriting to the wreath: “For Valour.”
—
Churchill remained in office until April 1955. He went to see the Cabinet Room a final time. “The room was in darkness,” Moran observed. “When the light was switched on it appeared in disarray, ready for the cleaners, the chairs, shrouded in their covers, pushed to one side, the ink-pots gone. Winston looked for a moment in bewilderment on the scene, then he turned on his heel and stumbled out into the hall.”
Nearly a decade later, on January 24, 1965, he died. From the train on his final journey to be buried by his parents in Bladon churchyard, there were seen
two single figures . . . first on the flat roof of a small house a man standing at attention in his old R.A.F. uniform, saluting; and then in a field, some hundreds of yards away from the track, a simple farmer stopping work and standing, head bowed, and cap in hand.