Winston’s War

‘I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. That is a little matter. I have retained something which is to me of greater value – I can still walk about the world with my head erect.’

Only then did he sit down. And still the Prime Minister would not look at him.

For a place of such eminence and influence, Downing Street was architecturally extraordinarily undistinguished. Even after the extensive renovations to Number Ten undertaken by Neville Chamberlain and his wife, required in part by the need to shore up floors that were sagging and in danger of collapse, much of the interior remained remarkably dark and cramped. A place of elves and goblins. Two of the most voracious of these goblins were Sir Horace Wilson and Sir Joseph Ball.

Wilson’s official title was the Government’s Chief Industrial Adviser, which did no justice to his real influence. In practice he was recognized as being Chamberlain’s most trusted assistant. He had accompanied the Prime Minister on all three of his flying visits to Hitler in the previous month and had even been despatched to talk with the German leader on his own. ‘He is the most remarkable man in England,’ Chamberlain had once told colleagues, ‘I couldn’t live a day without him.’ Wilson controlled most of the levers of Government. Meanwhile his close colleague Ball controlled the political machinery. He was the director of the Conservative Research Department, the policy-making body for the Tory Party, and was also the official in charge of publicity and propaganda at party headquarters. Ironically he had turned down Guy Burgess when Burgess had applied to become an employee of the Conservative Party after leaving Cambridge. He thought him too scruffy.

Wilson and Ball shared many things – a background in the secret services (both had been officers in MI5), virulent anti-Semitism, a passionate belief in the policy of appeasement, and above all a devotion to Neville Chamberlain that went far beyond any job description. They were formidable, and in some quarters were justifiably feared.

Now these two eminent servants of the people sat in Wilson’s office, a small room that ran off the Cabinet Room itself. It was already dark, the curtains drawn, the only light provided by two green-hooded lamps placed on desks by the tall windows, lending a conspiratorial atmosphere which both men enjoyed. Ball had just come off the phone from talking with one of the directors of the Yorkshire Post. Not for the first time they were discussing the predilections of the editor, Arthur Mann, a persistent man who seemed determined to be impressed by the resignation speech of Duff Cooper.

Phrases like ‘personal grudge’ and ‘loss of grip’ had littered Ball’s conversation, but he seemed to be making little headway. Mann was a notoriously stubborn anti-appeaser, the director had explained, and he wasn’t sure what anyone could do. ‘For heaven’s sake, Jamie, whose bloody newspaper is it? Why do you let him kick you around like that? For God’s sake, get a grip. No sane man wants to reconquer Berlin for the Jews.’ Ball mouthed the words slowly, hoping they might sink firmly into the other man’s mind. ‘This is a matter of survival. And not just the country’s survival, your survival as a newspaper, too. Look what’s happened to your damned advertising revenues. A summer of war scares and the bottom’s fallen out of your market. Down – what? Thirty per cent? Precisely. So long as you encourage cranks like Duff Cooper to go on whipping up war scares you can watch your profits shrivel like a baby in bath water. Nobody’s going to buy a bloody thing. Look at the economy in Germany – that’s the sort of thing we want here, not blood all over your balance sheet. You want war? ’Course not. But that’s exactly what you’ll get if you carry on crawling up the arse of Duff Cooper and his crowd.’ At last the argument seemed to have struck home, the director promised to see what he could do, and the conversation was resolved with promises of lunch.

It had been a profitable evening’s work. Other newspapers had been leant on, too. Ball scratched his stomach, contented. By morning Duff Cooper’s obituary would be suitably disfigured.

At that moment there came a knock on the door and a head appeared. It belonged to Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times. As always in the dark corners of Chamberlain’s Whitehall, he was welcomed like a general returned to his camp. ‘Thought I might find you two old rogues here,’ he said. ‘Need to take your mind.’

‘And a glass of sherry, too, Geoffrey.’

The editor made himself comfortable in a cracked leather armchair by the fireplace, wriggling in order to reacquaint himself with an old friend. ‘Just taken tea with Edward at the Foreign Office.’ The ‘Edward’ in question was Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and it was Dawson’s custom to meet with him on a frequent basis, particularly when preparing a trenchant editorial. They were long-standing personal friends, their lives intertwined. Both were Etonians and North Yorkshiremen, High Anglicans who worshipped and hunted foxes together.

‘He was helpful, I trust,’ Wilson prompted.

‘As always. Got a pocket full of editorials that’ll take me right up to the weekend. But that’s not what I’m concerned about. It’s my young pup of a parliamentary reporter, Anthony Winn. He’s written some god-awful eulogy about Duff Cooper’s resignation speech this afternoon, about its nobility, how it was a resounding parliamentary success, its barbs striking home. How it shamed the Government’s troops into silence, even. That sort of stuff.’

‘Then change it.’

‘Steady on, Joey. Editorials are one thing. Chopping a news reporter’s copy around is considerably more tricky. A little like kicking cradles. Not made any easier by the fact that, according to my sources, he’s got it absolutely bloody right.’

