On 30 November 1924, twenty-five days after accepting office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Then, having announced his return to the Conservative Party, after an absence of twenty years, he addressed himself to his first Ministerial task at the Treasury, devising and financing a substantial extension of national insurance, the social reform he had been instrumental in creating fifteen years earlier, at the height of his Liberal activities. In this he worked closely with the new Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain. He also sought means to reduce the burden of income tax on ‘professional men, small merchants and business men—superior brain workers of every kind’. The schemes he put up to his officials included pensions for widows and orphans, a major extension of old age insurance and the development of cheap housing. The Government itself, he believed, should experiment with new methods of house construction for those ‘who cannot afford to pay at the existing prices’.
On November 28 Churchill told the Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet, Thomas Jones: ‘I was all for the Liberal measures of social reform in the old days, and I want to push the same sort of measures now. Of course I shall have to give some relief to the tax-payers to balance these measures of reform.’
Churchill now moved into 11 Downing Street, which was to be his London home for the next four and a half years. From there, on December 9, he wrote to a leading Conservative, Lord Salisbury, a son of the former Prime Minister, to explain his view that an ‘increasing distinction’ between earned and unearned income might be the most effective and fairest way of raising new taxes. He was, however, opposed to any attempt to ‘hunt down the “idle rich”’, explaining to Salisbury: ‘If they are idle they will cease in a few generations to be rich. Further than that it is not desirable for the legislature to go. The Christian or the moralist alone can pursue an inquisition into what is “service” and what is “idleness”.’ Churchill added: ‘My maturer views of life lead me to deprecate the personal inquisition, except when self-instituted, into actions which are within the law. I think the rich, whether idle or not, are already taxed in this country to the very highest point compatible with the accumulation of capital for future production.’
The ‘existing capitalist system is the foundation of civilisation,’ Churchill told Salisbury, ‘and the only means by which great modern populations can be supplied with vital necessities.’ Five days later, on December 14, he set down for his officials at the Treasury his philosophy of wealth, based upon a combination of the taxation of unearned income and the encouragement of profits and productivity: ‘The creation of new wealth is beneficial to the whole community. The process of squatting on old wealth though valuable is a far less lively agent. The great bulk of the wealth of the world is created and consumed every year. We shall never shake ourselves clear from the debts of the past, and break into a definitely larger period, except by the energetic creation of new wealth. A premium on effort is the aim, and a penalty on inertia may well be its companion.’
On 6 January 1925 Churchill crossed to Paris, where, during a week of intensive negotiations, he secured a remarkable settlement of the tangle of international war debts. Henceforth Britain’s £1 billion debt to the United States, for which America had been pressing, would be paid by instalments at the same time as Britain received simultaneous and proportionate payments from France, Belgium, Italy and Japan; countries which themselves owed Britain a total of £2 billion, and which had hitherto been reluctant to agree to a schedule of repayment. Britain’s other debtors, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Roumania and Serbia, also accepted Churchill’s scheme.
All the negotiating States paid tribute to Churchill’s skill, patience and grasp of detail. ‘To uphold the interests of this country,’ Edward Grey wrote to him when the conference was over, ‘& at the same time to secure this recognition from the representatives of other countries is a rare achievement & a great public service.’
To finance his social reform measures Churchill embarked on several months of bitter controversy. While accepting the need for greater Air Force expenditure, and no reduction in the money being spent by the Army, he pressed for a substantial reduction in naval spending. Convinced that the Admiralty’s plans were grandiose and wasteful, he plunged into a political battle similar to the one he had fought in 1908, when, as President of the Board of Trade, he had challenged what he regarded as excessive naval spending; and he did so with the same social goal in mind. But he did not intend to jeopardise Britain’s ability to confront an aggressor if international harmony were to break down, explaining to the Cabinet on January 29, and drawing on his pre-1914 experience at the Admiralty: ‘During a long peace, such as follows in the wake of great wars, there must inevitably develop gaps in our structure of armaments. We have to select the essential elements of war power from amidst great quantities of ancillary and subsidiary improvements. These gaps can be gradually and unostentatiously filled up if deep international antagonisms, the invariable precursors of great wars, gradually become apparent in the world.’
On February 13 the Admiralty accepted Churchill’s upper limit of just over £60 million for the coming financial year; almost £1,200 million in the money values of 1990. Given Admiralty fears of Japanese naval expansion, Churchill agreed to make an extra £2 million available for an emergency, and to give the Admiralty the same amount of money for the repair of British destroyers as was spent by Japan ‘plus 25%’. The crisis passed. ‘He is a Chimborazo or Everest,’ wrote Asquith to a friend, ‘among the sandhills of the Baldwin Cabinet.’
In his determination to help productive enterprise, Churchill was uneasy at the Treasury’s decision, made earlier with the support of the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, to return to the Gold Standard. To go back to Gold, Churchill told his officials on January 29, ‘favoured the special interests of finance at the expense of the interests of production’. On February 22 he tried to influence them once more: ‘I would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content.’ To bring to bear the best arguments possible against a return to Gold, on March 17 he gave a dinner for the Cambridge economist J.M. Keynes and his own officials. But Baldwin, with his authority both as Prime Minister and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged Churchill not to rock a boat which was already virtually launched, and to which the Bank of England was committed.
Churchill gave way. Henceforth, he was to defend the decision of which he had at the time been dubious. Twenty-three years later, after listening to criticism from the Labour Prime Minister of the day, he told the Commons: ‘Mr Attlee referred to my action in bringing this country back to the Gold Standard in 1925. He says that I acted on advice. Indeed I did, on the advice of a Committee appointed by Lord Snowden, the Chancellor in the Socialist Government in 1924, of which Mr Attlee was himself a member. What did Lord Snowden say about our return to the Gold Standard? On the Second Reading of the Gold Standard Bill he said that while the Government had acted with undue precipitancy he and his Socialist colleagues were in favour of a return to the Gold Standard at the earliest possible moment.’
Churchill went on to point out that in December 1926 Snowden had written an article in the Financial Times in which he stated: ‘All the facts therefore do not support the impression that the return to gold has been detrimental to industry. The Bank Rate has not been raised; unemployment has not risen; real wages have not fallen; and the price level has been fairly well maintained.’ Churchill continued, ‘So far from causing what Mr Attlee calls “untold misery” the facts as I have said show that while I was the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer the real wages of our workpeople steadily and substantially increased.’
