BOOKS Churchill in the wilderness

IAIN MACLEOD

Robert Rhodes James's Churchill: A Study in Failure 1900-1939 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 63s) is an excellent addition to the vast pile of books about Winston Churchill. It is as sensitive as it is scholarly. Indeed I think its main failing is in the title rather than in the book. To call his thesis 'a study in failure' is a vulgarism which surprises me from a historian whom I greatly admire. It is as if one left Romeo and Juliet after the third act and headed one's review 'An idyllic story of young love'.

In Churchill's life one cannot pause at September 1939 and write hjm down as a failure. If of course his taxi accident in New York in 1931 had killed him, it would have been legitimate to brood sadly on the might- have-beens of political life. But knowing the glorious fulfilment of the war years and the calm sunset of his life that followed, Mr Robert Rhodes James should not have allowed so cheap a comment to be used. Indeed, to be fair, he shows himself somewhat defensive about it in the preface and in his conclusion he refutes himself both with Churchill's words and his own. For Churchill wrote in My Early Life: 'Life is a whole and luck is a whole, and no part of them can be separated from the rest'. And the author writes: 'It is always unwise to attempt to divide a man's life into sections, and in Churchill's case this unwisdom is particularly apparent.' Then why do it?

Mr Rhodes James is clearly puzzled by the apparent paradox that a man of genius with vast experience of politics should have at- tracted so little personal following until in his sixty-fifth year he became Prime Minister. I imagine the answer is that he was an uncomfortable and warlike fellow in a generation which longed for comfort and peace. '

In any parliament (including the one now happily dying) there are a few voices crying in the wilderness. They are un- comfortable people. Their admirers, if they have any, console themselves by recalling Churchill's career. But in fact most prophets take to the wilderness because it is their spiritual home, and few people listen to their jeremiads because most people know better. Whereas Churchill detested the wilderness. He was ineffective in opposition and ' frustrated out of office. Antwerp and the Dardanelles as well as his earlier adventures in war gave him an image as clear as it was partial.

Sir Alan Herbert, one of his devoted ad- mirers, put it excellently well : 'For more than twenty years I had adored (that is the right word, I fear) Mr Churchill . . . I thought he was nearly always right ... But I did think that he rather enjoyed a war :and after three years in the infantry, in Gallipoli and France, I did not.' With which one may take Churchill's own comment on the day in 1939 that war was declared. 'As I sat in my place, listening to the speeches, a very strong sense of calm came over me, after he intense passions and excitements of the past few days . . . The glory of Old England, peace- loving and ill-prepared as she was, but

ginstant and fearless at the call of honour, railed my being and seemed to lift our fate

to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation'.

Who then were his friends in the 1930s? In Parliament very few. The Labour party, by a remarkable achievement of self-hypnosis, have persuaded themselves that they stood with Churchill. In fact throughout his long life they attacked and reviled him as ferociously as he did them. In the crucial years they were for the most part much more critical of the British Prime Minister than of the German Chancellor. The Conservative party was torn between suspicion, ad- miration and fear of Churchill. Those who were at variance in greater or lesser degree with Chamberlain's policies included the next three Conservative prime ministers, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan. But only Brendan Bracken, Bob Boothby and Duncan Sandys can claim in the full sense of the word that in those years in Parliament they were Churchill's men. All honour to them, and I am particularly grateful to find in this book a short portrait of Brendan Bracken which corrects the almost wholly un- favourable view of this mysterious man which 1 formed in the years before his death in 1958, when I was a newly fledged Minister.

I have often wondered where I would have found myself if I had been in Parliament in the '30s. Some people (like Mr Heath, who campaigned in the Oxford by-election after Munich for the anti-Government candidate) can be sure, that they would have stood either with or close to Churchill. I am not so sure. On the one hand, I have always thought that Chamberlain was and is still underestimated as a Minister and as a man. On the other. I fell under Winston Churchill's spell the first time we met; I too have a romantic approach to politics, I love the pressure of great events. Perhaps I would have ended again in perplexity with Sir Alan Herbert: 'But, "wishful thinker", "anxious hoper", "old soldier", or "Christian believer"—what you will—I wanted Mr Chamberlain to be right, and keep the peace successfully . . . I voted sadly for Munich: and the whole thing made me ill.'

One of the best parts of the book is the author as an historian writing on Churchill as author and historian. The fierce devotion of son to father, so clear and so admirable in all the Churchills, carries obvious dangers for a

'Pieces-of-eight'

biographer. Thus Winston Churchill, writing his brilliant life of Lord Randolph Churchill, wrote in part his own life as he wished it to be seen. Mr Rhodes James is percipient in pointing out that the concluding words of Churchill's biography of his father: 'It was to that England that Lord Randolph Churchill appealed; it was that England he so nearly won; it is by that England he will be justly judged' tell us more about the son than the father.

In the same way ChurchilPs Marlborough more and more became both an exercise in family piety and, as Mr Rhodes James puts it, 'a kind of dress rehearsal for the problems of 1940-5'. But I am delighted to find again a perfect piece of amiable. self-parody from Winston Churchill's My Early Life. The young author is recalling a dinner with Lord Sandhurst at Government House in Poona:

`His Excellency, after the health of the Queen-Empress had been drunk and dinner was over, was good enough to ask my opin- ion upon several matters, and considering the magnificent character of his hospitality, I thought it would be unbecoming in me not to reply fully. 1 have forgotten the particular points of British and Indian affairs upon which he sought my counsel; all I. can remember is that I responded generously. There were indeed moments when he seemed willing to impart his own views; but I thought it would be ungracious to put him to so much trouble; and he very readily subsided.'

Naturally Churchill's work as an historian varies greatly in quality. Considering the quantity of his output and the many claims on his time it would be remarkable if it did not. Equally, I think Mr Rhodes James is nearer the truth in his cool analysis of Churchill's achievements in 1910-11 at the Board of Trade and the Home Office than Randolph Churchill's claim that his father was 'one of the architects of the modern Welfare State'.

It is an essential part of understanding and admiring Winston Churchill that one should realise how little his opinions changed in his long life. Political parties changed and Chur- chill changed political parties to keep in step. But he remained a child of the Victorian age and of an order which he sought to change only to preserve. He spoke often of Lord Randolph's phrase 'Trust the People' but he did not really trust them in politics beyond their station. He believed with a mystic fer- vour in England, in 'that England' which he thought his father had nearly won and which he was to win in the war that opens as this book closes.

And I come back again to my resentment of the title. I would like to think that it was the publisher's idea rather than the author's: a sales device rather than a description. For the truth surely is that we are free men in this country because of Winston Churchill and because of what he stood for and achieved. He was the most human of men and of course he had numerous failings.

They are faithfully chronicled in this book and no one should complain. Nothing detracts from the splendour of his life. He stands with Shakespeare as the greatest of our countrymen. Mr Rhodes James should not end his story in September 1939 as one of failure. He has written the overture with much skill. I hope one day he will finish the job.