ONE

‘RULE BRITANNIA’

Churchill loved singing, the good life, and the company of close friends – especially if they were rich, powerful, or influential. So the New Year celebrations to herald the arrival of 1921 found him in a jovial mood. He was staying at Port Lympne, a luxurious mansion in Kent perched on a ridge overlooking Romney Marsh with views over the English Channel. His fellow house guests consisted of some of Britain’s most powerful men: David Lloyd George, whose wily domination of the political scene as prime minister during the First World War and since, as well as his masterful handling of the Paris Peace Conference, had earned him the sobriquet of ‘the Welsh Wizard’; Baron Riddell, the influential proprietor of one of the bestselling newspapers of the day, The News of the World, who had masterminded Lloyd George’s relations with the press at Paris and now did so in Britain; Sir William Sutherland, nicknamed ‘Bronco Bill’, the political fixer and go-between who rarely left Lloyd George’s side, a Glaswegian widely mistrusted as an unscrupulous manipulator, branded by Riddell as ‘an amusing, cynical dog’, and damned by the Cabinet Secretary Sir Maurice Hankey as ‘an odious fellow, some sort of political parasite’. The Irish Secretary Sir Hamar Greenwood, a Canadian-born lawyer and Liberal Member of Parliament who had worked with Churchill at the Colonial Office before the war and now faced an Ireland in open revolt, was also amongst the company. His assigned task in the government was to exude optimism, and he was a loyal performer.

Discreetly accompanying the prime minister was his long-standing secretary and mistress, the thirty-two-year-old classics graduate Frances Stevenson, who had fallen for his charms before the war and been at his side ever since. The only other woman present was Greenwood’s politically ambitious wife Margo. The daughter of a wealthy English vicar and seventeen years younger than her husband, she was rumoured to have enjoyed the prime minister’s sexual favours before and possibly even after her marriage; the Greenwoods were frequent guests at weekend parties organized for Lloyd George by the ubiquitous Stevenson.1

*

The male guests were in their forties or fifties. The two women were in their early thirties. Close in age to both, and hovering discreetly in the background, was their host, the unmarried thirty-two-year-old aesthete and millionaire Sir Philip Sassoon. Sleek, athletic, and impeccably dressed, he was a grandson on his mother’s side of Baron Gustave de Rothschild of Paris, the second cousin of the famous war poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the local Conservative Member of Parliament. Churchill knew him well, as did Clementine, who had spent several weeks in 1914 at Port Lympne recovering from the birth of Sarah, their second daughter. As private secretary to Sir Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of British forces on the Western Front, Sassoon had managed Haig’s daily schedule and his relations with the press, drafted his letters, arranged visits for dignitaries, and garnered a host of influential contacts that were delivering him – and them – a healthy peacetime dividend by way of political influence. Churchill had made many visits to the Western Front as Minister of Munitions. ‘Philip sits like a wakeful spaniel outside [Haig’s] door,’ he joked to Clementine. Sassoon was now Lloyd George’s parliamentary private secretary and with an office next to the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street he now performed a similar function as he had for Haig. Frances Stevenson quipped that he was as ‘amusing and clever as a cartload of monkeys’.

Port Lympne was not Sassoon’s only residence. Both his grand house on Park Lane and his mansion north of London at Trent Park provided venues for an unending round of hospitality that brought together royalty, politicians, writers, stars of stage and screen, and other celebrities that was to stretch over two decades until Sassoon’s premature death aged fifty in 1939. Legendary in their day, his parties resembled theatrical set pieces that according to one of their regular participants ‘mingled luxury, simplicity, and informality, brilliantly contrived’.2

*

This visit was by no means the first that Churchill had made to Lympne. Just five months before, he and Clementine had enjoyed a summer weekend there when he had become absorbed in painting and sketching views across Romney Marsh, striving hard to capture on canvas the sparkling movement of the water. He appreciated Sassoon’s hospitality, his contacts, and his discretion, as well as his interest in art. The young millionaire was soon to be appointed a Trustee of the National Gallery of Art in London and he offered Churchill encouragement and critiques of his work, lent him paintings from his own private collection to copy, and introduced him to distinguished society artists. This was not the only weekend in 1921 during which Churchill would be one of Sassoon’s privileged guests.

