We sometimes speak of corruption to mean that a government or a group of people is knowingly crooked and dishonest. But corruption is also something which happens to bodies which are dead. Britain in the final administration (1951–5) of Sir Winston Churchill was flyblown and stinking in this latter sense.
Britain was tired, old, in decay, as was its Prime Minister. In January 1954, Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor of the humorous periodical Punch, commissioned (Leslie Gilbert) Illingworth, the cartoonist, to draw Winston Churchill in his decrepitude and to have a caption indicating it was time he went. ‘It’s true, that edition,’ Muggeridge mused, ‘but there’ll be accusations of bad taste.’1
Churchill was bitterly hurt. ‘Punch goes everywhere,’ he moaned to his doctor. ‘I shall have to retire if this sort of thing goes on…It isn’t really a proper cartoon. You’ve seen it? There’s malice in it. Look at my hands–I have beautiful hands.’2
It was true, added the doctor, Lord Moran, but he who had so often recorded for posterity Churchill with no trousers on, Churchill’s big, white fat bottom, Churchill having strokes, Churchill coughing, Churchill wheezing, Churchill drunk, could not resist describing the cartoon. ‘The eyes were dull and lifeless. There was no tone in the flaccid muscles. The jowl sagged. It was the expressionless mask of extreme old age.’ Nor could the good doctor resist copying out Malcolm Muggeridge’s ‘malice’, which compared old Churchill to the Byzantine Bellarius. ‘By the time he had reached an advanced age…his splendid faculties began to falter. The spectacle of his thus clutching wearily at all the appurtenances and responsibilities of an authority he could no longer fully exercise was to his admirers infinitely sorrowful, and to his enemies infinitely derisory.’
Worse was to come when members of both Houses of Parliament raised money for Sir Winston’s eightieth birthday. It was agreed that Graham Sutherland should be commissioned to paint Churchill’s portrait. As the artist remembered matters, a memory not untinged with bitterness, he believed ‘that the portrait was to be given to [Churchill] by both Houses on his 80th birthday for his lifetime and that after his death it would revert to the House of Commons. I was even shown places where it might hang.’3
After three sittings the old man was anxious to get a glimpse of the canvas. ‘Come on. Be a sport. Don’t forget I’m a fellow artist.’ But when he saw the work, he immediately protested. ‘Oh no, this won’t do at all. I haven’t a neckline like that. You must take an inch, nay, an inch and a half off.’4
Once the painting was complete, Churchill did his utmost not to exhibit the picture publicly. He wrote to Sutherland that ‘the painting, however masterly in execution, is not suitable as a presentation from both Houses of Parliament… About the ceremony in Westminster Hall. This can go forward although it is sad there will be no portrait. They have a beautiful book which they have nearly all signed, to present to me, so that the ceremony will be complete in itself.’
In the event, Charles Doughty, the secretary of the Parliamentary Committee which commissioned the picture, went to Chartwell, Churchill’s country home, and told him he had to accept the picture, and accept it publicly.
The eightieth birthday of the Prime Minister was on 30 November. Already The Times had published a photographic image of the portrait and the paper’s art critic praised it, saying it was more successful than Sutherland’s portraits of Lord Beaverbrook and Somerset Maugham. When Churchill accepted the gift on the podium he resorted, as he often did in life when threatened, to that very English shield, facetiousness:
I doubt whether any of the modern democracies abroad has shown such a degree of kindness and generosity to a party politician who has not yet retired and may at any time be involved in controversy [laughter]…the portrait…[he turned theatrically to look at it]…is a striking example of modern art. [Yelps of philistine laughter and applause] It certainly combines force and candour. These are qualities which no active member of either House can do without or should fear to meet.5
The son of a former Lord Chancellor and himself one day destined to fill that office, Quintin Hogg MP, immediately leapt in with his comments: ‘If I had my way, I’d throw Mr Graham Sutherland into the Thames. The portrait is a complete disgrace…Churchill has not got all that ink on his face–not since he left Harrow, at any rate.’6 But those who had seen the man, and the picture, knew that Sutherland with his brush strokes had perceived the same truth as the cartoonist and the satirists had seen. Churchill was past it, which is what made him such a very apposite Prime Minister at this date.
