FIVE

THE GREAT CORNICHE OF LIFE

Churchill’s relationship with money was a high-wire act that always teetered on the brink of disaster. As the grandson of a duke, he expected and relished the trappings of aristocratic life – grand houses, personal valets and servants, fine food and drink, expensive clothes, first-class travel. The problem was that he lacked the assured income to fund it. He received only a modest allowance when his father died and was forced to make his own financial way in life. This he did brilliantly by earning a small fortune through his early books and journalism. But what he earned was quickly spent. Never afraid to take on debt or run financial risks, by 1921 he was spending more than he was earning as a Cabinet minister. Meetings with his bank manager about juggling loans had become distinctly fraught. He could count on covering some of the gap between income and expenditure thanks to the lucrative contract he had just signed for The World Crisis. Still, the situation was precarious. Bills for the renovations and additions to the new house continued to mount. ‘We must try to live within our income,’ he sternly admonished Clementine.1

But that same day, twenty-four hours after the railway accident in Wales, his solicitors were officially informed of his inheritance of the Garron Towers estate lying on the coast of County Antrim in Ireland. Following the recent sale of most of the estate’s houses it consisted mostly of farmlands, quarries, a lime works, and a harbour. The proceeds of the sale were safely invested in government bonds and stocks that yielded an annual income of some £4,000 (£240,000 in today’s terms). Combined with his Cabinet salary it meant that he was suddenly a wealthy man, one of the many reasons that made this year an important turning point in his life. For the first time, he now had a secure income independent of any parliamentary or ministerial salary, or of what he could earn from writing. Adding to the rosy financial picture was the news this same month that his wildly spendthrift mother had sold her Mayfair house for a clear profit of £15,000, and was thus rescued from the depressing prospect of having to move across the Channel in search of a lower cost of living, as Clementine’s mother had done. ‘No more need to [live] abroad!’ he sighed with relief on her behalf.2

Observers were quick to speculate on what his inheritance would mean for Churchill. One of them was Thomas Power O’Connor, an Irish Nationalist Party Member of Parliament and a living link with the politics of the 1880s and the glory days of Churchill’s father. With almost fifty years of continuous service in the Commons, he now enjoyed the title of ‘Father of the House’. By profession he was a journalist and a long-time correspondent for the New York Herald, and he wrote regular columns for The Times. After noting that one of the assets of the Garron Towers estate was a large and gloomy house that for years had been let as a hotel, O’Connor went on to make the point that while there was not quite so much money as originally rumoured, nonetheless it opened new doors to Churchill’s ambitions and prospects:

But still there will be enough left to make Mr. Churchill’s position pecuniarily [sic] much more satisfactory than it has been. He also is like Mr. Lloyd George in finding politics the master passion of his life. Restless, boundlessly ambitious, with quite wonderful gifts as a Parliamentarian – which have steadily improved in the last few years – there is no knowing what he will ever do or to what position he may ultimately reach.³

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Churchill was never reluctant to celebrate good fortune in extravagant style. The day after receiving news of his inheritance, in an escapade missed even by the official biographer, he headed back to the Riviera to rejoin Clementine at Cimiez. Passing through Paris, he met briefly with Gerald Geiger, who reported eagerly to Archie Sinclair that ‘the blessed railway accident’ had seen their mutual friend leaving for the south of France in ‘an atmosphere of geniality possibly more exuberant than normal owing to the rosy visions which the prospect of an additional £6,000 pa [sic] doubtless engenders’. Travelling with Churchill in the train south were the Curzons, and on arrival at Nice he found Clementine waiting happily at the station along with various local dignitaries. He was in time to take in some of the colourful winter carnival and stayed for three or four days before returning home.4

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To Clementine the inheritance came as a massive relief. She had never shared her husband’s tolerance of debt and financial risk. Since he had left Nice two weeks before she had continued the good life on the Riviera. She was there for the Festival of Flowers, played tennis, socialized with friends, and spent money she knew they could ill afford; in fact, she had just sent her husband a bill for some new clothes. So her first natural reaction to the news was to hope they could pay off their debts. However, after a few days’ reflection, she began to relish the prospect of an easier and grander life. Dreams of again owning a large house in the country swam into view.