*

Port Lympne had been built for Sassoon just before the war as a modest weekend house. But in a burst of optimism at the arrival of peace he had spent a small fortune on having it modernized and enlarged by the fashionable young architect Philip Tilden. Outwardly, the red-brick building was stylish but conservative, with terraced gardens, fountains, statues, and pavilions with classical pillars that referenced the site’s historic origins as a Roman port.

Behind the bronze front door, however, Sassoon had let loose his own far from conventional creative ambitions and artistic tastes. An interior courtyard featured white marble columns, brilliant green pantiles, and orange trees, and was almost certainly inspired by a visit he had made to the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. The library was lined with books bound in pinkish-red Moroccan leather and sported a green and pink carpet. In the dining room the walls were decorated with marble-effect cobalt-blue lapis lazuli, the central table was surrounded by gilded chairs with arms resembling the wings of an eagle, and the ceiling was ringed with a frieze depicting a scene from ancient Egypt of half-naked black men working with animals.

But the dramatic highlight and undoubted talking point of the house was the drawing room. Here, Sassoon had commissioned a mural by the Catalan artist, Josep Maria Sert, who had deeply impressed him with the sets he had designed for a performance of the Ballets Russes. An allegory of Germany’s defeat in the recent war, it showed France as a draped and crouching female figure being attacked by German eagles and defended by the Allies in the form of children wearing headpieces from their respective national costumes, and by the Indian Empire, represented by elephants. The story ended with the German eagles being torn to pieces, feathers flying. Charlie Chaplin, who stayed with Sassoon later this same year, described Port Lympne as ‘something out of the Arabian Nights’.3

*

It was in the drawing room, surrounded by Sert’s triumphal mural, that Sassoon and his guests gathered to celebrate the New Year. Churchill was in a typically ebullient mood, vying with Lloyd George to be at the centre of attention. The two had long been friends and rivals. In the pre-war Liberal government, they had formed a ‘terrible duo’ that successfully steered radical social and political reforms through Parliament which made them anathema to Conservatives and the British establishment. With his clear blue eyes and mane of raffish white hair, Lloyd George was the senior by a decade. A disruptive force himself – he was the son of a poor schoolteacher and his first language was Welsh – he was more experienced, craftier, and more ruthless than Churchill. Their friendship was distinctly political, and sharply barbed. From close experience Lloyd George appreciated Churchill’s talents. But he also knew their risks. As Chancellor of the Exchequer when Churchill was Home Secretary, Lloyd George had considered Churchill’s plan to deal with the Welsh miners’ strike ‘mad’ and its author wild and impulsive. ‘He makes me very uneasy,’ he added.4 As prime minister, however, he felt safer with Churchill inside rather than outside the Cabinet. He had brought him back from the political wilderness to the Ministry of Munitions in 1917, and after the Conservative/Liberal Coalition victory of 1918 he appointed him Secretary of State for War and Air. Churchill was acutely aware of his dependence on Lloyd George. He knew that his protector could just as easily become his political assassin. This lent their alliance a treacherous edge. At the time of Gallipoli, Lloyd George’s support had been noticeably lukewarm. ‘I assure you,’ the fiercely loyal Clementine warned her husband, ‘he is the direct descendant of Judas Iscariot.’⁵

But tonight, all was bonhomie. Phoenix-like, Churchill was back in the Cabinet and at the centre of British politics – and, not least, media attention. Recently turned forty-six and just under five feet seven inches tall, Churchill had clearly crossed the line from youth into middle age. He was thickening around the waist and his face was rounding out. His pale blue eyes were as alert as ever but his sandy hair was fading and he was now almost bald on top. He was still energetic, physically active, and a keen polo player, the strenuous sport he had embraced as a subaltern in the British Army stationed in Bangalore, India, some quarter of a century before. But a serious fall playing the game a few months earlier had put him out of action for several days; injuries no longer healed as rapidly as in his youth. Until two years before he had also been an enthusiastic trainee pilot. He’d given it up after almost getting killed in a crash – and in reluctant response to a passionate plea from Clementine to think of his family and the children.