As Churchill worked on his first Budget, Clementine was in the South of France recuperating from nervous exhaustion. He sent her regular reports of family and Ministerial matters. ‘Mary is flourishing,’ he wrote that March. ‘She comes & sits with me in the mornings & is sometimes most gracious. Diana is just back from school & we are all planning to go to see Randolph this afternoon.’ As for Clementine herself: ‘Do not abridge your holiday if it is doing you good. But of course I feel far safer from worry and depression when you are with me & when I can confide in your sweet soul.’
A week later Churchill wrote again, distressed to learn that Clementine’s mother was dying. Lady Hozier was seventy-three. ‘My darling I grieve for you. An old & failing life going out on the tide, after the allotted span has been spent & after most joys have faded is not a case for human pity. It is only a part of the immense tragedy of our existence here below against which both hope & faith have rebelled. It is only what we all expect & await—unless cut off untimely. But the loss of a mother severs a chord in the heart and makes life seem lonely & its duration fleeting. I know the sense of amputation from my own experience three years ago.’
Four days after writing this letter Churchill walked in Lord Curzon’s funeral cortège, telling Clementine later that day: ‘He faced his end with fortitude & philosophy. I am very sorry he is gone. I did not think the tributes were very generous. I would not have been grateful for such stuff. But he did not inspire affection, nor represent great causes.’
The ‘great cause’ in which Churchill was now immersed was social reform. His concern was the hardship that fell upon a family after the prolonged unemployment, old age, sickness or death of the breadwinner. ‘In a few months,’ he told his advisers after receiving a delegation of Old Age Pensioners on March 24, ‘the result of the years of thrift may be swept away, and the house broken up.’ He intended his Budget to avert that catastrophe. All pensions, he told Neville Chamberlain on April 3, should begin at 65, not 70. Widows should receive a pension from the ‘very outset’ of widowhood.
Churchill introduced his Budget on April 28. Clementine, Randolph and Diana were in the Gallery to hear him. He spoke for two hours and forty minutes, showing, Baldwin told the King, ‘that he is not only possessed of consummate ability as a Parliamentarian, but also all the versatility of an actor’. Lucidity, rhetoric, levity and humour, each had its part in his speech, the centrepiece of which was the insurance and pension schemes.
When misfortune descended upon a workman’s home, Churchill said, whether unemployment, distress or the loss of the breadwinner, ‘it leaves this once happy family in the grip of the greatest calamity. Although the threat of adversity has been active all these years, no effective provision has been made by the great mass of the labouring classes for their widows and families in the event of death. I am not reproaching them, but it is the greatest need at the present time. If I may change to a military metaphor, it is not the sturdy marching troops that need extra reward and indulgence. It is the stragglers, the weak, the wounded, the veterans, the widows and orphans to whom the ambulances of State aid should be directed.’
Widows and orphans would receive pensions from the moment of their bereavement: 200,000 women and 350,000 children would be the immediate beneficiaries. All other pensions would come into force at the age of sixty-five. ‘Restrictions, inquisitions and means tests’ would be swept away altogether. Once the act was passed it would be ‘nobody’s business’ what any of the pensioners had ‘or how they employed their time’. Churchill had a second major change to announce: those in the lowest income groups would receive a 10 per cent reduction of income tax. It was his hope in doing this ‘that by liberating the production of new wealth from some of the shackles of taxation the Budget may stimulate enterprise and accelerate industrial revival’.
Neville Chamberlain, whose Ministry of Health had been deeply involved with the pension scheme, was impressed, writing in his diary on May 1, ‘We were pledged to something of the kind, but I don’t think we should have done it this year if he had not made it part of his Budget scheme, and in my opinion he does deserve personal credit for his initiative and drive.’ Two weeks later Churchill told the British Bankers’ Association, ‘This is our aim—the appeasement of class bitterness, the promotion of a spirit of co-operation, the stabilisation of our national life, the building of the financial and social plans upon a three or four years’ basis.’
In foreign policy Churchill also sought appeasement; on March 11 he had persuaded a conference of senior Ministers not to move towards a Treaty with France which could only serve to isolate and embitter Germany still further, but to work instead for an arrangement ‘to include Germany’; from this idea emerged the Locarno Treaties, whereby Britain, Germany, France and Italy guaranteed the security of their post-war frontiers. Churchill also urged, in a private conversation with the Polish Ambassador, that Poland ‘should by all means cultivate the friendship of Germany. If Germany were driven back on Russian support, Poland in the end would be crushed between them.’
***
Churchill’s work as a conciliator was seen most effectively at the end of July, when he was at the centre of the Government’s efforts to avert a miners’ strike by persuading the mine-owners to withdraw dismissal notices against their men. Despite some Conservative unease, Churchill also persuaded his colleagues to grant a Government subsidy to the mining industry, so that wages would not have to be cut. In Cabinet on July 30 Churchill pointed out that the miners had a certain amount of right on their side.
On August 6 Churchill defended the subsidy in the Commons. The decision to give it had been taken, he said, ‘because we have not yet abandoned that hope. If we had plunged into a struggle, allowed a stoppage of the mines, had faced a general strike on the railways, had accepted a temporary paralysis of the entire industry of the country, allowed trade to be checked, allowed social reform to be arrested, our finances to be deranged, had postponed pensions, and restored taxation—if we had taken that position, then for us, and so far as this Parliament is concerned, the door would have been closed to an advance to a better state of things. It may yet happen. But that is not a decision that any sane man or Government would take until every other reasonable possibility had been exhausted.’
Churchill concluded: ‘Even if it should be our duty, if ever it should be our duty, to take such a position, then the work of this Parliament is absolutely ruined. For the rest of its life it would be simply toiling back to reach the position occupied in 1924 and 1925—a position which to-day we find much to be discontented with. No chance of improvement! No hope of expansion! No alleviation of the burdens! Just a simple struggle to work back to where we are now. We have refused to accept such a melancholy conclusion.’
‘What a brilliant creature he is!’ Neville Chamberlain wrote to Baldwin three weeks later. ‘But there is somehow a great gulf fixed between him and me which I don’t think I shall ever cross. I like him. I like his humour and vitality. I like his courage. I like the way he took that—to me—very unexpected line over the coal crisis in Cabinet. But not for all the joys of Paradise would I be a member of his staff! Mercurial! a much abused word, but it is the literal description of his temperament.’
That autumn Churchill negotiated a comprehensive agreement for the repayment of France’s war debt to Britain; there would be sixty-two annual payments of £12.5 million. But if Germany defaulted on her own reparations payments to France, then France would be entitled to ask for reconsideration of the French debt to Britain. As the negotiations continued, Churchill’s opposite number, Joseph Caillaux, fell from office. In reply to Churchill’s letter of commiseration, Caillaux wrote, of their long and difficult negotiations together, ‘You showed me such courtesy throughout and you received me with so much grace, & had such a happy touch in vivifying & brightening our conversations, that they left me with the impression that we were in complete agreement.’