When the Labour Party won the General Election of 1945, by an overall majority of 136 seats in the House of Commons, many were astounded. The people of Britain had spoken so unambiguously, so clearly. They had dismissed the individual who for many, at the time and since, was ‘the man who won the war’ (and at the time of the election it was not quite over–the election was in July, the Americans bombed Hiroshima with an atomic bomb on 6 August); the ‘greatest Englishman’, Winston Churchill. They had voted in as their Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who seemed like a nonentity but who had a very clear, and a very clearly explained, programme. Clement Attlee and his team wanted the socialist government which had begun in wartime–state control of supplies of food and fuel and production–to continue in peacetime. His party was quite happy with the first great global consequence of America having entered the war on the side of the Allies–namely, the dismantlement of the British Empire. Attlee lost no time in negotiating the liberation of India from the Imperial straitjacket (as it was seen). It was surely only a matter of time before the other colonies, in Africa and Asia, followed suit. Britain, bankrupted by the war and deprived of her Empire, was in a position where she could not but choose to become a new thing. And surely the landslide election result had made it very clear what a majority of the electorate wanted. They wanted Britain to recognise that the strange story of its Empire, and its growth as a world power between the eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, had been an historical aberration. She was only a north European Protestant archipelago, of tremendous resourcefulness, of great technological expertise, of deep cultural brilliance, but no longer an Imperial power. She was poised to become something a little like Sweden–a northern European socialist state, in which the major sources of supply and manufacture, as well as the health, education and welfare of the people, were paid for by high taxation and a centralised government.
After five years of it, however, the electorate made it plain that its wishes were very much less clear-cut. The appalling weather, the deep snows and frozen pipes of 1947, perhaps contributed to the feeling; the frequent runs on the pound, a metaphor which suggested a recurrent national indigestion, a universal feeling of faint sickness, made many people feel that the last thing they wished was to have their life savings and their income confiscated by the state, the more so, since there was not much evidence that the railways, as British Railways, ran any better than they did as LNER, LMS or the old Great Western. As the years went by, the nationalised coal and steel industries performed noticeably less well than their continental rivals. The National Health Service was deemed to be a success, but the more hypochondriacal everyone became, and the further medical and pharmaceutical research advanced, the less affordable it seemed.
So it was, that by the time that this book begins its story, the electorate of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had decided that it did not wish to be a northern socialist state such as Sweden. It re-elected the Conservative Party, whose leader was still the old war hero, Winston Churchill. Having watched the debacle when India was partitioned and over a million were killed in the fight between Muslim and Hindu, some conservative-minded people at home wondered whether the paternalistic old Empire had been such a cruel idea after all. Was there any need to abandon the African colonies, to which, especially in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, so many ex-servicemen had taken their families for a new life after the war? Watching the chaos in the Middle East since the establishment of a ‘State of Israel’ and the growth of anti-Western populist movements in Egypt, did the British public want to retire altogether from the world scene? Did they not still possess, in the British Commonwealth of nations, a unique position of influence in the world? Was it not right, in spite of the shift of power to the United States, that Britain with all her wisdom, influence, historical links with Egypt, Malaya, Cyprus, Malta, Africa, should continue to play a role which was utterly unlike any other country?
So, Britain, by re-electing Winston Churchill, thought again about its own national identity. The old King died of lung cancer, and he was replaced by his beautiful, and completely mysterious, from birth to old age, daughter Elizabeth. It was inevitable that headline writers and clichémongers would seize upon the idea of a New Elizabethan Age, but…why not? Britain never completely resolved the irreconcilable differences concealed in the post-war elections: in 1945 they had wanted a benign socialism, in 1951 Imperialist nostalgia. Having just lived through the financial ruin of the war, the bankruptcy of the peace, the millions of deaths and bereavements, the misery of the austerity years in which a banana seemed a luxury, small wonder the British were confused about their identity.
Churchill’s chief function, in his last spell in office, was symbolic. He was the Grand Old Man who had won the war, and as long as he was the Prime Minister it was possible for some of the electorate, at least, to nurse the illusion that Britain still enjoyed the power and prestige which it had known before that calamity.