*

To amuse the company Sir William Sutherland had brought along gramophone records of speeches by Warren Harding, the newly elected Republican President of the United States. Churchill knew more about American politics than anyone else in the company. Some he had learned from his American-born mother, but he’d acquired most from one of her oldest friends – and former lovers – the Irish-American politician Bourke Cochran, one-time Democratic congressman from New York City and close advisor to both Presidents Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1895 Churchill had arrived in New York on his way to observe the Spanish Army’s campaign to crush a guerrilla uprising by Cuban rebels. It was his first visit to the United States and his mother had arranged for Cochran to take her impressionable twenty-year-old son in hand. The force of Cochran’s belief in the power of rhetoric and oratory to sway politics had stayed with him ever since.6

As Harding’s voice boomed out scratchily from the machine’s gigantic loudspeaker, Churchill and Lloyd George amused the company by shouting back irreverent and caustic comments. Given the compromise nature of American politics, Churchill told his fellow guests, platitudes such as those emerging from Harding’s mouth were inevitable. It was simply not safe for an American politician to venture much beyond promises that ‘The sun shone yesterday upon this great and glorious country. It shines today and will shine tomorrow.’

His mimicry raised predictable laughter. But behind the mirth lay serious anxiety. The First World War had fundamentally changed the balance of world power. The US Senate had refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and thus blocked America’s entry into the League of Nations. How would the new power of the United States, especially of its Navy, be contained? And what did its command of the seas, especially in the Pacific, mean for the British Empire, the Royal Navy, and for Anglo-American relations generally? When the gramophone emitted some grandiose claim by Harding about the American Navy, Lloyd George confessed that he would rather pawn his shirt than allow America to dominate the seas. His outburst struck a powerful patriotic chord and spontaneously the assembled company launched into a lusty rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’. Churchill took the lead. As a former First Lord of the Admiralty his pride in the Royal Navy ran deep. He believed passionately in maintaining British naval superiority in the new post-war world. Only two weeks before, at a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence, there had been an intense discussion about Anglo-American naval relations. Lloyd George considered this the most important and the most difficult question the Committee had ever discussed. Churchill was all for close relations with Washington, and he accepted that when it came to battleships there would have to be equality – if only for reasons of economy. Overall, though, Britannia should rule supreme in ships. ‘Great Britain must remain the strongest naval power,’ he argued passionately. ‘It would be a terrible day . . . when she ceased to be this. Great Britain, since the most remote times, had always been supreme at sea. The life of the nation, its culture, its prosperity, had rested on that basis.’ Not surprisingly the evening saw him repeatedly singing out the words of ‘Rule Britannia’ and going out of his way to praise their beauty and patriotic fervour. The last two verses, he pronounced, would make a splendid peroration.7

More songs followed. Lloyd George, who had been brought up as a Baptist, was known for enjoying hymns and taking part in Wales’s annual National Eisteddfod or Festival of Song and Poetry. Once, during the Paris peace talks, a junior member of the Cabinet Secretariat had gone over to Lloyd George’s flat for dinner. ‘As I came in,’ recorded Leo Amery, ‘[I] heard weird doleful sounds and found L. G. [Lloyd George] singing a Welsh hymn to Miss Stevenson’s accompaniment.’⁸ But in the privacy of Lympne, surrounded by trusted friends, he chose something in a markedly different vein: the popular Irish song ‘Cockles and Mussels’. Its opening lines – ‘In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone’ – undoubtedly evoked wry smiles, or at least private chuckles, as the assembled guests joined in with the chorus; the prime minister’s relaxed attitude towards his marital vows was no secret and not for nothing was he known as ‘The Goat’. In Paris he had lived openly with Frances Stevenson in a luxurious flat on the rue Nitot, quite separate from the official British delegation. After two or three more songs, and a song-and-dance routine by Hamar and Margo Greenwood, it was Churchill’s turn.