By now she had moved on from Nice to stay with Adele, the widowed Countess of Essex, another old friend, who owned a villa named Lou Mas at St Jean Cap Ferrat. An American heiress and former society beauty, she was a close neighbour in Mayfair of Churchill’s mother and divided her time between London and the Riviera. One day she and Clementine met for lunch in Monte Carlo with Jean, Lady Hamilton, the co-owner with Sir Ian of the Churchills’ lost lamented Lullenden. The encounter sparked nostalgic musings that revealed that both Clementine and Winston were now already nursing hopes of repeating the country house experience – though Clementine ruefully accepted that even with the Garron Towers inheritance a place like Lullenden itself would be too costly to run.5 Shortly afterwards, she moved to the gleaming white belle époque Hotel Bristol in nearby Beaulieu-sur-Mer, where she stayed until the end of February. She felt lonely in this vast hotel surrounded by middle-class English people, but she kept up her tennis, continued her casino visits, and was especially delighted when John and Hazel Lavery arrived for a lengthy stay at nearby Cap d’Ail. The artist’s previous Mediterranean visits had been to North Africa. Now he hoped to capture the visually exciting landscape of the Riviera.⁶

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Clementine was no passive or subservient observer of her husband’s political career, and actively promoted his cause with other sun-seekers on the Riviera. One day, at her special request, Adele invited J. L. (‘Jim’) Garvin, the voluble editor of the influential Sunday newspaper, the Observer, for lunch at Lou Mas. He was one of the few Conservatives to have defended Churchill over the Dardanelles. ‘He is young. He has lionhearted courage. No number of enemies can fight down his ability and force’, he had written. ‘His hour of triumph will come.’ So gratified was Churchill by this that he had nominated Garvin to write his biography, although this never in the end transpired. The lunch was a relaxed event full of London gossip, and Clementine learned that Lord Northcliffe was bursting with curiosity about Churchill’s art and wanted to know how much his ‘Charles Morin’ paintings in Paris had sold for. Yet memories of war still cast their shadows over the Riviera’s febrile glitter. Garvin’s only son had been killed on the Somme in 1916, and his wife had died of influenza during the post-war pandemic. The Hotel Bristol itself had only recently re-opened after serving as a military hospital. More consequential, however, was a lengthy conversation Clementine had at the Bristol with another powerful media figure. But this one was known as an outspoken foe of her husband.⁷

*

‘Thank God, we are once more on British soil!’ declared the fresh-faced twenty-six-year-old Churchill as he stepped off a train from Boston at the Windsor railway station in Montreal. It was just before Christmas 1900. He was heavily bundled up against the cold and on his way to Ottawa and Government House to enjoy the season’s festivities with the Governor-General of Canada and his wife, Lord and Lady Minto. Afterwards, he would continue with a speaking tour he was making of North America. It was his second visit across the Atlantic, and the first to Canada. Since his dramatic escape from the Boers, he had spun it into a highly lucrative lecture tour and tale of personal adventure that earned him enough to fund his lifestyle for several years to come. He had also just been elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament. In New York he had been introduced to his audience by the legendary author Mark Twain, and in Boston by his namesake (but no relative), the American novelist Winston Churchill. He had met President McKinley in Washington, and dined in Albany with the Governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt. After Christmas with the Mintos, he returned to Montreal to give his lecture before going on to Toronto and Ottawa and finishing his tour in Winnipeg.