Wilson and Ball glanced at each other uneasily. ‘Right only on the day, perhaps. Not in the overall context,’ Wilson mused. ‘He had to go. Duffie is a man who lives his life on the very edge of disaster. Not a man of sound judgement, Geoffrey – why, just look at his women. Pulls them off the street. Some of them are foreign, with completely inappropriate contacts … I sometimes wonder whether his rather lurid liaisons haven’t weakened his mind.’

‘And The Times of all newspapers can’t go peddling Jew propaganda, Geoffrey,’ Ball added. ‘Heavens, it’s an organ of propriety and eminence. Of the Establishment, not the revolution. We all recognize your newspaper’s special position – just as we recognize your own personal contribution to it.’ Ah, the final twist. All three of them were acutely aware that Dawson was the only man in the room who hadn’t yet been handed his knighthood. It was occasionally the subject of uneasy banter between them, an honour pledged but a promise yet to be delivered. And while he waited, he would behave.

‘That’s why I needed your guiding hand. Is the Duff Cooper story so damned important? Worth the aggravation I’ll get if I play the heavy-handed censor and rewrite the damned copy?’

The expressions of the other two men eased. Ball’s feet swung up onto the desk. The eminent servants of the people smiled at their guest, and expressed their mind as one.

‘Oh, yes, Sir Geoffrey. Please!’

The editor of The Times did as he was told. Destroyed the copy as though he were laying siege to a mediaeval fortress. Then he reconstructed it. ‘Emotional gourmets had expected a tasty morsel in Mr Duff Cooper’s explanation of his resignation,’ he wrote, ‘but it proved to be rather unappetising. Speaking without a note, the former First Lord fired anti-aircraft guns rather than turret broadsides. The speech was cheered by the Opposition, but Mr Chamberlain disregarded it for the moment with only a pleasant word of respect.’

The copy still went out under the name of Anthony Winn, the paper’s parliamentary correspondent. The following morning he resigned. He would be one of the first to be killed on active service in the war that was to follow.

And so the House of Commons gathered to debate the Munich agreement. The arguments continued for four days – far longer than the resistance shown by Chamberlain at Munich. It was a debate awash with nobility and bitterness, defiance and servility, with servility by far the larger portion – although, of course, at Westminster it is never known as that, being dressed up in the corridors and tea-rooms under the guise of loyalty and team spirit. Play the game, old fellow! Chamberlain demanded loyalty and dominated his party – those men of mediocrity who gathered around him knew he had the offices of state at his disposal, along with the substantial salaries and residences those offices commanded. Duffie had thrown away his London home and five thousand pounds a year – a small fortune in an era when those who enlisted to die for their country still did so for ‘the King’s shilling’ plus a couple of coppers more a day. Anyway, an election was due at some point, perhaps soon, and disloyalty to the Great and Popular Leader was certain to be repaid in kind. Appeasement was inevitable, it was argued, and nowhere more vociferously than in the Smoking Room of the House of Commons, where MPs throughout the ages had gathered in pursuit of alcohol and the secret of everlasting electoral life.

‘What’s your poison, Ian? Gin? Tonic? Slice of the Sudetenland?’

‘Make it a whisky, Dickie, would you?’

‘Large whisky coming up.’

A pause for alcohol.

‘You ever been to Czechoslovakia, Ian?’

‘Not even sure I could find it on a map. Faraway places, and all that.’

‘What did Neville say the other night after he came back from Munich?’ Dickie imitated a tight, nasal accent. ‘“And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”’

‘Somebody’s bed, at least. Whose was it last week, Dickie?’

‘I adhere to a strict rule. In the six months before any election I deny myself the pleasure of sleeping with the wife of anyone with a vote in my constituency. Which includes my own wife, of course. Sort of self-discipline. Like training for a long-distance run.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Central Office. It might become compulsory.’

‘It’s good politics. I work on the basis that I shall always get the women’s vote – so long as their husbands don’t find out.’

‘Better than leaving it dangling on the old barbed wire.’

‘Can’t stand all this bloody war-mongering, Ian. Any fool can go to war.’

‘Particularly an old fool like Winston.’

‘Been at it half his adult life. Look where it’s got him.’

Slightly more softly – ‘And if war is to be the question, how the hell can Bore-Belisha be the answer?’

Their attention was drawn across the cracked leather of the Smoking Room to where the portly and dark-featured figure of the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha (or Bore-Belisha or Horab-Elisha, according to taste), was ordering a round of drinks.

‘Do they make kosher whisky, Ian?’

‘Judging by the amount he knocks back it’s a racing certainty.’

‘Fancies himself as a future Leader, you know.’

‘Elisha? Really? Not for me. Always thought it might be helpful if we found a Christian to lead us on the next Crusade.’

‘Precisely.’

‘He’s getting even fatter, you know. Strange for a man who proclaims his devotion to nothing but the public good.’

‘A genetic disposition to –’

‘Corpulence.’

‘I was thinking indulgence.’

‘Christ. Gas masks to the ready. Here comes St Harold.’