As an army cadet at Sandhurst during the 1890s he had used his leave to venture into central London and enjoy one of his greatest pleasures – the music hall. This boisterous and often bawdy late Victorian blend of music, words and theatricality thrilled him all his life. As a child he loved playing with his toy theatre. He admiringly talked of his father Lord Randolph Churchill’s ‘showman’s knack’ of drawing attention to himself. Given an audience, he once confessed to his mother, ‘there is no act too daring or noble’. Lloyd George neatly captured his theatrical character after observing him once in the House of Commons. ‘The applause of the House is the very breath of his nostrils,’ he observed. ‘He is just like an actor. He likes the limelight and the approbation of the pit.’9

*

The drawing room at Lympne was far removed from the orchestral pit of a London music hall. But it was certainly theatrical, and it held a captive audience. Churchill seized the moment. He had an impressive memory for words and could cite great passages of prose and poetry by heart, a gift that would provide him with a lifetime’s fund of phrases and images from which he later drew to inspire the nation during the dark days of the Second World War.

But alongside the classics of literature he retained a fund of material from the old music hall. Not long before, he had dutifully accepted an invitation – although it was more like a command – to one of his mother’s fashionable lunches in London. Here, for the first time, he met Ivor Novello, the brilliant young Welsh composer of the popular and enduring First World War song, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. They immediately took a liking to each other and throughout the meal sparked each other off by reciting the titles of music-hall songs they both knew. But Novello was puzzled when Churchill cracked an obscure joke. Only the next day did it dawn on the composer that it related to the title of a long-forgotten song from ‘the old days’.¹⁰ When they first met before the war, the Canadian press magnate Max Aitken – later Lord Beaverbrook – had quickly noted Churchill’s penchant for living well, smoking expensive cigars, enjoying brandy and, in moments of relaxation, singing music-hall melodies ‘in a raucous voice, and without any instinct for tune’.¹¹ Music-hall songs were to give him comfort for the rest of his life. During the anxious build-up to the D-Day Normandy landings in the spring of 1944, Clementine celebrated her fifty-ninth birthday with a small family gathering at Downing Street. To keep them amused while Winston worked on his papers, his private secretary ‘Jock’ Colville chose a selection of music-hall songs. These, he knew, were Winston’s prime choice of music.12

One of the most popular late Victorian and Edwardian music-hall entertainers was George (G. H.) Chirgwin, the son of a circus clown, who specialized in minstrel shows. But instead of using a fully blacked-up face he painted a large white diamond shape over one eye and was thus billed as ‘The White-Eyed Kaffir’. Churchill was clearly familiar with Chirgwin, and Margo Greenwood, who was keeping a diary, noted that ‘Winston repeated by heart verse after verse of Chirgwin’s [songs].’ George Riddell, also a diarist, marvelled at how effortless it all was, even though Churchill had not heard many of the songs in years. Even the hard-bitten and cynical Sutherland was impressed. ‘He’s an artist in words,’ he observed drily.¹³