In Montreal he delivered his talk to a packed audience at Windsor Hall. It followed the format he had perfected, a skilled confection of vividly told highlights of the British campaign against the Boers woven together by the scintillating thread of his personal adventures and illustrated by carefully selected photographs. For his rapt audiences north of the border he added some suitably laudatory words about the performance of the Canadian troops. By all press accounts it was a great success. The English-language Montreal Gazette noted approvingly that ‘Lord Randolph’s son . . . caught the sympathy and interest of his audience and retained it throughout.’8

Yet one listener took away a distinctly negative impression of the ambitious young politician from Britain. Colonel John Bayne Maclean was the son of Scottish immigrants to Ontario. A former journalist who owned a number of trade magazines, he had put an enormous effort into publicizing the talk as well as arranging a lunch and a dinner afterwards for the speaker. But he was disappointed to find that Churchill had little to reveal about the Boer War that the twelve hundred or so paying listeners did not already know. What was worse, he came across as ‘boastfully arrogant’ by claiming that one day he would be the British prime minister. The son of Lord Randolph, thought Maclean, had been ‘shamefully disgusting and offensive to all’, and his negative opinion had only hardened over the years.

This winter Maclean had joined the swelling wave of North Americans flooding to the post-war Riviera to mingle with the rich and famous of European society. By this time, he was a grandee of Canadian publishing and had accrued a media empire that included Maclean’s, an influential news magazine reporting on politics and current events that was read across the country. To have it as an enemy could be disastrous. Clementine was well aware of Maclean’s influence in Canada. So she deployed all her considerable charms against the tycoon whom she found ‘naif, vain, touchy, kind-hearted, horribly energetic, and vital’. The blunt-speaking Maclean was sufficiently diplomatic not to mention his reaction to her husband’s 1900 visit to Montreal. Instead, urged on by Clementine, he enthused at length about Canada and himself. By the end of their conversation he was a convert to the Churchill cause.9

The dividend came several weeks later when Maclean’s published a special feature on Churchill carefully timed for the Imperial Conference in June. Spread over several columns, the hefty article described him as ‘the most striking figure in British politics’. The author of the laudatory article was well chosen for the purpose. Sir Ian Hamilton had first met the young Churchill as ‘an eager chubby-faced shipmate’ while they were sailing home together from India in 1897. Ever since, they had formed something of a mutual admiration society. Churchill’s fifth book was a glowing account of Hamilton’s triumphant march on Pretoria during the Boer War. As commander of the Allied forces at Gallipoli, Hamilton in turn had deplored Churchill’s dismissal from the Admiralty. ‘What a tragedy that his nerve and military vision have been side-tracked,’ he lamented; ‘his eclipse projects a black shadow over the Dardanelles.’

To anyone reading Hamilton’s profile of Churchill it was clear that in the new Colonial Secretary the Empire had found a man of courage, vision, and genius. ‘Is he perfect?’ asked Hamilton rhetorically. ‘Heavens, no! A genius he is, but wayward and self-absorbed. In company he falls often into a sort of trance . . . [but] . . . really he is dreaming with an intense concentration and is clearing the decks for action . . .’ Above all, he emphasized, Churchill was the man for action. ‘He is in every sense courageous, and he never gets frightened unless danger is still a long way off; then he does get the wind up but that is because he sees very far ahead and is miserable, wretched, when his colleagues wish to wait-and-see. He sees. He doesn’t want to wait; he wants to make ready for the storm. Yet once let it break and the last thing that will break under it is Winston’s nerve.’ It was almost as though Hamilton was writing the advance script for Churchill as he urged rearmament on a reluctant Britain in the 1930s.10

For Clementine, Maclean’s conversion was a considerable coup and demonstrated not for the first time that she was her husband’s strongest and most faithful ally. It was also a sign that his reputation across the British Empire was recovering from its low point of five years before. To have the leading Canadian magazine of opinion come out so powerfully in his favour was excellent news. From now on, Canada to Churchill would always be ‘The Great Dominion’, a land of huge opportunity and potential vital to the security and future of the British Empire. His faith was powerfully enforced when at the end of the decade he crossed the country by train with his son Randolph, brother Jack, and Jack’s son, Johnny. ‘The immense size and progress of this country impresses itself upon one more every day,’ he enthused. ‘The sentimental feeling towards England is wonderful. The United States are stretching their tentacles out in all directions, but the Canadian National Spirit and personality is becoming so powerful and self-contained that I do not think we need fear for the future.’¹¹

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Still basking in the glow of his inheritance, and with a now carefree Clementine at Cap Ferrat dreaming of a new Lullenden, Churchill motored out to the Chiltern Hills some forty miles north-west of Downing Street and another grand house within easy reach of London. Nestling close to the ancient village of Ellesborough in a quintessentially English landscape thickly wooded with beech trees lay the ancient Tudor mansion known as Chequers, or Chequers Court. After entering its fine wrought-iron gates set between two lodges, he passed down ‘The Victory Way’, the long drive built during the war with the help of German prisoners of war, and soon caught his first glimpse of the house that during the Second World War was to become almost a second home to him and Clementine.

