Guessing games

ROBERT SKIDELSKY

I lie Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey 937-1940 edited by John Harvey (Collins 1s) I remember talking to a senior and distin- guished civil servant soon after devaluation in November 1967. He was saying how much easier our situation would have been had we taken the plunge much earlier, in July 1966 for example. I asked him why, hold- ing the view he did, he had not tried to persuade a leading Minister known to be in favour of expansion (e.g. George Brown) to resign and lead the fight for an alterna- tive policy. His reply was 'If you want to be an impresario, you must first of all have a star.' Sir Oliver Harvey, the author of these Diaries, fancied himself as just such an im- presario in 1938. There was no nonsense in his mind about a civil servant keeping out of politics. His star was Anthony Eden, his Foreign Office chief. A career diplomat and a fervent anti-appeaser, Harvey sought to 'promote' Eden into a national alternative to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. We have become so accustomed to think- ing of Eden as a straw-man that it is hard to understand how he came to be cast in the role of hero in the mid-1930s—and for many years afterwards. It probably had less to do with his own qualities than with the absence of any plausible alternative. The incompar- able Winston Churchill was out on a limb; the Labour party had no one; the Conserva- tives were still ruled by the dreadful old gangs left over from 1914. Faute de mieux the youthful, seedily good-looking Eden be- came the repository of the hopes of the young, the idealistic, the forward-looking. Harvey was convinced that if Eden re- signed the Government would fall and Anthony would return as PM. Eden duly re- signed on 20 February 1938 (after much prodding from his Private Secretary), Hali- fax taking over his job. He made speeches up and down the country. From his own reports to Harvey, they were enthusiastically received (this is hard to believe as his oratory was notoriously uninspiring). Far from top- pling, the Government never trembled. If only A.E.'s impeccable sentiments could be expressed somewhat more crisply his im- presario sighed. 'I feel A.E. must develop a programme,' Harvey was writing on 13 November 1938—something he might have thought about before encouraging Eden to embark on his populist career. Soon he was agreeing with Halifax that Eden paid too much attention to his `image' and not enough to his homework. Eden for his part 'wants to be back dreadfully' in the Government— almost on any terms. But the telephone call from No 10 never came.

Harvey had clearly misjudged the man and the mood of the country (still far more drowsily non-interventionist than he allowed). But perhaps a more important fail- ing of the alternative national leader was the lack of an alternative policy. Chamberlain wanted a political settlement with Hitler. Churchill wanted to ring him round with Britain, France and Russia and anyone else who would come in. Eden's policy, appar- ently, was to keep him guessing, so that Germany could never be sure that HMG would not intervene in Central Europe and the French could never be sure that we would—thereby [for some obscure reason] discouraging both from forward policies'. Anything more calculated to cause war by miscalculation could scarcely be imagined—

especially with gamblers like Hitler and Mussolini around. Eden was popular with

Harvey because he was a Foreign Office man —and the 'guessing-policy' was just another

name for the traditional Foreign Office dis- like of any fast commitments—thus encour- aging one's enemies and discouraging one's friends.

Indeed the 'guessing' policy was so obvi- ously stupid, given even the most elementary insight into the psychology of the dictators, that one wonders whether something more than mere Foreign Office traditionalism was involved in 4. After all, both Churchill's and Chamberlain's policies were peace policies— the former's aimed at deterring the aggressor, the latter's at removing the causes of con-

flict. The Foreign Office policy was designed to accomplish neither of these two aims. It

was almost as if men like Harvey had come to believe that war was the least of all the possible evils. His diaries are full of references to the fundamental incompatibility between the Hitlerian and the democratic system (strangely enough he was far less worried about Russia). He had become con- vinced, he writes, that no peace was possible till the Hitler regime had been overthrown.

It is a very short step from this to actually becoming a supporter of making war. Of course he could not say (or even think) this openly, in a democracy, but if this was his policy—half-admitted only to himself—then no more admirable instrument for the pur- pose than the 'guessing policy' could be de- vised for tempting the dictators into making war through miscalculation.

There's another point, which links up with the 'promotion' of Eden as an alternative to Chamberlain. Harvey was convinced that

England needed a 'new deal' a la Roosevelt. He is constantly urging Eden to come out

with a big social programme to heal class divisions. Increasingly he came to feel that this spirit of national solidarity could only be evoked by war. He constantly accuses Mussolini of seeking foreign adventures in order to solidify his own regime. Yet there is little doubt that by 1939 war offered some kind of solution to the problems of the democratic regime as well. This is not true just in the limited sense that rearmament 'cured' the unemployment problem. But in the absence of any real intellectual, moral, or political thrust for a genuine Keynesian New Deal, war offered the best, perhaps the only chance of uniting the nation and sweep- ing away the dreadful old men enthroned by an ailing democracy.

If I am right in my assumption that a semi-conscious war party (which must be distinguished from the Churchill group) existed in the Foreign Office, then this throws an important light on the whole ques- tion of the operation of the so-called ap- peasement policy. Appeasement, it must never be forgotten, was Chamberlain's per-

sonal policy for ensuring `peace in our time.'

It was not the policy of the British govern- ment of which he was Prime Minister. In fact it was carried out largely by stealth

behind the backs of the Foreign Office officials—who -protested repeatedly against

Chamberlain's 'amateur' diplomacy. When- ever he attempted to bring it out into the open—as on the issue of giving Germany back its colonies or in his relations with Mussolini—Chamberlain was checkmated by the Foreign Office. It's interesting how con- temptuous Harvey and his group are of Vansittart, who was violently anti-German but agreed with Chamberlain on the need to try to detach Italy from the Axis. Again this was a perfectly reasonable strategy. (by no means the only one) given that one's aim was to avoid war. It made no sense to those with a vested interest in war.

There is much that still remains to be explained. There is, for example, the curious episode of Tilea, the Roumanian Minister in London who comes to the Foreign Office on 17 March supposedly with the story that the Germans have just presented Roumania with an 'ultimatum'. This starts the whole British avalanche of guarantees to Eastern Europe. Yet the Roumanian government denied the story the next day and Tilea subsequently denies ever having said anything of the sort. What is one to make of that? Then there is the obscure episode of the Anglo-German economic negotiations of January-March 1939. briefly touched on in these Diaries ('that mountebank Montagu Norman is off to Berlin'). It is not so much the facts we lack, as a new interpretation of all these events. When that book is written, Sir Oliver Harvey's Diaries will be an indispensable source.