On November 30 Churchill was fifty-one; that week Baldwin asked him to mediate between the Irish Free State and Ulster. The Free State feared that the border was to be altered in Ulster’s favour, and was also reluctant to pay its £155 million debt to Britain for unrecoverable revenues and munitions. Churchill opened negotiations on December 1; at the end of three intense days he had evolved an acceptable formula whereby no border changes would take place, and the Free State’s debt would be paid over a period of sixty years. Six weeks after this Irish success, Churchill opened negotiations in London for the settlement of Italy’s £592 million war debt to Britain. After two weeks of negotiations it was agreed that Italy would repay the full debt, but to defer all payments for four years, then spread them until 1988. The best evidence of the fairness of the settlement, Churchill commented, ‘is the fact that it fully satisfies neither party’.
On 31 January 1926 Clementine left England for a prolonged holiday in the South of France. Churchill remained at Chartwell, where at weekends he entertained political friends, among them the Conservative MP Ronald McNeill, now his Financial Secretary, who before the war, at the height of the ‘Ulster pogrom’, had hurled a book at him across the floor of the Commons, drawing blood. Fruit trees were being planted ‘every quarter of an hour’, Churchill reported to Clementine on February 7. A week later there was a gathering of colleagues, among them the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Samuel Hoare, who wrote to a friend, ‘I had never seen Winston before in the role of landed proprietor. Most of the Sunday morning we inspected the property, and the engineering works upon which he is engaged.’ These consisted of making ‘a series of ponds in the valley. Winston seems blissfully happy over it all.’
Churchill was also happy in the presence of his children, who found endless entertainment in their new home’s hidden corners and rolling fields. On March 20, as he worked at Chartwell on plans for his second Budget, he wrote to Clementine, who was then in Rome: ‘All is well here. Mary breakfasted & Sarah dined with me. Diana talked quite intelligently about politics & seemed to have a lot of information derived from the newspapers. They are all very sweet & it is a joy to have them down here.’ Diana was seventeen, Sarah eleven and Mary three. Randolph, then fourteen, was a boarder at Eton.
In search of revenue for his second Budget Churchill drew up plans to introduce a tax on petrol. He also proposed a 5 per cent annual tax on the purchase price of luxury cars, and a tax on heavy lorries based on their weight and ‘road-smashing’ characteristics. Another of his ideas was a tax on imported American films. ‘It would naturally give great pleasure in this country,’ he told his advisers, ‘if any revenue could be derived from the profits of American film producers.’
Churchill introduced his second Budget on April 27. As in the previous year, Randolph was in the gallery to hear him. The theme for 1926 was thrift and economy. Luxuries were to be taxed, as was betting; a 5 per cent tax on all bets. The economic picture, Churchill told the House, ‘is not black; it is not grey; it is piebald, and on the whole the dark patches are less prominent this year than last’. But he warned that the worsening crisis in the coal industry could lead to the need for new taxes on a substantial scale. The day after his speech, the mine-owners, for whom he was still providing a Government subsidy so that they would not cut their miners’ wages, told Baldwin that an immediate wage cut was essential, in view of their losses. The miners refused to contemplate any cut in wages. Baldwin then proposed increasing the working day by one hour, to eight hours, but keeping wages the same. On April 28 the owners agreed, but not the miners.
The owners now demanded an immediate cut in wages. When the miners rejected this on May 1, the entire labour force was shut out; the owners had closed the mines. That same day the Trades Union Congress announced that, in support of the miners, a General Strike would begin on May 3, at one minute to midnight.
Negotiations between the Government and the TUC continued throughout May 2. Shortly after eleven o’clock that evening, news reached the Cabinet, which had gathered in Churchill’s room in the House of Commons, that printers at the Daily Mail, in apparent anticipation of the strike, had suppressed the paper ‘because they did not like its leading article’. Ministers were unanimous that this action made further negotiations impossible. An attempt had been made to silence the Press. Negotiations now would be under duress. There must be an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the strike notices. ‘It is a point worth making,’ one of Baldwin’s closest associates, J.C.C. Davidson, wrote ten days later, ‘that there was no discussion on this point. It has often been written that the extremists forced Baldwin’s hand, but nothing could be further from the truth.’
On the morning of May 3 a Cabinet strike-breaking committee was set up under the Home Secretary. Churchill was not a member, but was asked by the Committee to prepare a plan for a Government news-sheet. He did so, proposing that it should be devised ‘not merely to contain news, but in order to relieve the minds of the people’. One of its tasks would be to ‘prevent alarming news from being spread about’. Churchill added, ‘I do not contemplate violent partisanship, but fair, strong encouragement to the great mass of loyal people.’ The leading articles should also be ‘not violently partisan, but agreeable to the great majority of the people on our side’; in a few short phrases he explained what he meant, ‘Constitutional, the hope for peace, Parliament, maintain authority in the country, injury to trade and reputation of the country.’
Speaking in the Commons that afternoon, seven hours before the General Strike was to begin, Churchill’s tone was conciliatory. He praised the moderation of the Labour MPs who had spoken, including MacDonald, and welcomed the ‘efforts for peace’ which had been made by the Trades Union negotiators on the previous day. They had done their best, he said, ‘to bring about a warding-off of this shocking disaster in our national life’. He would not use ‘one single provocative word’. As for the Government, it could not divest itself of responsibility for ‘maintaining the life of the nation in essential services and public order’. Once strike notices were withdrawn, however, negotiations on every aspect of the coal crisis could begin again: ‘The door is always open. There is no question of there being a gulf across which no negotiator can pass, certainly not. It is our duty to parley.’
The General Strike began that night; Churchill went to the printing presses of the Morning Post to supervise the production of the Government news-sheet. With him was Samuel Hoare, who suggested calling the paper the British Gazette. As the first issue was being printed, Churchill told Baldwin that its editorial theme would be that the General Strike was a challenge to the Government, with which there could be no compromise, but that the dispute in the coal industry which had provoked it was one on which ‘we are prepared to take the utmost pains to reach a settlement in the most conciliatory spirit’.