*

So he was. Before becoming a politician, he was a writer. First as a highly paid war correspondent, then as the author of bestselling books based on his personal exploits in the imperial wars of late Victorian Britain: the North West Frontier of India, Sudan, and the war against the Boers in South Africa. Determined to vindicate the memory of the father who had so spectacularly self-destructed, he’d also written his hefty two-volume biography. Since his own political crash after Gallipoli, he was now desperately keen to vindicate himself. Over the previous few months he had been gathering documents from his time at the Admiralty to support his case, dictating the drafts of chapters of what quickly expanded from a short book about Gallipoli into a multi-volume history of the First World War to be entitled The World Crisis. In November he had persuaded the London literary agent Albert Curtis Brown to take on the project, and they soon secured an offer of £9,000 for British Empire rights – the equivalent today of £300,000. Then, just before Christmas, he had received more excellent news: The Times newspaper had agreed to pay £5,000 for serialization rights. When he arrived at Lympne, lucrative American contract talks were also well advanced. In the end, the book was to earn him some three-quarters of a million pounds in today’s terms. Churchill held no religious belief in eternal life. ‘Words,’ he once said, ‘are the only things that last for ever.’ His writings about himself have effectively ensured him his own kind of immortality.14

The regular weekend stays at the country houses of friends and colleagues offered more than the welcome opportunity to talk, enjoy fine food, and drink champagne. He always had something creative to do as well. In good weather, this meant taking along an easel, canvasses, and an armoury of brushes and tubes of paint. At other times, he arrived equipped with pen, paper, and documents. With the generous contracts for The World Crisis in his pocket, this 1921 New Year’s Eve he was in an especially expansive mood. So much so indeed that he boasted to Riddell that he had already written a great part of the first volume, planned to produce 300,000 words, and would then cut it down in length and polish it all up. It was exhilarating, he confessed to the wealthy press magnate, to feel that he was working for half a crown a word. He then disappeared upstairs to write more. Two hours later he returned. ‘It’s a horrible thought,’ joked Riddell to Lloyd George, ‘that while we’ve been frittering away our time, Winston has been piling up words at half a crown apiece.’¹⁵

*

Jokes about money were one thing, Music-hall nostalgia another, and mimicry of the Americans yet another. More serious was the talk about Ireland.

Here, British policy was teetering between repression and concession. Home Rule bills creating parliaments for both Northern and Southern Ireland had come into force just before Christmas. But the limited devolution they granted was not enough for Sinn Fein, which demanded a republic and full independence outside the British Empire. Its armed struggle, led by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), sparked assassinations and reprisals on both sides. Barely six weeks before the gathering at Lympne, on a Sunday morning in late November 1920, twelve British agents were hauled out of their beds at various addresses across Dublin and shot in cold blood, many in their pyjamas or in front of their wives; most were involved in anti-IRA intelligence work. In retaliation, that same afternoon British forces raided the Croke Park Gaelic football stadium in the city and fired into the crowd, killing twelve spectators and injuring dozens more. ‘Bloody Sunday’ was followed by more reprisals and in December the Cabinet decided to proclaim martial law in four of Ireland’s southern counties. After an IRA ambush on a British patrol a large part of the city of Cork was burned to the ground, including the City Hall and Carnegie Library. Ireland, said Lloyd George, was nothing better than a ‘hell’s broth’. In fear of IRA assassins he had started wearing a bullet-proof waistcoat and taking a fierce Airedale police dog with him on walks.16

*

Churchill’s relationship with Ireland was long, close, and complex. He had spent part of his childhood in Dublin, had close Irish relatives, and the small fortune he was about to inherit came from an estate in County Antrim. Although his father had notoriously played ‘the Orange card’ in supporting the Protestant unionists of the north, since before the war he himself had supported Home Rule, although with separate provision for Ulster. Far from being an imperialist John Bull when it came to Ireland, his views were complex and nuanced. What he was bitterly opposed to, however, was the IRA’s campaign of violence. On this, his views were hawkish and his rhetoric was bloodthirsty. After Lloyd George had appointed him six months before as head of the Cabinet Committee on Ireland, he had suggested various methods of intensifying the war including aircraft to bomb or machine-gun Sinn Fein. To increase the chances of a settlement, he said, it was necessary ‘to raise the temperature’ of the conflict to a real trial of strength.¹⁷As Secretary of State for War he was ultimately responsible for the troops in Ireland. The previous spring, he had proposed the creation of a specially recruited auxiliary armed force to be attached to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). Known as the ‘Black and Tans’ because of the colour of their uniforms – a mix of police black belts and army khaki – it was they who spearheaded the bulk of British reprisals against the IRA, entered Croke Park with such deadly results, and set fire to Cork. The head of the RIC was Major-General Henry Tudor, a long-standing friend since their subaltern days together in India. Thanks to him, the force became increasingly militarized.