Churchill was tired and old, however, and he had little or no control over the changes which were evident to anyone of his political acuity. At the end of November 1952, for example, he asked to be told the numbers of coloured people–as they were called in those days–who had entered Britain. He wanted to know where they lived; also, the number of ‘coloured’ students. Two days later, he asked in Cabinet whether the Post Office was employing any ‘coloured’ workers, pointing out that ‘there was some risk that difficult social problems would be created’ if this turned out to be the case.7 On 18 December 1952, he set up an inquiry to see how further immigration by ‘coloured’ people could be prevented, and whether they could be kept out of the civil service. When the report was ready, in February 1954, Churchill told the Cabinet that ‘the continuing increase in the number of coloured people coming to this country and their presence here would sooner or later come to be resented by large sections of the British people’. But he agreed that it was ‘too soon to take action’ in the matter.8
He was reluctant to continue the policy, which he had inherited from the previous Labour administration, of granting African colonies their independence, and when forced to go ahead with allowing Kwame Nkrumah to become the Prime Minister of the Gold Coast (later Ghana) he wrote apologetically to the apartheid government of South Africa, ‘I hope you recognise that the decisions taken about the Gold Coast are the consequences of what was done before we became responsible.’9
The blatant racism of the old war hero shocks a later generation. For this reason, it is convenient for historians to suggest that it was only ‘extremists’, such as Sir Oswald Mosley, who thought in this way. (Mosley tried to revive his old fascist thugs of pre-war days and stood for Notting Hill in the 1959 election.) It was in Notting Hill, where many blacks had settled, that the race riots had occurred in 1958. It is easy, and correct, to see Mosley as inflammatory. Less easy for the imagination to absorb is the fact that when it came to his views of black people, the leader of the British fascists had views which were commonplace for a white man of his generation. They were shared by Sir Winston Churchill. They were shared by the hero of El Alamein, General Montgomery (1887–1976). After the war, Clement Attlee as Prime Minister sent Monty to Africa to provide a confidential report on the suitability of giving the Africans self-government. It was a shock for the liberal-minded ‘Clem’ to be told by Monty, after a two-month ‘fact-finding tour’, that ‘the African is a complete savage and is quite incapable of developing the country himself’. He recommended making the whole of sub-Saharan Africa into a British-controlled bulwark against communism, to be aligned with South Africa. His advice was only to come to light in 1999, and a fellow peer, Lord Chalfont, commented that ‘his reputation is irredeemably damaged’.10
Churchill’s attitudes to Europe were no more progressive than his ideas about ‘coloured’ people. Although Churchillian quotes on the European subject were often cited, as the British quarrelled among themselves about it in later years, it is hard to imagine him lining up with Jacques Delors or Tony Blair. True, in 1946 Churchill had airily spoken of the possibility of a United Europe, but in private he conceded that ‘I have never thought that Britain…should become an integral part of a European Federation’. In 1950, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, he called for a United European Army to be formed against the Soviet Union, but by 1952 he was telling President Truman, ‘I have been doubtful about a European Army… It will not fight if you remove all traces of nationalism. I love France and Belgium, but we cannot be reduced to that level.’11
The sad fact was that Illingworth, Muggeridge and Graham Sutherland had all seen what was abundantly obvious to his close colleagues. Harry Crookshank, Leader of the House, found him ‘terribly drooling…fast losing his grip’.12 Far from being the prophet who looked forward to the actual future–a multi-racial Britain which was part of the European Union, he had turned into a drooling old reactionary, always half tight, incapable of holding back the future he deplored.
If the aged figurehead was barely capable of fulfilling his symbolic duties, the new young Head of State was also to find herself the target of some hitherto unprecedented criticism.
The decline in deference is one of the most striking features of our times. Deference was always tinged with irony in Britain, as anyone can deduce from reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott or Dickens, where impertinent servants are often quicker-witted than their masters, and where haughtiness or arrogance in superiors is regularly lampooned. The class system existed, and until the 1950s it remained very largely unaltered, partly because of the irony which in some senses redeemed it.