The surrounding Buckinghamshire countryside was rich in historical associations. John Hampden, a principal leader of the parliamentary opposition to King Charles I during the English Civil War, had lived close by, as had Benjamin Disraeli, the great leader of the Victorian Conservative Party and twice prime minister. Chequers’ own history went back to the Domesday Book of 1086, and its name derived from an earlier house once owned by a twelfth-century Exchequer official. Just four weeks before his visit, Lloyd George had formally taken possession of the keys from Sir Arthur and Lady Lee, who presented it in perpetuity to the nation as a place of rest and relaxation for British prime ministers. Churchill was one of his earliest guests. Along with him he brought Marigold.

Like Churchill himself, Chequers was the product of an Anglo-American union. Arthur Hamilton Lee had been a commissioned artillery officer in the British Army, where one of his earliest postings was to the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met Ruth Moore, the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street banker, whom he soon married. Later he served as the British military attaché with the United States Army in Cuba and made friends with the leader of the legendary ‘Rough Riders’, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, who was to stay at Chequers several times over the coming years. In 1900 Lee left the army and was elected as a Tory Member of Parliament in the same ‘Khaki election’ that saw Churchill also enter the House of Commons. During the First World War, Lee fell under the spell of Lloyd George, worked for him at the Ministry of Munitions and the War Office, and was knighted for his efforts. Two years later he was raised to the peerage as Baron Lee of Fareham.

It was Ruth Lee’s Wall Street inheritance that created the Chequers the couple gave to the British nation. They spared no expense in lavishly modernizing and furnishing it throughout with seventeenth-century oak panelling, hanging the walls with almost two hundred historic portraits and other paintings, and stocking it with antique furniture and countless artefacts of historic interest. Amongst them was Napoleon’s scarlet and gold dispatch case, the octagonal table the deposed French Emperor used while an exile on St Helena, and a large collection of Cromwelliana, including a mask of the Lord Protector himself. One of the first sights to greet Churchill was a large collection of enemy trophies on display in the Great Hall.

In giving the house to the nation, the Lees’ hope was twofold. First, that during an epoch of radical change in the nation’s history it would act as a moderating influence on its rulers. ‘To the revolutionary statesman the antiquity and calm tenacity of Chequers and its annals might suggest some saving virtues in the continuity of English history and exercise a check upon too hasty upheavals,’ wrote Lee in the deed of settlement, ‘whilst even the most reactionary could scarcely be insensible to the spirit of human freedom which permeates the countryside of Hampden . . .’ These were words that Churchill himself could have written, anxious as he was about the rising tide of socialism in Britain and revolution abroad, yet powerfully committed to a romantic view of English history that saw it as the steady march towards freedom embodied in a stable parliamentary monarchy. He had little religious belief. It was history, or this special version of it, that lay at the heart of his faith.12

The Lees also hoped that the rural tranquillity of Chequers would benefit the personal health of prime ministers. ‘The better the health of our rulers,’ declared Lee, ‘the more sanely they will rule.’ Ironically, during Churchill’s first official use of the house starting in 1940, it was to be far from a tranquil retreat from the cares of office. On the contrary, it became a buzzing hive of frantic activity and a powerhouse of strategy. Relatively safe from air attack, it was to serve as his command centre second only to the underground war rooms in Whitehall. Characteristically, one of the first changes he made was to install a direct telephone line to Downing Street. Another was to have the book-lined Long Gallery converted into a temporary cinema for the use of its wartime staff and himself after a long day’s work – a far cry from the quiet walking and contemplation of nature so lovingly envisaged by the Lees.