Volunteers, many of them students, drove copies of the British Gazette to towns throughout southern England. Lindemann collected fourteen Oxford undergraduates and sent them to London; they reported to the Treasury for their distribution tasks. On Hoare’s instructions aeroplanes flew the paper to the north of England. When the first issue was ready to be printed Churchill asked the BBC to broadcast the sound of the presses in action, but the BBC refused to do so. Two days later he proposed that the Government should take over the BBC and use it to broadcast official news. The Cabinet rejected this.
By the morning of May 5 more than 230,000 copies of the British Gazette had been printed. In an unsigned article, Churchill wrote that without newspapers Britain was reduced ‘to the level of African natives dependent only on the rumours which are carried from place to place’. These rumours would in a few days ‘poison the air, raise panics and disorders, inflame fears and passions together, and carry us all to depths which no sane man of any party or class would care even to contemplate’.
Each issue of the British Gazette was more widely distributed than the previous one. On May 6 the War Office sent a company of troops to protect the paper-mill which was making the actual paper. The Admiralty sent a naval guard to escort the paper by barge up the Thames. Meanwhile, the editor of the Morning Post, H.A. Gwynne, one of Churchill’s old Conservative enemies from Home Rule and ‘Peers versus the People’ days, tried to have Churchill kept out of the building. During the first night’s production, he complained to Baldwin, Churchill had tried ‘to force a scratch staff beyond its capacity’ and had ‘rattled them badly’.
At his room in the Treasury, Churchill collected material which he felt should have a place in the paper, giving prominence to those aspects of daily life where the strike was proving least effective. He also marked as ‘not recommended for publication’ details of serious shortages of flour and sugar, of the overturning and stoning of trams that were still running, and of an incident of looting where the police had used their truncheons to clear the street.
In Cabinet on May 6 Churchill urged the maximum protection for food convoys coming into London from the docks. On May 7 Baldwin supported his proposal to incorporate Territorial Army troops, as volunteers, into the existing volunteer police forces. They would have armbands instead of uniforms, and truncheons instead of rifles. When the Home Secretary asked who would pay for this, Churchill retorted: ‘The Exchequer will pay. If we start arguing about petty details, we will have a tired-out police force, a dissipated army and bloody revolution.’
***
In a BBC broadcast on May 8 Baldwin appealed for an end to the General Strike and a start to negotiations with the coal-miners. In his appeal he repeated Churchill’s conciliatory theme of five days earlier, ‘No door is closed.’ Churchill meanwhile was still supervising the British Gazette. ‘He butts in at the busiest hours,’ Gwynne again complained on May 9, ‘and insists on changing commas and full stops until the staff is furious.’ In the Commons there were complaints about newsprint being requisitioned for the Government paper but denied to the various Labour broadsheets. Paper could not be made available to newspapers ‘engaged in imperilling the life of the nation’, Churchill replied. As for the Government, it ‘cannot be impartial as between the State and any section of its subjects with whom it is contending’.
On the morning of May 11 more than a million copies of the British Gazette were distributed. That day there were intimations that the miners wished to open negotiations with the Government. There must be ‘a clear interval’, Churchill wrote to Baldwin that day, between the calling off of the General Strike and the resumption of the coal negotiations. ‘The first tonight—the second tomorrow. But nothing simultaneous and concurrent.’ The Government’s message should be: ‘Tonight surrender. Tomorrow magnanimity.’ On the morning of May 12 the General Council of the Trades Union Congress decided that it could no longer support the miners if they remained on strike. At midday the TUC leaders went to see Baldwin at Downing Street to tell him that the General Strike was over. A few moments later Churchill told the Council Chairman, ‘Thank God it is over.’
***
Ten days after the end of the General Strike, the New Statesman accused Churchill of having been the leader of a ‘war party’ on the night of May 2, and of forcing an end to the Government’s negotiations with the TUC. It also alleged that Churchill had said that ‘a little blood-letting’ would be all to the good. The paper weakened this charge by adding, ‘Whether he actually used this phrase or not there is no doubt about his tireless efforts to seize the providential opportunity for a fight.’
Churchill wanted to bring an action for libel against the New Statesman for its charge that he wanted blood-letting, telling the Attorney-General: ‘As you well know, my arguments in Cabinet were all directed to keeping the Military out of the business, and to using, even at great expense, very large numbers of citizens unarmed. I am sure I never used any language not entirely consistent with this.’ Churchill added, ‘I certainly do not feel inclined to allow such a lie to pass into the general currency of Labour incriminations.’ But it did.
***
Although the General Strike had lasted only nine days, it had divided the nation. Those who supported it were particularly bitter against those who had ‘broken’ it. It was not Churchill’s reputation as a strike-breaker, however, but his qualities as a conciliator, that led Baldwin to ask him, eight days after the General Strike had ended, to take charge of the Government’s negotiations with the miners.
Churchill agreed to do so, working to build a bridge between the miners and the owners. When the owners insisted on a reduction in miners’ wages, he countered by proposing that any such reduction in wages should be paralleled by a reduction in owners’ profits. There was also a limit to reduced wages, he insisted, ‘below which on social grounds miners ought not to work’. These were not new sentiments on Churchill’s part; during a Cabinet discussion on a strike in the coal mines five years earlier he had argued that if there had been a proper understanding of the miners’ needs, ‘we could have stopped the strike very much more cheaply in advance’.
That autumn, as the coal strike continued with increasing bitterness on both sides, Baldwin, about to set off for his annual holiday in France, again asked Churchill to take charge of negotiations. On August 26, in Cabinet, Churchill spoke approvingly of the miners’ desire for a national minimum wage. That same day, in talks with the miners’ leaders, he told them, ‘I sympathise with you in your task’, and asked them for some offer of terms which he could then press the owners to accept. In the Commons on August 31 his remarks about the miners were, Thomas Jones reported to Baldwin, ‘dignified, conciliatory and fair’.
On September 1, in an attempt to break the deadlock, Churchill invited MacDonald to Chartwell. The Labour Leader’s visit was kept a closely guarded secret. MacDonald offered to ask the miners’ leaders to agree to negotiations on the basis of a comprehensive national settlement with a minimum wage. Two days later, after a meeting with MacDonald in London, Churchill met secretly with the miners’ leaders and, in strictest secrecy, worked out with them a formula acceptable to them which the Government could then put to the owners in order to bring the strike to an end. The formula which Churchill accepted was based on the miners’ demand for a minimum wage which could not be undercut by individual owners. All now depended on the agreement of the owners, whom Churchill undertook to persuade into accepting the formula. He invited them to Chartwell, in the hope that the country-house atmosphere would induce conciliatory thoughts. But the owners would not yield.