Churchill stoutly defended the Black and Tans’ campaign of reprisals. They were ‘striking down in darkness those who struck from the darkness,’ he unapologetically wrote later. Nor would there be any negotiations under duress, he told his parliamentary constituents in Dundee that October. The IRA, he thundered, was nothing more than ‘a miserable gang of cowardly assassins’. Not surprisingly, Scotland Yard soon received intelligence that Sinn Fein was planning to kidnap him and other British ministers. By the time he arrived at Sassoon’s Port Lympne, he had been given a personal bodyguard.18

The Irish crisis seemed deadlocked in a never-ending cycle of violence and bloodshed. Yet behind the scenes, things were moving. Back-channel exploration with Sinn Fein had been going on for months. Just the day before travelling down to Lympne, Churchill had backed Lloyd George at a special Cabinet meeting in arguing for a temporary truce. But the generals present were strongly opposed. ‘Terror could be broken,’ they argued, and carried the day with martial law being extended to four more counties in the south. Lloyd George and Churchill arrived at Sassoon’s nursing their defeat. Sir Hamar Greenwood was not on the original guest list. But after getting an urgent phone call from Lloyd George, he drove down in his car with Margo. As a Canadian with strong imperial instincts, he had prevaricated during the Cabinet meeting. But it was important to get him back in line and to review the situation.

General Tudor had supported the other generals in vetoing a truce. Yet Churchill was not one to nurse a grudge or take it personally. Far from it. His old friend was just standing firm as he had during the war as commander of the 9th (Scottish) Division, explained Churchill to his colleagues, and described a visit he had made to Tudor’s headquarters on the eve of the massive German Spring offensive of March 1918. Together they had toured the front line and visited the trenches. The shelling on both sides was terrific. After observing the bombardments for several minutes Tudor insisted they move on. Moments later, the spot where they had been standing was blown up. Throughout, Churchill admiringly told the gathering in Sassoon’s drawing room, Tudor had been quite unconcerned.

Implicitly, so had he. He was the only one present who had actively fought on the Western Front. Whatever criticisms that could be levied against him about Gallipoli, his battlefield experience gave him a moral advantage over many of his contemporaries. It also provided him with rich first-hand material for the book that he was working on upstairs in his room. His account of the episode with Tudor in The World Crisis is characteristically cinematic. ‘Through the chinks in the carefully prepared window,’ he writes graphically, ‘the flame of the bombardment lit like firelight my tiny cabin.’19

*

Over the breakfast table that Monday morning the talk returned to Ireland. All of those there supported peace – provided Sinn Fein was prepared to make concessions. ‘Winston [punctuated] the conversation with shrewd comments,’ noted Margo Greenwood. He had already confessed that he was worried about the negative effects that British repression was having on American public opinion. In one case, Kevin Barry, an eighteen-year-old medical student, had been executed in Mountjoy Prison in Dublin for a terrorist attack that killed three British soldiers. A professional hangman was specially brought in from London to carry out the sentence and Barry’s death was quickly immortalized in a legendary nationalist ballad with its highly charged chorus words ‘Hanged liked a dog’, not shot ‘like a soldier’. More notoriously, the imprisoned Sinn Fein Lord Mayor of Cork and IRA commander, Terence MacSwiney, had died in Brixton Prison after a hunger strike lasting seventy-four days. In an exquisitely choreographed show of Sinn Fein propaganda, his open coffin was carried from Brixton to Southwark’s Catholic Cathedral, where 30,000 people filed past his coffin to view the corpse. MacSwiney’s funeral continued to receive massive worldwide publicity as his body was conveyed by rail and ferry back to Cork. Britain was clearly losing the international war of propaganda over Ireland.²⁰

Churchill, more than most of his contemporaries, was attuned to the shifting tides of transatlantic sentiment. He was also sympathetic to Irish national feelings and aware that public support inside Britain for the government’s hard-line stand, already shaky, could not continue indefinitely. Yet from intelligence reports he also knew that the IRA itself was doubting it could win the war. Was it, perhaps, time for a deal?