Churchill was deeply impressed. On the Sunday he sent a letter to Clementine from the house. ‘It is just the kind of house you admire,’ he wrote, ‘a panelled museum full of history, full of treasures,’ and added that Marigold had marched into his bedroom that morning in ‘blooming health’ but with no ‘special communication’ to make. Perhaps, he noted, Clementine would one day get to see it herself.

She was now at Cap Ferrat, a haven with its own seductive charm. Backed by precipitous white cliffs topped by the medieval village of Eze, the peninsula dangled like an earring into the Mediterranean and was an especially favoured spot for the wealthy. The drive from Nice had taken her along the French Corniche, the twisting road running high above sea level through cactus and pines that offered magnificent views of the Mediterranean. So when she sat down in Adele’s villa to write a letter expressing her optimism and joy at her husband’s new situation she readily fell back on images of the luxury that surrounded her. What with his new and exciting task at the Colonial Office, the visit to Chequers, his book, and his painting, it must feel, she wrote, that he was ‘soaring like an aeroplane above the great Corniche of life’. As for herself, she enthused in a later letter, she was now free of haunting care and felt like ‘a cork bobbing on a sunny sea’.13

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Churchill took possession of his room at the Colonial Office on Tuesday 15 February, the first day of the new parliamentary session. It was twice as big as his old one in the War Office and reminded him of the days he had spent writing in the saloon at Blenheim Palace. ‘Fine and sedate . . . but well-warmed,’ he glowed. With him came Eddie Marsh, to whom it was familiar territory. It was here, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, that Churchill had first taken him on, and Marsh had actually started his civil service career there some ten years before that. It seemed fitting, remarked one of his fellow civil servants, that the immaculately dressed Marsh ‘should spend his days in heavily-carpeted rooms, locking and unlocking Cabinet boxes with one of the four keys that dangled from a slim silver chain’.14

Churchill’s fresh surroundings matched the global scope of his new responsibilities. Britain had emerged from the Paris Peace Conference with an imperial reach wider than ever before in its history. Not only had it acquired the mandated former Ottoman territories in the Middle East, but also several former German colonies. Along with the Indian Empire and the Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, they made the British Empire the largest in the world.

Yet for him politically, at any moment the aeroplane soaring above the great Corniche of Life could stall and come crashing to earth. The reason was simple. Politically, he was almost completely dependent on Lloyd George. It was the Welsh Wizard who had brought him back to high office after the Dardanelles disaster, and he could still now make or unmake him. This would leave him isolated. He had a coterie of loyal personal friends, but he lacked any strong and independent political base. ‘He was not interested [in other people and their opinions],’ observed Violet Asquith. ‘Nor did he seek to conceal his indifference by any softening subterfuge. To save his life he could not have pretended an interest he did not feel . . . He enjoyed the ovation of the crowd but he still ignored the necessity of having a personal following.’ Alexander MacCallum Scott, his first biographer, noted the same weakness. ‘He was not a man who encouraged intimacies,’ he wrote. ‘His brusqueness often verged on rudeness, and alienated many a well-wisher.’ This stood in sharp contrast to Lloyd George, who possessed the gift of demonstrating genuine interest in others’ opinions. During their lifetime the two men promoted the image of a close and enduring friendship. Yet Clementine’s private gibe about Lloyd George and Judas Iscariot was easily matched by Lloyd George’s own, that Churchill ‘would make a drum out of the skin of his own mother in order to sound his own praises.’¹⁵

