Looking after Anthony
Alan Watkins
CHURCHILL: THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL, 1945-60 by Lord Moran Constable & Robinson, £9.99, pp. 480, ISBN 1845292979 ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 When this book first came out in 1966 it covered the entire period during which Charles Moran had been Winston Churchill’s physician from 1940 onwards. It caused a good deal of controversy, less because it was in any way hostile to Churchill than because it showed him as a fallible human being. The Churchill family were particularly exercised by its publication. Ran dolph Churchill said that all he asked of Moran was that he should have followed the standards of the ordinary GP, which he had failed to do. Randolph’s sister Mary Soames, denounced the work as disgraceful. It was so, even though her husband Christopher had emerged from it in a near-heroic light, keeping the entire show on the road after Churchill’s stroke in 1953 with the aid of Jock Colville and Lord Salisbury.
Moran was conspicuously less generous about the part played by R. A. Butler, who thought in retrospect that his best chance of becoming prime minister had come and gone in that year of Churchill’s illness. The reasons for his exclusion, when he was 50, did not lie soley in his lack of attraction for what was then the Tory high command. It was thought also, by the same group, that to put anyone except Eden into No. 10 would be ‘unfair to Anthony’. For Eden had also been ill in 1953 and was almost as unwell as Churchill — perhaps more so — even if in a different way.
If the decision had been taken to be as unfair as you like to Anthony (the Tories can be ruthless enough when it suits them) the beneficiary would not have been Butler but, rather, Salisbury. No objection appears to have been taken to his peerage — it does not seem to have come up at all — though allowances have to be made for Moran’s inclination to love a lord and for his sympathy with the reactionary Churchill entourage.
I use the word, by the way, in a fairly exact sense. Churchill himself may have been nobly obsessed as others were, after all, by the hydrogen bomb, which provided the reason for hanging on to office (for it was neither an excuse nor what the Iron Curtain countries would later call a pretext). But the men around him looked back to the years before the war, which they wished to see re-established, as Churchill himself did in most respects. The first half of the 1950s really was a very odd time. I know. I was there.
It makes complete sense to divide the book into the wartime and post-war periods with a separate volume for each, as the present publishers have done. There are numerous editions. Thus on 29 September 1951 Moran is told by the entourage that ‘one particular bad hat’ is going to be made Minister of Health. He is asked to stop the appointment, as Churchill will not listen to them. The bad hat turns out to be Walter Elliot, who had (unexplained in any footnote) been Minister of Health in 1938-40. Moran tells Churchill that, if he appoints Elliot, he will have to find another personal physician. Churchill had never intended to appoint him in the first place. But he was no worse a hat than, say, Butler: he was described as such by Moran because he was not a member of the gang of Churchill sycophants.
There are also many omissions. For instance, on 18 July 1955 Sir Norman Brook, the Cabinet Secretary, conceded Churchill’s view that his resignation, as distinct from the date of the election, was not a matter for the Cabinet to decide. However, this time the party knew all about the date and Anthony could not have given way even if he had wanted to.
This is only part of a longer entry, which makes clear that the date of the 1955 election had been fixed by Central Office. The bit I have quoted sets out Churchill’s view that the date for an election is for the Cabinet to decide and not for the prime minister alone. This is surely right: but it goes contrary to the modern view, which derives partly from David Lloyd George and partly from error by the constitutional lawyer Sir Ivor Jennings. And yet the entry for 18 July has been excised here; the diary jumps from 12 to 20 July. It could perhaps be made slightly clearer that we are not getting the full works.
A short footnote: it would be incorrect to think that the initial hostility to the book came solely or even mainly from the Churchill family. In 1966 I was working for The Spectator as its political columnist when it had its offices at 99 Gower Street. From time to time I would call at the nearby Marlborough Arms for a restoratif. One of the attractions of the place was that it also enjoyed the custom of Colm Brogan, who lived in an adjacent mansion block. Brogan was a Tory columnist and prolific pamphleteer who anticipated the 1980s. Clutching a glass of whisky (later, alas, exchanged for tomato juice), he would discourse volubly in Glaswegian asperities on contemporary politics. He had no time at all for Moran. As there was no greater defender or — to an even greater extent — exponent of free speech than Brogan, I was puzzled by this. In my opinion, the book is well worth buying.
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