*

Before returning to London he had one more thing to accomplish. The Lympne estate nestled in a natural amphitheatre on the edge of the sea embraced by an escarpment. Here, over a picnic lunch on New Year’s Day, he asked Lloyd George for a new Cabinet position.

The fact was that he was discontented and wanted to leave the War Office. After a promising start sorting out a mess over the demobilization of millions of men in uniform and backing the creation of an independent Royal Air Force, Churchill suffered a series of failures and disappointments. Despite all his efforts, the Cabinet had refused to intervene in Russia against Lenin’s Bolshevik regime and had agreed to start trade negotiations with Moscow. It had also failed to support Churchill’s demand that Britain should start negotiating with Mustafa Kemal of Turkey, and frustrated some of his efforts to reduce expenditures in Mesopotamia (which in the course of 1921 became known as Iraq). Within the Cabinet, he was often isolated.

Above all, however, he feared an imminent breakdown in his relationship with Lloyd George. This was the only thing keeping him in the political game. That their relationship had survived so long was something of a miracle. Now he could see it ending. Shortly before Christmas he had bluntly set out his fears in a long and emotional letter to his long-time political friend. ‘I am vy [sic] sorry to see how far we are drifting apart on foreign policy,’ he began, and ended by hinting, not so subtly, at resignation. ‘I have other new interests on [which] I [could] fall back,’ he wrote.21

Lloyd George was increasingly aware of the fragility of his Coalition government and likewise feared a break. Yet Churchill outside the Cabinet would be more of a nuisance and a danger than inside. The trick was to find him a task that would absorb his energies on an alternative grand stage. Two years before, when he was pondering where to place Churchill in his Cabinet, Riddell had suggested the Colonial Office on the grounds that the colonies would pose many problems and that the position itself needed ‘bucking up’. Besides, he added, Churchill could usefully make a tour of the Empire. Lloyd George had rejected the idea then. ‘It would be like condemning a man to be head of a mausoleum,’ he said. But Riddell’s words clearly stuck in his mind. The Empire was certainly a grand stage that would appeal to Churchill’s imperial instincts. Perhaps, too, it would be useful to have him out of the country for a while enjoying a grand tour of his new domain. Now, gazing out over the English Channel, the prime minister offered him the position.22

But Churchill did not immediately leap at the opportunity. Instead, he thought it over for three or four days. It was something of a poisoned chalice as it would include Mesopotamia (Iraq) as a British mandate. He had already struggled to reduce troop numbers there because of resistance and opposition from other ministries with overlapping interests in the country. Only if he was allowed to set up his own special Middle East Department with full powers over the issue, he told Lloyd George, would he take on the job. A few days later the two men hammered out its terms. He would formally take over the Colonial Office and relinquish the War Office in mid-February. Work on creating the new department would begin immediately and he would start thinking about making a personal visit to the Middle East to examine the issues at first hand. This perfectly fitted Lloyd George’s political agenda. He knew Churchill better than did Churchill himself. ‘Winston must have a stunt, he is not content to do the ordinary work that goes with his post,’ he confided to Margo Greenwood.²³

The decision also suited Churchill and was more a matter of push than pull – a way of removing himself from sources of friction and conflict with Lloyd George rather than any great enthusiasm for his new task. Indeed, his experience so far with the ‘thankless deserts’ of Iraq was largely negative. ‘I am afraid this venture is going to break me,’ he despondently told Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary.²⁴