Churchill was angered by the owners’ attitude; ‘recalcitrant’ and ‘unreasonable’ was how he described it to Baldwin. He now sought to have the principle of a minimum wage incorporated in a Government Bill, the aim of which, he told the Cabinet on September 15, was ‘to bring pressure to bear on the owners’. But the Cabinet objected to any such pressure being applied, and Baldwin, who returned that day from France, declined to support Churchill’s efforts. Nor would the Cabinet endorse another proposal by Churchill, which was also acceptable to the miners, for a compulsory arbitration tribunal.
Learning that Churchill could no longer rely on Cabinet unanimity behind his proposals, the owners persisted in their refusal to consider a minimum wage. They even refused to attend a tripartite meeting with Churchill and the miners. This refusal, Churchill told the Cabinet on September 24, was ‘wholly wrong and unreasonable’ and without precedent ‘in recent times’. The Cabinet refused, however, to order the owners to a meeting, and to Churchill’s chagrin decided that the Government should now dissociate itself from the dispute, leaving the owners and the miners to continue their strife until its conclusion.
On September 27, in the Commons, in a last effort to resolve the dispute, Churchill offered, if the miners would agree to return to work without a national minimum wage, to set up an independent National Tribunal ‘having the force of law’, which would examine each regional wage settlement and secure a fair settlement in each region. The miners, angered by the refusal of the owners to accept a national minimum wage, refused his offer. Churchill now tried to work out a formula which would enable the miners to accept the National Tribunal without loss of face. His Cabinet colleagues again refused to go along with him. ‘Most of our Party dislike Government interference,’ one of them explained to a friend on September 29, ‘and believe that Winston started a new and unnecessary stage of interference, and were not at all cordial to him.’
Churchill’s efforts had been in vain. His pressure on the owners had come to nought. His desire to involve the Government as an arbitrator had been rejected by the Cabinet. His attempt to get the miners to settle had been rejected. ‘Now I am afraid it must be fought out,’ he wrote to his Parliamentary Private Secretary, Robert Boothby, on October 16, after the miners’ final rejection of a National Tribunal. ‘These people think themselves stronger than the State. But that is a mistake. There is a similar attitude among the owners.’
***
Both at the Treasury and at Chartwell, Churchill continued with his war memoirs. Harold Bourne, the manager of Thornton Butterworth, the publishers, was frequently summoned to both; he later recalled how cross Churchill could get if the proof chapters were not in order, but how, after every storm, there seemed to be ‘an additional glint in his humorous eyes. Humour seldom seemed far away from him.’ Churchill was always keen to see every stage of the proofs. On December 12 he sent Bourne a letter in verse:
Straight away,
without delay,
I want the page proofs day by day.
On January 4,
I leave this shore,
nor will you catch me any more!
Humour and philosophic reflection went almost hand in hand; on December 28 Churchill wrote to Beaverbrook: ‘There are very great things to be done by those who reach a certain scale of comprehension & of power in their early prime. As long as health & life are ours, we must try to do them—not to be content except with the best & truest solutions.’ His own work continued even on holiday. That winter he would play his last game of polo at Malta. ‘If I expire on the ground,’ he wrote to his host, ‘it will at any rate be a worthy end.’
Churchill was fifty-two. He took with him on his travels at the beginning of 1927 the proofs of the third volume of his war memoirs, which Bourne had got to him in time, and on which he finished working while at Genoa. Then, from Malta, after his final polo match, he turned to political matters, writing to Baldwin about the need to include in the forthcoming Trade Union Bill the right of any individual member of a Union to contract out of the Union’s hitherto compulsory political levy. In Athens, he gave a newspaper interview expressing his pleasure at the restoration of Parliamentary Government in Greece. In Rome, he had two short meetings with Mussolini, telling a Press conference in the Italian capital that anyone could see that Mussolini ‘thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understood it, of the Italian people’. Churchill added: ‘Had I been an Italian, I am sure I would have been whole-heartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. But in England we have not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form. We have our own way of doing things.’
One further political issue shadowed Churchill during his holiday; the attack by Chinese warlords on British subjects in two Chinese ports. The Cabinet decided to send reinforcements to China. Churchill approved. ‘Short of being actually conquered,’ he wrote to Baldwin on January 22 from Eze, in the South of France, ‘there is no evil worse than submitting to wrong and violence for fear of war. Once you take the position of not being able in any circumstances to defend your rights against the aggression of some particular set of people, there is no end to the demands that will be made or to the humiliations that must be accepted.’ This was the essence of Churchill’s criticism of appeasement from weakness.
At Eze, Churchill stayed at Consuelo Balsan’s château, Lou Seuil; her marriage to his cousin Sunny had been dissolved in 1921. While at Eze, he continued to monitor the Cabinet’s action in China. On January 25 he wrote to the Secretary of State for War to urge him to send out ‘plenty of tanks to Shanghai’. But on practical grounds he opposed the despatch of gas shells, telling the Secretary of State: ‘I was very glad to see that you had carried your point about gas. “Gas for Asia” may be a phrase of great significance. But I believe you will find tanks even more effective, both for street fighting and operations in open country. I hope that firm action and adequate forces will lead to a peaceful solution. But if not, I beseech you, at the outset of what may be great responsibilities, to use the right tackle.’
From Eze, Churchill travelled to Paris, where, on January 26, he lunched with Loucheur and several other French politicians, including Vincent Auriol, who in 1947 became the first President of the Fourth Republic. From Paris he went to the Duke of Westminster’s château at Eu for three days’ boar-hunting, before returning to London. Shortly after his return, the third volume of The World Crisis was published. Readers were struck by his vivid, moving descriptions of the battles of the Western Front. J.M. Keynes described the book as ‘a tractate against war—more effective than the work of a pacifist could be’.
***
On April 11 Churchill introduced his third Budget. MPs crowded into the House to hear him speak. ‘The scene was quite sufficient,’ Baldwin told the King, ‘to show that Mr Churchill as a star turn has a power of attraction which nobody in the House of Commons can excel.’ He had withstood Cabinet pressure to reduce death duties, and was content to raise money by imposing new taxes on imported motor-car tyres and imported wines, and increasing old taxes on matches and tobacco.
Old enemies were impressed by Churchill the Chancellor. ‘The remarkable thing about him,’ Lord Winterton, a Conservative MP since 1904, wrote to a friend, ‘is the way in which he has suddenly acquired, quite late in Parliamentary life, an immense fund of tact, patience, good humour and banter on almost all occasions; no one used to “suffer fools ungladly” more than Winston, now he is friendly and accessible to everyone, both in the House and in the lobbies, with the result that he has become what he never was before the war, very popular in the House generally—a great accretion to his already formidable Parliamentary power.’
