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A TIME TO REMEMBER
By Bruce Anderson
An Orkney native who read
history at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, Bruce Anderson
is s political columnist and a
former political editor of The
Spectator, for which he now
writes as the magazine’s drink
critic.
T
hroughout his early
career, Winston Churchill
always revelled in
controversy, and on
occasions he provoked
it. From the beginning, he seemed
to be a strong candidate for political
eminence.
In one of the 昀椀nal eras of aristocratic
political dominance, an able young
man from a ducal background could
expect early preferment; what would
now be called “entitlement”. Churchill
did indeed take that for granted.
Yet there were always problems.
Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph,
was also a young man of brilliant
promise. He became Chancellor of
the Exchequer at an early age; full
of ambition, there seemed to be
no barriers to those ambitions: the
premiership itself appeared to be
within his grasp.
But Randolph lacked solidity and
judgment. He came into con昀氀ict
with Lord Salisbury. Although
less colourful than Gladstone, that
paladin of the house of Cecil could
be regarded as Queen Victoria’s
greatest Prime Minister. He had a
massive solidity that Churchill lacked.
There was a clash. Salisbury won.
Randolph resigned from of昀椀ce and
his health then gave way, possibly due
to syphilis. The House of Churchill
appeared to have turned into the
House of Icarus.
Twenty years later, some sceptics saw
Winston Churchill as a second Icarus,
destined not for the heights, but for
another fall. The early and middle
phases of his career did nothing to
assuage those doubters: as Home
Secretary, an of昀椀ce which normally
demanded a certain gravity on the
part of its holders, he seemed inclined
to excitability, turning up in person
to take command of the Siege of
Sidney Street, when a few anarchists
exchanged 昀椀re with policemen.
This was not how such matters were
normally conducted.
Then there was Gallipoli. Churchill
knew that war meant a butcher’s bill,
but he hated the thought of wasting
lives needlessly. He was always ready
to employ a powerful intellect and
strategic radicalism to search for an
alternative to sending millions of men
to chew barbed wire in Flanders.
Hence Gallipoli, an attempt to force
a way through those narrow straits,
open the road to Constantinople,
thrust a dagger into the underbelly
of German-Austrian domination of
Central and Eastern Europe, knock the
Turks out of the war, bring Bulgaria
and Romania in on the allies’ side,
make it easier to reinforce Russia, and
thus swing events decisively against
Germany.
The Right Hon. Lord Randolph Churchill
Dramatic stuff, and as long as military
history is studied, that campaign will
be re-fought. There is an argument
that Gallipoli failed because Churchill
only half-persuaded his colleagues.
Had he been given bolder generals
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and admirals, and more material, it
might have worked. Others say that
the obstacles were too great. Above
all, we under-estimated the Turks,
who were dogged, brave 昀椀ghters, and
formidable in defence.
British soldiers evacuated from Gallipoli
in 1915 are transferred to Salonika in
Greece
Churchill survived, although
“Gallipoli” was regularly used as a
term of abuse during his con昀氀icts on
the hustings. But by the 1920s, he was
still too formidable to ignore. In 1924,
Balwin won an election and wanted to
reunite the Conservative party.
Although Churchill had broken with
the Tories twenty years earlier, he then
more or less rejoined them during the
wartime coalition. He was still widely
distrusted in some Tory circles. but
Baldwin sought harmony. There is a
vulgarism, which was uttered much
later by Lyndon Johnson about J.
Edgar Hoover: “I’d rather have him
inside the tent pissing out than outside
the tent pissing in”. Though Baldwin
would never have said anything like
that, he would have understood it.
He protected his “tent” by making an
offer which delighted Churchill: the
Chancellorship.
This was not necessarily a ministerial