But if Churchill was dangerously reliant on Lloyd George, the prime minister himself was precariously placed. He had stormed to power in the 1918 General (‘Victory’) Election by leading his Coalition of National Liberals and Conservatives to win over 500 seats in the House of Commons. Combined with his personal standing as the prime minister who had won the war, this gave him two years’ mastery of the political scene. But as 1921 opened, his grip on the Coalition and the country was patently weakening. It was a grim winter. The post-war boom was over. Unemployment was rising steeply, and the Labour Party was gaining more and more popular support. Amongst diehards on the Conservative backbenches, pressure was growing for reductions in state spending. The Treasury, which was under Conservative control, took the same line. To keep them happy, Lloyd George was forced to cut back on some of the progressive measures the government had introduced to make the country ‘fit for heroes’, his great electoral promise. In January the victory of an ‘anti-waste’ candidate at a by-election in Dover increased the pressure, which was spurred on by a virulent anti-Lloyd George press campaign. Spearheaded by the Northcliffe press, owner of The Times and Daily Mail, it began to cast doubt on the very survival of the Coalition. On the very day that Churchill was luxuriating in his bed at Chequers hinting to Clementine that one day, too, she might be able to enjoy its splendours, The Sunday Times declared roundly that ‘Everyone knows that the present Coalition cannot last indefinitely.’16

As rumours of a possible general election spread, Lloyd George moved firmly to strengthen his political base. The Liberals had split when he displaced Asquith as prime minister in 1916. His followers took the designation of ‘National’ (or ‘Coalition’) Liberals’, while those remaining loyal to Asquith became known as ‘Independent Liberals’. It was a bitter schism. The Independents kept control of the Liberal Party machine and funds, as well as the National Liberal Club in central London. Here, relations between the rival Liberal factions became so acrimonious that both Lloyd George and Churchill saw their portraits rudely relegated to the basement. In response, the Lloyd George Liberals set up an alternative club known as the 1920 Club. Formed shortly before Christmas 1920 and cheekily situated almost next door, it held its first general meeting in mid-February at the Central Hall in Westminster, just off Parliament Square. Moving the vote of thanks for its creation was the Chief Liberal Whip – none other than Captain Frederick (Freddie) Guest, Churchill’s cousin and shrewd political crony.¹⁷

As the first British prime minister to fully appreciate the power of the press, Lloyd George went out of his way to court press magnates and avidly read the newspapers to gauge public opinion. Thanks to Freddie, he even possessed one of his own after Churchill’s cousin master-minded the purchase of the Daily Chronicle as his personal mouthpiece. Baron Lee, who was now First Lord of the Admiralty, also pitched in by purchasing the weekly journal Outlook as a pro-government organ. In October 1920 the Lloyd George Liberal Magazine had also been launched, specifically to bolster the Coalition. Guest was one of the principal electoral architects of the Coalition government and a figure key to its continuing survival. As a leader with no party machinery or treasury behind him, Lloyd George needed a war chest to finance his political activities. Here, Freddie proved indispensable by building up a fund eventually reaching £3 million through the sale of honours such as knighthoods and other forms of political patronage. Although there was little new about the trading of honours for political purposes, the scheme was becoming a growing target for Lloyd George’s political enemies. Freddie’s dubious dealings were one of the reasons why Clementine disapproved of him. Now, as the political ground beneath his feet began to shake, Lloyd George turned to Churchill’s cousin once again for help.18

The day after Churchill returned from his weekend at Chequers, the prime minister sent Guest to the West Country, Yorkshire, and Lancashire to bolster support for the National Liberals against attacks by their Independent Liberal rivals that threatened to weaken his political base. Here, Guest strongly banged the anti-socialist drum by telling an audi-ence at the Manchester Reform Club that only the Coalition could prevent a Labour government from coming to power – a theme that Lloyd George was to embellish himself at the inaugural dinner of the 1920 Club held the following month at the Savoy Hotel in London.¹⁹ In a similar talk at Leeds, Guest concluded by referring to the Liberal Club’s removal of its Lloyd George portrait to the basement. They should remember, he joked, that Guy Fawkes had once stored gunpowder in a cellar.²⁰