Cartoonists vied in portraying ‘Winsome Winston’ and ‘The Smiling Chancellor’. In reporting on the Budget speech to the King, Baldwin stressed Churchill’s ‘cheerful and buoyant optimism’ and his sense of the dramatic. ‘There is in Mr Churchill an undercurrent of buoyant mischievousness which frequently makes its appearance on the surface in some picturesque phrase or playful sally at the expense of his opponents.’ Baldwin added, ‘His enemies will say that this year’s Budget is a mischievous piece of manipulation and juggling with the country’s finances, but his friends will say that it is a masterpiece of ingenuity.’
Amery protested to Baldwin that Churchill’s Budget contained nothing but a few ‘hand-to-mouth dodges’. There was nothing in it to help the productive industries ‘from which the revenue after all is derived’. But Churchill was even then at work on a comprehensive scheme to abolish the system of local rates, in order to relieve British industry and Britain’s farmers of the burden which rates imposed on them. Rising unemployment and falling trade were his foes. The money to make up for the rates would be replaced by taxes; Churchill envisaged a petrol tax and a profits tax as the two principal replacement sources of revenue.
The derating scheme was to absorb a great deal of Churchill’s energies in the coming year, and to focus his mind on the means of raising additional revenue by taxation; the sum needed to abolish the rates altogether was £50 million, the compensation that would have to be paid to the local authorities for their loss of rating revenue. The hoped-for reward was to see the productive sector of the economy flourish. Derating, he told Baldwin on June 6, would constitute a ‘large, new constructive measure which, by its importance and scope, by its antagonisms as well as by its appeal, will lift us above the ruck of current affairs’, Industry would be stimulated, agriculture placated, ‘and the immense mass of the ratepayers would be astonished and gratified’. If the remaining rating assessment was then shifted from property to profits, ‘the relief would come with increasing effect to the depressed and struggling industries and factories, with reactions upon our competitive power and upon employment of the utmost benefit’.
Baldwin gave the scheme his approval. But Neville Chamberlain was annoyed that Churchill should once again, as with the insurance schemes of 1925, be picking the finest plums. Encouraged by the enthusiasm of his Treasury officials, Churchill went ahead, working at his scheme during the summer at Chartwell, while at the same time he painted, organised the building of walls, dams and ponds, and began a new literary venture, his autobiography from childhood to his entry into Parliament in 1900.
That summer Clementine Churchill was knocked down by a bus in a London street and badly shaken. While her husband remained at Chartwell, she went for six weeks to recuperate in Venice. Churchill was dictating sections of his autobiography; each night he would turn out the lights and listen to music on the wireless with his brother Jack. He also went to Scotland to hunt stags, and to catch salmon with his friend the Duke of Westminster. In October he joined his wife in Venice, where he painted, swam, and continued work on his autobiography. In London there was much speculation about his future. ‘Baldwin seems to be getting very much under the influence of Churchill,’ a Labour MP, Josiah Wedgwood, wrote to a friend, ‘perhaps because C never despairs of the republic. He is as young as ever, and the country and politics are still his game. They say that Baldwin is so tired and, perhaps, ill, that he will retire before the election and advise the King to send for Churchill.’
Leaving Clementine to continue her recovery in Venice, Churchill returned to England to work on the details of his derating scheme. His attempt to obtain £3 million of the £50 million he needed by cutbacks in naval expenditure failed; Neville Chamberlain sided with the Admiralty at the Cabinet meeting at which only the minimum naval cutbacks were agreed. As Treasury officials worked to perfect the scheme, one of them warned that the revenue raised for derating would be revenue denied towards the paying off of the national debt. Ever the optimist and enthusiast, Churchill replied, ‘I must beg you to inscribe hope and confidence in the growing strength of the country upon all your memoranda.’ An unexpected ally was a Conservative MP, Harold Macmillan, who proved such an enthusiast about derating that Churchill gave him a room at the Treasury in which to examine the scheme in detail.
On December 17, three weeks after his fifty-third birthday, Churchill’s scheme was ready for circulation to the Cabinet. That day he sent the first copy to Baldwin, to whom he called it ‘My Best Endeavour’. Seven days later Neville Chamberlain, to whom he had also sent a copy, replied with five pages of comment and a covering note, ‘You will see that my attitude, though cautious, is not wholly unfriendly.’ Chamberlain’s main suggestion was to make the rating relief partial, ‘say 50 per cent’, rather than total, to avoid the tax on petrol from which Churchill intended to raise £20 million of the £50 million needed. Such a tax, Chamberlain feared, would greatly antagonise the motorists, a growing slice of the electorate. Macmillan also suggested a partial scheme, 66 per cent derating, as he feared that the profits tax, ‘forged no doubt honestly for the purpose of financing this great relief to industry’, was capable of proving, in the hands of a Socialist Government, ‘a horrid engine of fiscal extortion’.
After studying the scheme, Lord Weir, Churchill’s former Director-General of Aircraft Production at the Ministry of Munitions, wrote to him on 3 January 1928, ‘You will do more for the coal industry by this action than all the coal commission reports put together.’ But Chamberlain now suggested retaining a third of the total rate. Reluctantly Churchill accepted this, ‘only bowing to the need of obtaining more general agreement’, he told Baldwin on January 4, ‘and defacing the classical purity of the conception for the sake of an easier passage!’ As less money would now have to be found from taxation, Churchill decided to discard the profits tax and make the petrol tax provide most of the money needed.
On January 9 Churchill and his son spent two days in northern France hunting wild boar. At Chartwell, on their return, James Lees-Milne, then an undergraduate at Oxford, was among the guests; he later recalled how after dinner, with the tablecloth removed from the dining-table, ‘Mr Churchill spent a blissful two hours demonstrating with decanters and wine-glasses how the Battle of Jutland was fought. It was a thrilling experience. He was fascinating. He got worked up like a schoolboy, making barking noises in imitation of gunfire and blowing cigar smoke across the battle scene in imitation of gun smoke.’ On the following morning Churchill paced up and down his vaulted study dictating his autobiography. ‘The sound of footfalls on the boards and his familiar voice were clearly audible. And in the afternoons he was waist deep in waders in the lake.’