There was one aspect of it all, however, which was largely untinged by irony, and that was the attitude of the public towards the monarchy. The Coronation on Tuesday 2 June 1953 had held the nation in thrall, filling television viewers with the sense that Britain in all its pride and greatness could be reborn. It was a triumphalist, but also a poignant ceremony, bringing memories of the late King, a dignified, dutiful figure whom almost everyone respected for his courage in reviving the monarchy after the Abdication crisis of 1936, and his leadership during the Second World War.
His daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, was enchantingly beautiful, and although in her public appearances she appeared to be shy and stilted, the public invested her with all their hopes for a better future. Her youth, her piety, her winning smile, her bright eyes, her young children, all excited a reverence which approached idolatry.
It was sometimes difficult to remember this in the later years of her reign, when even conservative newspapers were open in their scorn for her children, when her husband’s tactless jokes or outbursts of bad temper became commonplace causes of embarrassment, and when the Queen herself could be lampooned as an ugly puppet on the television satirical show Spitting Image. By the time this show was shocking and amusing the nation, republicanism was spoken of as an alternative form of government, and chatted about on the BBC as a plausible alternative–though it never seemed to have appealed to more than about 20 percent of the adult electorate.
The Queen had to learn, after the advent of ‘satire’ in the 1960s, that the age of deference was dead. But in the 1950s she was considered to be beyond criticism. This was demonstrated when a small-circulation journal, National and English Review, edited by a Conservative peer called Lord Altrincham, devoted its issue of August 1957 to an analysis of the institution of monarchy. Of the various articles, the one which attracted most attention was penned by Lord Altrincham himself, later, when he had renounced his peerage in order to stand unsuccessfully for Parliament, known as the writer John Grigg.
His article contrasted George V, whom he saw as an ideal constitutional monarch, and the shaper of the modern constitution, with the granddaughter, Elizabeth II. He considered it a great mistake that the Court was composed of tweedy, aristocratic types, rather than representing the racial and social range, not merely of Great Britain but of the Commonwealth of which she was the head. ‘Crawfie, Sir Henry Marten, the London season, the race-course, the grouse-moor, canasta, and the occasional royal tour–all this would not have been good enough for Queen Elizabeth I!’13
What people found truly shocking in Altrincham’s article was not so much his attack on the ‘upper class twits’ of the Court, as his personal description of Elizabeth II herself: ‘She will not…achieve good results with her present style of speaking, which is frankly “a pain in the neck”. Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text… But even if the Queen feels compelled to read all her speeches, great and small, she must at least improve her method of reading them. With practice, even a prepared speech can be given an air of spontaneity.
‘The subject-matter must also be endowed with a more authentic quality. George V, for instance, did not write his own speeches, yet they were always in character; they seemed to be a natural emanation from and expression of the man. Not so the present Queen’s. The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation. It is not thus that she will be enabled to come into her own as an independent and distinctive character.’14
A torrent of denunciation descended upon Altrincham. ‘What a cowardly bully you are,’ one woman wrote to him. As he was emerging from Television House with Ludovic Kennedy on 6 August, Altrincham met with Mr B. K. Burbridge, who stepped forward from the crowd and smacked him hard in the face, shouting, ‘Take that from the League of Empire Loyalists’ (i.e. Mosleyites). In fining Mr Burbridge 20s. for his assault, the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate expressed sympathy for his motives: ‘Ninety-five percent of the population of this country were disgusted and offended by what was written,’ he remarked, truthfully.
The Queen was unable to change her very distinctive character, though she was to conduct her duties as Head of State conscientiously and seriously for over half a century after Lord Altrincham’s article first appeared. As far as the composition of her Court was concerned, she did not heed his advice. At the end of the reign, it was still composed of aristocrats and canasta players, with no admixture from the Commonwealth, and no members of the middle or lower classes. The Queen remained doggedly, and to many people shockingly, badly educated. She displayed no knowledge of literature–old or new–no interest in serious music or the arts, no cleverness in an academic or ostentatious sense, though as time went on it would seem that she possessed mysterious reserves of common sense. As time wore on, it would seem as if her notion of parenthood was remote, and cold, and her eldest son publicly criticised her for this–though the rather brisker Princess Anne would leap to the mother’s defence. Her decision to send her sons to Gordonstoun was unredeemed folly. Stories regularly circulated of the Queen being, like many Englishwomen, more able to emote with animals than with members of her own species, and it would be fallacious to suggest that she ever excited warm affection from her people.