But gunpowder is volatile and unpredictable. Outwardly the relations between Churchill and Lloyd George were civil and friendly. But they were far from seeing eye to eye on many issues, and at Cabinet meetings Churchill was often ‘a brooding source of discontent’.21 Contrary to popular myth, he was no reactionary. In the pre-war Liberal government, he had argued vigorously for active social reform, and its radical scheme of unemployment insurance was his personal brainchild. During the war he had argued for massive state intervention in the economy and in 1918 favoured the nationalization of the railways. He also strongly and consistently pressed for the taxation of war wealth – the amount by which personal wealth had increased during the war. When the Cabinet had rejected the idea the previous June, he made sure that his dissent was recorded in the official minutes. He also remained committed to the government’s housing programme, which was now coming under increasing attack. His own experience and lifestyle were privileged and aristocratic. But since 1908 he had been a Member of Parliament for Dundee, an impoverished and heavily working-class town dominated by the jute trade and hit badly by the current slump. After one of his earliest visits to Scotland, he had been struck by the unfriendly and disaffected attitude of the working classes. ‘They evidently [mean] trouble,’ he remarked. Now, unemployment was increasing steeply and poor relief was hard to get, as he was reminded almost daily by angry and anguished letters from his constituency. The swingeing cuts to social programmes being contemplated by the Cabinet seriously troubled him. When he visited his constituency later in the year he was shocked to see men in bare feet and children who were clearly starving and under-nourished. ‘Should our policy remain the austere bankers’ policy?’ he caustically asked Lloyd George.²²

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It was on foreign policy issues, however, that he was most seriously at loggerheads with the prime minister. Over the Bolsheviks they had frequently come to metaphorical blows, and there was now an uneasy truce. It was Turkey that now divided them. Two years before, eager to profit from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Greece had invaded the Anatolian mainland of Turkey and seized the city of Smyrna with its Greek population exceeding that of Athens itself. A former Ottoman army officer called Mustafa Kemal, known as ‘Ataturk’, was now leading a national war to drive out the Greeks. Lloyd George was passionately pro-Greek and an unqualified supporter of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, whom he hailed as ‘the greatest statesman Greece had thrown up since the days of Pericles’. By contrast, Churchill wished to see Turkey kept as intact as possible as a bulwark against Bolshevik Russia and because he feared that a humiliation of the Turks would alienate Muslims across the Middle East and within the British Empire. The two men had frequently quarrelled over this. Shortly before Christmas, Churchill had accused Lloyd George of waging ‘a vendetta’ against the Turks.23

Things were to get worse. While he was holidaying on the Riviera with Clementine, he received an urgent plea from his friend Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, who was married to Clementine’s cousin and lifelong friend, Venetia Stanley; their home at Breccles in Norfolk frequently played host to the Churchills. Lloyd George was about to go to Paris and would be pressing his views about the Greek–Turkish war on the French. ‘His mood is violently anti-Turkish and he is dreaming in Greek,’ wrote Montagu. ‘Come back or go to Paris but act now and save the world.’ Five days later Churchill arrived in the French capital. He found Lloyd George in ‘a cursed bad humour’ and determined to keep on backing the Greeks. The next morning, the two men continued their row after Lloyd George accused him of having driven Turkey into the First World War in the first place when he was at the Admiralty. Back in London, Churchill wrote him a furious letter correcting certain facts, hinting strongly that he might resign, and pointing out that Lloyd George’s anti-Turkish stance would badly harm his own chances of finding a Middle East settlement.

His anger climaxed later in the month. Amongst a bundle of secret intercepts that landed on his desk he spotted the text of a telegram sent from the Greek Foreign Office in Athens to its legation in London, which revealed that in a recent conversation with Venizelos, Lloyd George had expressed his total support for the Greeks even against the advice of the Foreign Office. The next day, Churchill furiously confronted him with the evidence. If he did not stop his anti-Turk crusade, he warned, the Turks would be thrown into the arms of the Bolsheviks, Mesopotamia would descend into disorder, and Muslims everywhere would be alienated from Britain. ‘I am deeply grieved at the prospect and find myself so utterly without power to influence your mind even in regard to matters with which my duties are specially concerned,’ he wrote bitterly. He was all the more distressed, he added, because they agreed on many other issues and because, he concluded, ‘of our long friendship & my admiration for yr [sic] genius and work’. With his relations with Lloyd George in such a febrile state, it was just as well that after a few hours’ reflection he decided not to send the letter. Instead, a few days later, he left the country bound for Cairo.24