***
Churchill presented his derating scheme to the Cabinet on January 20. ‘They seemed a little oppressed with the amount of labour which would be involved,’ Churchill wrote to Balfour, ‘but after all the bulk of this will fall on me—& I am quite ready to undertake it, & pretty sure I can produce a satisfactory result.’ On January 31 the Cabinet Policy Committee, chaired by Neville Chamberlain, agreed that partial derating was to be part of the 1928 Budget. Three days later, at Birmingham, Churchill launched the public campaign for derating, describing rates as ‘a harassing burden upon productive industry and agriculture’, levied, unlike income tax, ‘whether there are any profits or not’.
On February 16 the Cabinet gathered in the Cabinet Room as a mark of respect for Asquith, who had died on the previous day. As they came out Churchill defended his derating scheme to the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, Thomas Jones, whom he had earlier welcomed at Chartwell as a ‘corrective’ influence for Randolph against Lindemann’s fierce Conservatism. Churchill told Jones that compensating local authorities for their lost rates ‘really was the communist principle, from each authority according to its ability, to each authority according to its need’.
In March the derating scheme ran into difficulties. Chamberlain was uneasy at the way it had eclipsed his own plans to do something for the poor and for the necessitous areas. Churchill tried to encourage him to continue with his own scheme, but to no avail. At each meeting of the Cabinet Policy Committee, Chamberlain raised new objections. ‘I can make no progress in the face of your opposition,’ Churchill wrote to him on March 12.
An acrimonious correspondence followed. ‘Up to now I have done all the giving,’ Chamberlain wrote on March 14, and he now insisted that the railways be excluded from Churchill’s scheme and continue to pay rates. Churchill argued that this would make impossible his intention of cheaper charges for farmers moving food by rail. But Chamberlain, whose influence and interest lay with placating and wooing the local authorities, was adamant. Again Churchill gave way, writing to Chamberlain with some bitterness that he was ‘increasingly inclined to think that we had better leave the handling of these thorny matters to another Parliament, and perhaps to other hands’.
In Cabinet on April 4, after two days of intense discussion, all was settled; ‘Complete agreement, and at any rate ¾ of what I was aiming at,’ was how Churchill described it to Clementine. But the loss of a quarter of his scheme, and Chamberlain’s animosity, cast a shadow across his enthusiasm. ‘Neville most obstinate and, I thought, unreasonable. Pray God these plans bring back a little more prosperity to Poor Old England.’
Churchill delivered his fourth Budget on April 24. ‘Every public gallery was crammed,’ Baldwin told the King, ‘while in the Peers’ Gallery their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Gloucester were seen to take their places.’ In a speech lasting for three and a half hours, Churchill fascinated and amused the House; announcing an almost 100 per cent rise in children’s allowances, he commented, ‘Another example of our general policy of helping the producer.’ Clearly, patiently and with a wealth of detail, he then set out his derating scheme, and explained how it would be achieved; its aim, he said, was ‘to revive industry and create new jobs’.
Baldwin told the King that Churchill’s speech was ‘almost the most remarkable oratorical achievement’ of his career. But the debate that followed had to take place without him; a severe attack of influenza forced him to stay in bed at Chartwell. As soon as he was able, he went to Scotland to recuperate on the Duke of Westminster’s Rosehall estate, where he read Beaverbrook’s book on the opening months of the war, about those who had been his friends and fellow-politicians in 1914. ‘Think of these people,’ he wrote to Beaverbrook, ‘decent, educated, the story of the past laid out before them. What to avoid, what to do etc. Patriotic, loyal, clean—trying their utmost. What a ghastly muddle they made of it! Unteachable from infancy to tomb—there is the first & main characteristic of mankind.’
Churchill added at the bottom of his letter, ‘No more War.’ That July, the Committee of Imperial Defence discussed what was known as the ‘Ten Year Rule’ for defence spending; a rule laid down by the Committee in 1919 whereby the defence expenditure in any one year was to be based on the assumption that there would be no European war in prospect for the next ten years. Churchill took a lead in proposing that the rule should be ‘reviewed every year’. Its aim, he pointed out, was not to hamper the development of ideas, but to ‘check mass production until the situation demanded it’. The nation’s safety would be preserved, but excessive and premature expenditure avoided; it was essential, he argued, to avoid the production of weapons, ships and planes that would be obsolete by the outbreak of war.
Baldwin at first opposed the Ten Year Rule altogether, but was guided by the arguments of Churchill, and above all of Austen Chamberlain, that a European war was not imminent. The Committee then accepted Churchill’s proposal that there should be an annual reconsideration of the rule, so that the moment it appeared that the prospect of war was on the horizon, measures could be taken to prepare for war, using the most up-to-date equipment and weaponry.
In the summer of 1928, as pressure mounted within the Conservative Party for a return to Protection, Churchill was again at odds with his colleagues. ‘Take care,’ Lord Derby wrote to him in July, ‘that there is not an attack on Free Trade disguised under a vendetta against you.’ Churchill did not allow himself to become distressed, writing to Clementine that August, ‘Really I feel quite independent of them all.’ It was clear that the Conservative leadership would not pass to him if those then at the centre of the Party maintained their jealousy and mistrust. ‘He is a brilliant wayward child,’ Neville Chamberlain wrote to a friend, ‘who compels admiration but who wears out his guardians with the constant strain he puts upon them.’
Churchill made his ‘guardians’ work, or made them feel guilty that he was working when they were not. That summer and autumn he spent most of his time at Chartwell finishing the post-war volume of his war memoirs. ‘Remember my counsel to you and abide by it!’ Baldwin wrote to him on August 5: ‘Paint, pens, dams and nought else.’ Churchill also helped with the bricklaying for a small cottage for his five-year-old daughter Mary. ‘I have had a delightful month,’ he wrote to Baldwin on September 2, ‘building a cottage and dictating a book: 200 bricks and 2,000 words a day.’
Each day, Ministerial work was brought by car from the Treasury; Churchill devoted several hours to it daily. That month one of his visitors, James Scrymgeour-Wedderburn, noted in his diary after a two-hour talk alone with Churchill: ‘When he becomes engrossed in his subject he strides up and down the room with his head thrust forward and his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, as if he were trying to keep pace with his own eloquence. If he shows signs of slowing down, all you have to do is to make some moderately intelligent observation, and off he goes again.’
That autumn there had been considerable international activity, initiated by the United States, to secure the disarmament of the three strongest powers, Britain, France and the United States herself. ‘Personally I deprecate all these premature attempts to force agreement on disarmament,’ Churchill wrote to one of his Treasury advisers on September 9. Five days later he explained his unease in greater detail: ‘We are frequently told that Germany would disarm on the understanding that other nations would disarm too, and that further France in particular is bound morally to disarm. However I do not admit that any moral obligation exists. The Germans were prostrate and yielded themselves virtually at discretion. Any undertakings about Allied disarmament were not a matter of bargaining but a voluntary declaration on the part of the Allies.’
