The 'Chimp' in Africa
Mary Churchill paid a brief visit to Paris in 1946 with her father. There she met Christopher Soames, a Coldstreamer, an assistant military attache at the Embassy, and fell in love, By Mary Soames's own account (Clementine Churchill), 'Both my parents had many misgivings because of my precipitate action . . . although [my mother] expressed no immediate or open opposition to our engagement.' Others remember rather differently, that.Clemmie indulged in a display of tantrums, particularly condemning Duff and Lady Diana Cooper (he was then our ambassador in Paris) for failing to chaperone her daughter properly and for encouraging an unsuitable match.
Winston took a more lenient view. A friend talked to him in the House of Commons about the forthcoming marriage. He confided with a smile, 'Yes, and what's so nice is that he is so very ambitious.' In fact the two men took to each other from the start. ,Inevitably there was hostile gossip about Soames marrying for his career, but the striking thing is that he formed a close and moving relationship with Churchill, the only new and real friend of whose old age he became.
During their honeymoon Christopher was taken very ill, and had to retire from the army. Churchill suggested that his new son-in-law should manage Chartwell Farm. So began 'an idyllic, pastoral period in our lives', as Mary Soames was to write — an idS/11 helped by the combination of the Chartwell produce and the excellent chef seduced away from the kitchen of the Hotel Roy Rene at Aix-en-Provence by the serious gourmet-gourmand Soames. The 'deceptively able Chartwell estate manager' as he had been presciently described by Alastair Forbes in his political column, entered the Commons as Member for Bedford in 1950, and for the next decade he worked his way up the ministerial ladder, beginning with a three-year apprenticeship as his father-in-law's PPS. By 1958 he was in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for War (there was a curious rumour that he retrieved and read his own wartime file).
For the last four years of the Macmillan-Home Ministry he was Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. He showed considerable political courage by his early support of British entry into the Common Market, not a popular cause with the farming community at a time when the Agriculture Minister was regarded as little more than a spokesman for the National Union of Farmers.
By now there was no longer any question that he was living in his father-in-law's shadow. in fact, he had performed for Winston two signal, final services (after his buying of the marvellous grey racehorse Colonist II, whose victories gave the old man such pleasure): he it was who persuaded Churchill to resign, first, as prime minister in 1955 —on 'April the Fifth', a day which pleased Soames as being the name of a famous Derby winner; and then as an MP in 1963, when it needed great delicacy to point out that Churchill was by now too infirm in body and spirit to be an adornment to the House.
Soames's own retirement from the Commons came involuntarily in 1966 when he lost his seat. That, and his monotonously unsuccessful attempts to find another seat, seemed to have ended his career in British politics, something to which he was apparently resigned in his new career as diplomatist and Eurocrat. As ambassador in Paris he weathered with dignity the storm of Taffaire Soames' (which would be better called 'la connerie Wilson'). Thence he moved to Brussels as a Vice-President of the European Commission.
There was never the slightest prospect of his becoming Leader of the Conservative Party after Heath. That was wistful St. James's Street talk — he would indeed have been the last of the White's candidates. As it was he was delighted to return to the Cabinet as a peer and as Lord President of the Council. It is no secret that he would have preferred the Rhodesian cup to have passed from him, but he accepted what he believed to be his duty, and will no doubt perform it with dignity and skill, assisted by Mary Soames who really is as nice a woman as she sear's on television.
lain Macleod's joke about Soames is well-known: 'Under that bluff exterior there's a pretty bluff interior%'but it rather misses the point. Soames is no intellectual, has no literary or musical interests, in fact, confesses to friends that the exercise 0' power in one form or another is the onlY thing that he really enjoys. But LadY Soames is not wrong when she describes her husband in interviews as 'sensitive'. With his heavy-jowled features and his booming voice (given to the regular use at home and among his friends of language which the middle classes still frown upon) he has also very delicate hands. And he has, too, delicate intuitions, which he relies upon precisely because he is more a man of instinct than of cerebration.
He established a warm friendship with Andre Malraux when he was in Paris. It was on the face of it a surprising relationship but in fact a characteristic Soames initiative, and a useful one, since it supplied him with a sideways insight into de Gaulle's temperament and thought processes. It is not easy to see him forming similar friendships in Salisbury, either white or black. All the same, the people of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia will find in the 'Chimp', as his parents-inlaw affectionately called him, a negotiator and diplomatist to be reckoned with.
Previous page
