when he had been eager to fashion an image of vitality, press reports brought up his prolonged bouts of pneumonia during the Second World War, his impending seventy-first birthday, and the undeniable fact that for a man of his years a tiny cold could prove to be a very big deal. In view of his comeback plans it was all a bit of a disaster, but as a friend once said, Churchill ‘produced his greatest efforts in disaster’. Adversity tended to stimulate him.
While he was abroad, a stack of invitations to speak had accumulated at Hyde Park Gate. One request in particular fired Churchill’s imagination by appealing to his sense of drama. F. L. McLuer, the president of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, asked him to lecture on international affairs. The proposal dovetailed with Clementine Churchill’s wish that they spend part of the winter in Florida for his health. Still, McLuer’s letter is likely to have been of little interest had it not been for an addendum scribbled across the page: ‘This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you. Best regards, Harry Truman’. Even Truman’s seconding of the invitation would have made little impact on Churchill without the offer, however casual and offhand, to introduce him.
Churchill instinctively grabbed on to those three words as if they were a lifeline, and he refused to let go until he had used them to hoist himself back up onto the world stage. Truman’s presence on the same platform would call world attention to his message about the looming Soviet threat in a way he could never hope to achieve by himself. In his present circumstances, it would mean everything to Churchill, a defeated politician after all, to be able to borrow and bask in the American leader’s power.
As Churchill crafted his reply, he went significantly beyond an attempt to formalize Truman’s commitment. He tried to draw the President further into the picture, to suggest that Truman had intended a good deal more by his words than he probably had. (In fact, Truman as yet had no real investment in the visit. An intermediary, a Westminster alumnus, had solicited his involvement in the invitation. Truman had merely added his hasty endorsement and passed the letter on as a favour to a friend.) Though it was McLuer who had written to him, Churchill cut the college administrator out of the loop by addressing his letter, dated 8 November 1945, directly to Truman. He wrote as if he had in hand an official presidential invitation to speak under Truman’s ‘aegis’. Careful to refer to his understanding that Truman planned to introduce him, Churchill insisted it would be his ‘duty’ to come to the US and do as the President requested. He pledged to Truman that the Fulton speech would be his only public address in America ‘out of respect for you and your wishes’.
Churchill was unquestionably distorting the tenor of Truman’s message, and his decision to point out that he had praised Truman in the House of Commons the previous day was also risky. At Potsdam, Truman had complained in his diary of what he perceived as Churchill’s efforts to soft-soap him. Nevertheless, having cleared the speaking engagement with his successor, Churchill sent off his answer via Attlee’s secretary, to be hand-delivered when the American and British leaders met presently to discuss atomic policy and related matters in Washington.
While Churchill waited for Truman to respond, he went to Paris and Brussels for a week to speak and be feted. His painting holiday had helped him regain perspective and confidence after the election and he was happy once again to receive honours. Now, with an eye towards a comeback, it suited him to shift public attention back to his war triumphs.
In Brussels, adoring crowds waited for hours to catch a glimpse of him. They fought their way past police and tossed flowers at his car. A girl managed to hurl herself onto the running board and kiss him, and an old woman was heard to declare that now that she had seen Churchill she was ready to die. He was made an honorary citizen and proclaimed ‘the saviour of civilization’. Hailed for his war leadership, Churchill missed no opportunity to showcase his achievements in the run-up to war as well. When he told a joint session of the Belgian Senate and Chamber on 16 November that had the Allies moved to stop Hitler early on, the Second World War (‘the unnecessary war’) would probably never have had to be fought in the first place, he was reminding people that he had been right in the 1930s and letting them know that he was right now.
In contrast to his rapturous reception abroad, there were no cheers for Churchill when he returned to London on 20 November. Immediately, he faced a new challenge to his leadership. This time the malcontents were younger parliamentarians who mocked their tired elders in the Conservative Party as ‘Rip Van Winkles’, content to sleep through the socialization of Britain. To the young Tories’ outrage, Churchill had been absent from Parliament on 19 November, resting at Chartwell after his trip, when Labour unveiled further nationalization plans. The party’s number two man, Anthony Eden, had been missing as well.
At a meeting of the backbenchers, Churchill slouched in a red leather armchair for an hour and a half, but he might as well have been enduring a slow stretch on the rack as his juniors by many years criticized his leadership. At the time of the general election, Churchill’s belligerence had landed him in trouble; now the complaint was that he was not belligerent enough. The man of blood had gone anaemic. The young people wanted him to set off a debate in the House of Commons on the broad matter of nationalization by introducing a motion of Government censure.
No one can have wanted to turn out the Government more than Churchill. No one can have had greater reason to be impatient. He was truly, as his father had said of Gladstone, an ‘old man in a hurry’. Still, he protested, the timing was all wrong. The Attlee Government had only been in power for a few months and it was too soon to argue that they had failed. Like it or not – and Churchill did not like it – the Opposition had little choice but to wait upon events. The Conservatives needed to let some time pass and give things a chance to go wrong. Far from benefiting Conservatives, Churchill argued, a premature confrontation would spotlight Tory weakness, allowing Labour to emerge even stronger than before.
Churchill suggested that when his critics had had more experience they would see that he had been right, but they were unyielding. At last he reluctantly consented to go on the warpath against Attlee; it was either that or allow the charge to stand that somehow he had lost the will to fight.
On the evening of 27 November, three days before his seventy-first birthday, Churchill placed a motion of censure before the House, which claimed that the Government had focused on long-range nationalization plans at the expense of the people’s immediate postwar needs. Churchill filed the motion without comment in expectation of a full-dress debate the following week.
Robert ‘Rab’ Butler, Churchill’s wartime Minister of Education, established the tone at the next day’s Conservative Central Council meeting in London. The pale, balding, pouchy-eyed Butler introduced Churchill as the ‘Master Fighter’. Churchill’s mockery of Socialist ministers elicited peals of delight, and when he slowly, mischievously flapped his arms to help listeners visualize ‘the gloomy vultures of nationalization’ hovering over Attlee’s Britain, the hall echoed with appreciative laughter. Delegates from throughout Britain insisted they had never known Churchill to be in better form.
He met a less enthusiastic reception in the House of Commons. Labour shot down Churchill’s motion – by this time, despite its genesis, it was very much identified in the public mind as his motion – by a vote of 381 to 197. But then, he had expected it to fail. What he could not have expected was the wit and ferocity of Attlee’s counterattack. Churchill was known to view his successor as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’, but there was nothing sheepish about Attlee’s devastating performance on 6 December.
Clementine Churchill watched from the gallery, and more than a hundred politicians had to stand or squat on the floor for want of seats, as the small, spare, fidgety Attlee, who had a reputation as a lacklustre speaker, gave what was widely received as the best speech of his parliamentary career to date. Attlee made Churchill seem ridiculous for asking why a Government that had been elected to carry out a socialist programme did not carry out a Conservative programme. He avowed that Britain disliked ‘one-man shows’ and he characterized the motion of censure as nothing more than ‘a party move by a politician in difficulties’.
Every time Attlee scored a hit – and there were many – the Labour benches roared. His plush pink target looked on in silence. Churchill made a point of rising above