Churchill pointed out that since 1919 important changes had taken place in the situation of France: ‘She gave up the Rhine frontier in return for a promise by the United States together with Great Britain to come to her aid in the event of German aggression. This American promise has been withdrawn and France has not now the security on which she was induced to abandon the Rhine. The only securities for the defence of France are the French Army and the Locarno Treaties. But the Locarno Treaties depend for their efficiency upon the French Army. As long as that army is strong enough to overpower a German invasion no German invasion will be attempted.’
The British undertaking in the Locarno Treaties to protect Germany ‘from the misuse of the French Army’, Churchill wrote, ‘affords Germany full security, and it is unthinkable that France would attack Germany in defiance of England and Germany together. Thus the strength of the French Army protects us against the most probable danger of our being forced to intervene in Europe, and it is not in our interest at all to press for the whittling down of this force below the point of security. Moreover France will never consent to such a whittling down and all expectations that she will are futile.’
***
At the end of September Churchill was invited by the King to Balmoral for four days’ grouse and stag shooting. While there, he met for the first time the two-and-half-year-old Princess Elizabeth, and wrote to Clementine: ‘The last is a character. She has an air of authority & reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.’
That November Churchill was fifty-four. ‘You are still a child,’ Baldwin wrote to him, ‘so I may say “many happy returns”.’ Churchill spent his birthday at Chartwell. Clementine was at a nursing-home convalescing from blood-poisoning. Churchill remained at Chartwell for as much of each week as he could, dictating the final chapters of his war memoirs. At Christmas he was joined by Clementine, now recovering, by his three daughters, and by Randolph, now in his last few months at Eton.
On 7 February 1929 Churchill was in London for an emergency Cabinet. The Germans, hitherto disarmed and militarily weak, were, according to the most recent reports, developing a new battle-cruiser, light, fast and well armed, which would have a greater radius of action than any British battle-cruiser, and would fire a heavier weight of shell per minute than its nearest British rival. Cruiser design, Churchill warned, ‘was passing into a phase which would render obsolete our existing cruisers’. The new German cruiser would have 11-inch guns; these were debarred to Britain under the Washington Naval Disarmament Treaty of 1922. Churchill was again, as at the time of the German Navy Law in 1912, vigilant in his scrutiny of German intentions, and prospective power.
***
A General Election was to be held in May. Churchill’s first pre-election speech, on February 12, portrayed the dangers of a change of Government. If the Labour Party came to power, he said, it would be bound ‘to bring back the Russian Bolsheviks, who will immediately get busy in the mines and factories, as well as among the armed forces, planning another General Strike’. Well-meaning and respectable Ministers would be ‘moved here and there like marionettes, in accordance with the decision of a small secret international junta’.
This was Churchill’s theme throughout the campaign. It was made all the more urgent and strident by his realisation, as Beaverbrook wrote to a friend, that ‘he accepts electoral defeat in advance’. Other Conservative Cabinet Ministers assumed that the Party would be re-elected, and in several private gatherings discussed Churchill’s future office; Secretary of State for India and Foreign Secretary were two of the posts mentioned most frequently. Indeed, Baldwin himself suggested to Churchill that he should go to the India Office. He ‘seemed to feel’, Churchill later recalled, ‘that as I had carried the Transvaal Constitution through the House in 1906 and the Irish Free State Constitution in 1922, it would be in general harmony with my sentiments and my record to preside over a third great measure of self-government for another part of the Empire’. Churchill, however, was not attracted by this plan. Lord Birkenhead, then Secretary of State for India, had discussed with him many problems on the path to self-government in India, and he shared what he called Birkenhead’s ‘deep misgivings about that vast sub-continent’.
Neville Chamberlain revealed his growing animosity when he wrote to a friend that if Churchill were to become Foreign Secretary, Baldwin would ‘find himself waking up at nights with a cold sweat at the thought of Winston’s indiscretions’. Baldwin, however, with greater faith in Churchill’s statesmanship, favoured the Foreign Office for him, telling Leo Amery on March 4 that he would have ‘a rare chance of spreading himself and giving life and picturesqueness to what Austen has made a deadly dull business’.
On March 7, as political speculation continued, the fourth volume of Churchill’s war memoirs was published; called The World Crisis: The Aftermath, it was an eloquent plea for a settlement of post-war grievances and inequalities. Within a month, he agreed to write another multi-volume work, a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. He was also committed to finishing his autobiography, and had in mind a fifth and final volume on the war dealing with the Eastern Front and the Bolshevik revolution. If the General Election in May went against the Conservatives he would not be idle.
On April 15 Churchill delivered his fifth Budget, a count reached previously only by Walpole, Pitt, Peel and Gladstone, each of whom was, or was to become, Prime Minister. When he announced that he was abolishing the duty on tea which had existed since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Labour Shadow Chancellor Philip Snowden called it ‘election bribery’. Churchill was quick to point out that Snowden himself had earlier described the duty as ‘crushing the bent backs of the working class’.
Churchill spoke for nearly three hours. ‘I have never heard you speak better, and that’s saying a great deal,’ Baldwin wrote on the following day. ‘I hate the word brilliant: it has been used to death and is too suggestive of brilliantine: but if I may use it in its pristine virginity, so to speak, it is the right one. I congratulate you with both hands.’ It was a speech, wrote Neville Chamberlain in his diary, that had ‘kept the House fascinated and enthralled by its wit, audacity, adroitness and power’. Two weeks later, as part of the election campaign, Churchill made his first radio broadcast. ‘There was a note in it of extraordinary intimacy with his audience,’ wrote the Daily Express.
During his broadcast Churchill urged his listeners to vote Conservative, telling them, ‘Avoid chops and changes of policy; avoid thimble-riggers and three-card-trick men; avoid all needless borrowings; and above all avoid, as you would the smallpox, class warfare and violent political strife.’ On May 6 he repeated this theme in Edinburgh and Glasgow. But speeches were in vain; on May 30 the Conservatives were swept from office, and Ramsay MacDonald formed his second Government.
Churchill was re-elected for Epping; although without Cabinet Office, he was still a Member of Parliament, twenty-nine years after he had first entered the House of Commons. ‘He’s a good fighter,’ T.E. Lawrence wrote to Marsh that June, ‘and will do better out than in, and will come back in a stronger position than before. I want him to be PM somehow.’