Jonathan Schneer: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
Originally published in The Historian, Volume 79, Number 1.
That vast mountain, Churchilliana, seems in no need of augmentation. Churchill’s thoughts and action in the Second World War especially have attracted a considerable scholarship based on extensive archives and numerous memoirs by witnesses—beginning of course with Churchill’s own six-volume history. Nonetheless, in this well-told narrative the author intelligently reopens two questions often begged: What exactly were the relations between Churchill and his war cabinet and among the officers he appointed, and why did the triumphant, even heroic, Churchill and his party go down to ignominious electoral defeat in the first general election after the war in Europe had been safely won?
This historian’s problem with these (as it turns out) related questions may be seen in the scrupulous adherence to what might be called the Martin Gilbert Principle. Churchill’s official biographer employed a research staff. Whenever one of his young helpers would write a sentence with words like “perhaps” or “maybe” in it, Gilbert would pounce. “Perhaps not!” “Maybe not!” he would write in the margin. He wanted firm, documentary evidence, not speculation.
But the two questions brought to the fore necessitate speculation. As Jonathan Schneer observes, two of Churchill’s war cabinet members—the extreme (and extremely eccentric) socialist, Stafford Cripps, and the habitual intriguer, Lord Beaverbrook—apparently (i.e., perhaps) entertained ambitions to replace Churchill as prime minister. But they never pulled the trigger, so there can be no smoking gun of evidence. And as for the general elections of 1945, accurate polling data could not or at least was not collected; even in America, we were a few years away from the embarrassing headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Churchill had seen the weakness of a one-party government in wartime during the First World War, and he determined to establish a national-unity government including members of both major parties. Adding to the complications was the discreditable behavior of his own party in the years leading up to the war—with Churchill himself having done the lion’s share of the discrediting. He needed to appoint Labourites because the industrial working classes would produce the weapons needed to win the war. Minister without Portfolio Clement Atlee and Minister of Labour and National Service Ernest Bevin proved indispensable to Churchill’s team but also pursued their stated aims of social democracy in Great Britain after the war. Meanwhile such Conservatives as Lord President of the Council Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax shared Churchill’s anti-socialism but attempted to vindicate their pre-war appeasement policies by urging (and in Halifax’s case extending) peace feelers to the Nazis. Personal and ideological ambitions swirled around Churchill throughout the war, and Schneer offers a plausible, dramatic account of how the great managed this conflict-within-the-conflict.
As for that election, Schneer goes a long way toward demystifying it. Memories of the Great Depression, fear of its possible return, and the demonstrated patriotism and competence of Labour Party leader Clement Atlee brought a groundswell of support for the party, culminating in the landslide. Churchill was a war hero, but the war was over. In the Politics, Aristotle observes that a ruling group that needs to widen its support in order to win a war is likely to cede rule wholly or in part after the war. Just so.
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