But there was something there. What it was would be extremely hard to define. Constitutional historians such as Lord Altrincham could, if they surveyed the whole of the Queen’s reign, compare her unfavourably with George V. She was known to be agitated by the state of the Established Church–in this she was not alone as the years wore on, and it moved through a series of self-imposed crises. But she was generally considered powerless to intervene. Why? Was she not the Supreme Governor of the Church? She was deemed to be worried about the danger to the Union posed by Scottish nationalism, but once again she seemed to do nothing about it. She allowed some rum coves, and some actual criminals, to become peers of her realm–how closely did she question the Prime Ministers responsible for the elevation of these rogues? Would not George V have refused to allow the mangling of the House of Lords perpetrated by Tony Blair? Would that redoubtable monarch not have insisted upon a plausible alternative system being in place before the Second Chamber was deprived of its hereditary element, and the red leather seats were filled with Blair’s placemen and placewomen, some of whom had overtly bought their places?
All these things were the direct responsibility not of her advisers, not of anyone but the Head of State herself, and they are more serious criticisms than that her voice was a pain in the neck.
But she was one of those very mysterious people in history whose virtues consisted in what she was, not in what she did, and which easily overcame her drawbacks. One of these virtues was longevity. In a rapidly changing Britain, she remained the one fixed point, the one element of public life which did not change. Secondly, as was made clear on the rare occasions when she was known to broadcast her own words, rather than speeches written for her, she was a person of directness, simplicity, unfashionable Christian piety. Thirdly, she was a genuinely humble person. But these are lists of adjectives and qualities and they fail to convey what it is, about her and the institution they represent, that filled so many of her subjects with a feeling they nursed for no other public figure. At the time of her Golden Jubilee, after a disastrous period for the Royal Family, it was widely expected that the occasion would be a flop. Over a million people thronged the streets of London to see her on the balcony of Buckingham Palace–the largest crowd that had assembled since the victory celebrations at the end of the war. She was–a word once applied by her daughter-in-law to her butler–a rock.
Churchill’s death in 1965 produced a great upswell of patriotic sentiment, personal admiration and nostalgia. Churchill in his last days as Prime Minister, however, was an embarrassment. It was perceived that the strongest of his appetites, stronger even than his need for brandy and cigars, was lust for power, and it outlasted his physical and mental capabilities–as the merciless diaries of his doctor recorded. Any suggestion that he was too old for the task, whether it came from colleagues or the press, would be treated as examples of disloyalty. ‘He spoke bitterly of the folly of the Tories in rashly throwing away all he had to give.’ (In fact, it was his son-in-law, Christopher Soames, who was urging the old man to retire. ‘I think I can harangue the bastards for fifty minutes,’ he said of what would be his last speech as leader to the Party Conference at Blackpool. ‘If they try to get me out, I will resist.’15
‘Poor Anthony will be relieved at this,’ the old man remarked, after one of his many ‘turns’, but he continued to stay on in office, rather than allowing Anthony Eden, his chosen heir since 1940, to take over the leadership. Although he liked to praise Eden, Churchill also had grave doubts about his judgement, and worries about the younger man’s state of health. In both areas, Churchill was right to be worried. On the very eve of his resignation, Churchill held a dinner for the Queen at Number 10 Downing Street. When the evening was over, his doctor went to see the old man in his bedroom. He was still wearing his Garter (of which he was a Knight), his Order of Merit and his knee-breeches. He sat silently and then suddenly blurted out, ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it.’16 The next day, wearing one of the last frock coats to be seen in London outside a theatrical outfitters, the grand old Victorian went to Buckingham Palace to kiss the Queen’s hands and resign his office. Robert Anthony Eden, two months short of his fifty-eighth birthday, succeeded him as Prime Minister.