Churchill overcame doubts on all sides to enjoy his finest hour

Of the events of May 10, 1940, when King George VI invited him to form a government, Winston Churchill said: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.”

A few hours later the Wehrmacht invaded and swiftly overran both Belgium and the Netherlands.

Although objectively it was the United Kingdom’s ‘darkest hour’, the grimmest crisis in its history, for Churchill it was to prove his finest hour.

Churchill became occupant of 10 Downing Street as a result of a fractious debate on May 7 and 8 1940 about the mismanagement of the Norwegian campaign.

Strictly speaking, Neville Chamberlain was not actually defeated in the vote at the end of this debate but his majority fell from 213 to 81. Thirty-three Conservative MPs and eight other MPs who normally supported the government voted against it. Another 60 abstained.

Chamberlain interpreted this substantial erosion of his normal majority as a vote of no confidence in his prosecution of the war and so Chamberlain resigned. Yet, the great irony is that the man who was really responsible for the mismanagement of the Norwegian campaign was none other than Winston Churchill.

With the benefit of hindsight Churchill’s succession appears inevitable. It most emphatically did not seem so at the time. The preferred candidate of ‘the Establishment’ – the Royal Family, the civil service and the bulk of the Conservative party – was Lord Halifax, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Viceroy of India (1925–31) and foreign secretary (1938–40). Halifax was even acceptable to the Labour party. It is often said that Halifax turned down the office of prime minister because he believed that he could not govern effectively as a member of the House of Lords. This is simply disingenuous. In light of the scale of the crisis confronting the United Kingdom, Halifax’s peerage was ‘no insuperable obstacle’ to him becoming prime minister.

For all Churchill’s great oratorical skills – in 1954 Ed Murrow, the legendary American journalist, claimed Churchill ‘mobilised the English language and sent it into battle’ – he was widely distrusted by his parliamentary colleagues because they believed his judgment had been poor on a wide range of issues.

Churchill’s career provided more than ample evidence of poor judgment: Gallipoli, the return to the gold standard, his opposition to self-government for India and his support for Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. Stanley Baldwin, three times prime minister in the 1920s and 1930s, made the point perfectly when he observed: ‘When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability – and then came a fairy who said, “No one person has a right to so many gifts,” and picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why, while we delight to listen to him in this House, we do not take his advice’.

Why then did Churchill become prime minister in the dark days of May 1940? In brief, the answer is largely because Churchill was determined to become prime minister whereas Lord Halifax chose not to press his claim, recognising that Churchill possessed a skill set better suited to the horrendous challenge confronting the nation 70 years ago.

As Andrew Roberts records in ‘The Holy Fox’, his prize-winning and critically acclaimed biography of Lord Halifax: ‘Nothing can cast doubt on the central fact that with the ultimate prize in his grasp, Halifax acted selflessly and put his country before his father’s dreams [of his son becoming prime minister] and his own ambitions’. Roberts may be erring on the side of generosity here.

Jock Colville, assistant private secretary to three successive prime ministers (Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and Clem Attlee), observed: ‘Seldom can a prime minister have taken office with the Establishment so dubious of the choice and so prepared to find its doubts justified’.

But despite Colville’s interesting assertion that ‘within a fortnight’ the Establishment coalesced behind Churchill’s leadership, the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.

Between May 24 and 28 members of the War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler through Italian intermediaries or to fight. Lord Halifax was the principal advocate of exploring a negotiated peace. These debates took place against a bleak backdrop because the fate of the British Expeditionary Force hung in the balance.

On May 25 Churchill ‘asked’ British troops besieged in Calais to continue to fight against overwhelming odds in order to buy time for either a proposed counterattack (which was not a feasible proposition) or for the evacuation of as much of the BEF as possible.

Churchill’s ‘request’ weighed very heavily with him because he knew only too well the enormity of what he was asking.

After sending his ‘instructions’ to Brigadier Claude Nicholson, he dined with Ismay, this chief military advisor, and Anthony Eden, the secretary of state for war.

In his History of the Second World War, Churchill recorded: ‘One has to eat and drink in war but I could not help feeling physically sick as we sat silent at the table.’

Ultimately it was the successful evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk which was to make Churchill’s decision on May 28 to fight on, irrespective of what happened to France, credible.

Nevertheless for 14 months elements of the Conservative Party continued to plot against Churchill, ‘putting party before country, and love of intrigue before both’.

But then, as Andrew Roberts in his book ‘Eminent Churchillians’ has shrewdly observed: “Old men forget, but old politicians forget selectively.”