first postwar election, Eden was perhaps only being human when he discovered that he could not stifle ‘an unworthy hope that we may lose’. And when he did get what he had guiltily wished for, he confided to his diary that while history would dub the British people ungrateful for having dismissed Churchill, perhaps they had, in reality, only been wise. Believing that the Tories would be out for ten years, Eden spoke to friends of his fervent desire to lead the Opposition and mould the party for the future, but he also voiced concern that Churchill would insist on holding on to the job – ‘and get everything wrong’. By the time six months had passed, Eden’s fears – at least, those about Churchill’s intentions – seemed to have been realized.
As far as Eden could tell, at the start of 1946, Churchill had not even contemplated the possibility of retirement. Eden whined to Cranborne that Churchill meant to go on ‘forever’. He was sure that the Conservative Chief Whip James Stuart and the party chairman Ralph Assheton were encouraging Churchill to hold on to the leadership for as long as possible in the interest of putting off the ‘evil day’ when Eden took over. And even if Churchill were miraculously to step down, Eden was no longer confident that the party leadership, not to mention the premiership, would ever be his. He worried about being displaced by the likes of the forty-two-year-old Rab Butler or the fifty-one-year-old Harold Macmillan, though neither man was generally regarded as ready to lead. He also worried about the impatient young Tories who, when they mocked the party’s Rip Van Winkles, meant the second-in-command and other venerable Conservatives no less than they did Churchill. To make matters worse, Eden’s tumultuous personal life threatened to bar him from the premiership for good. His marriage was in tatters; Beatrice Eden wanted to marry her American lover. A divorce could sink Eden’s political dreams. Had he worked and waited all this time, for nothing?
Eden’s complaint was not that he could have been a contender. It was that he had been one for too long. At a moment when he felt ‘fed up with everything’, the prospect of a new job suggested a way out of the succession trap. Even as Churchill had been using Eden to allay concerns about his own impending absence in America, Eden had been hoping he might soon be in a position to bolt. Nothing had been settled and other names were still prominently in play, but on 2 January 1946, Ernest Bevin confirmed to Eden that he was a candidate to become the United Nations’ first Secretary General. Following their talk, Eden let it be known at the Palace that he was ‘anxious’ to be considered.
Characteristically, he was not without ambivalence. Eden had a lifelong tendency to vacillate that had prompted Lady Redesdale, the mother of the Mitford sisters, to dub him ‘the wet hen’. In the present instance, he seemed to be scurrying in all directions at once. Eager as he was to escape to the UN, he hesitated to abandon his prime ministerial ambitions after all that he had done and endured to realize them. By turns he insisted that he longed to extricate himself from the rough and tumble of British politics and vowed to return to lead his party when Churchill was gone at last. Eden’s former boss, Stanley Baldwin, warned that if he joined the UN, Butler was likely to claim the Tory leadership; once Eden made the move, there would almost certainly be no coming back.
Cranborne huffed to Conservative colleagues that if Eden took the UN job he was ‘through with him’. Typically, however, Cranborne assumed a very different posture in conversation and correspondence with Eden himself. Rather than threaten Eden, he flattered him. In his most narcotic tones, Cranborne encouraged Eden in the belief that he was indispensable to the party’s prospects. He maintained that only the designated heir could keep Conservatives together and that only he could lead them to victory in a new general election. For Cranborne, the UN episode was a flashback to the offstage tempest three years previously when Eden, already maddened by Churchill’s staying power, had considered becoming Viceroy of India. At the time, Eden had assumed that his position as Conservative heir apparent would be waiting whenever he saw fit to return. Now, as then, Cranborne, acting in his accustomed role of providing ‘the backbone to Eden’s willow’, worked hard to disillusion him. In the process, Cranborne may merely have substituted one illusion for another. He reassured Eden that Churchill’s day was finally over, that Churchill now belonged to the past, and that even he was bound to find this out. Cranborne made the case Churchill had often made himself: that Eden needed only to be patient and wait a little longer as number two.
Eden was a figure of stark contradictions. As a diplomat he was a nimble negotiator gifted with an ability to mitigate tensions and always to seem cool and composed. As a man he was also vain, touchy, and hysterical. Alcohol brought out the worst in him. When Eden arrived at St James’s Palace on 9 January, the King’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, guessed that he had been drinking. Immediately, Eden ripped into two of the King’s equerries as they showed him to his place at the banquet table in the William IV Room. Loudly complaining that he had been seated next to the head delegate from Nicaragua, the would-be leader of the new world peacekeeping organization made no secret of his conviction that he rated a more important dinner partner. He also seemed unhappy that he had been placed in the vicinity of Attlee.
Dinner began; the Krug 1928 champagne and other wines from the cellars at Buckingham Palace flowed; and George VI, a slight man with prominent teeth who suffered from a nervous stammer that tended to affect him when he addressed the public, spoke of the momentous tasks facing the delegates and of the need to put petty, selfish concerns aside in the interest of making the UN a success.
After dinner, the company moved to the Queen Anne Room, where the King planned to talk individually with certain guests. He was especially keen to speak to the dark-eyed, sallow-faced Russian, Andrei Gromyko (said to call to mind ‘a badger forced into the daylight’), to urge that the wartime contact between London and Moscow not be lost. George VI’s press secretary, Lewis Ritchie, brought over each of the chosen delegates, and photographs were taken at the King’s request. The bright flashes provoked a new hissy fit from Eden. Using filthy, abusive language, he protested to Ritchie that the camera lights were bothering him.
Butler, one of a small number of Opposition members present, sprang forward to apologize on Eden’s behalf, pointing out, in case anyone had failed to notice, that the man he hoped to replace as heir apparent had had too much to drink.
The next day, Lascelles drafted a stinging letter of rebuke to Eden. Realizing that he had ‘made an ass’ of himself, Eden, before he heard from the Palace, wrote an abject letter of apology. Not only had he sabotaged his candidacy for the UN job, but he had also provided ammunition to those who questioned his capacity to lead the Conservative Party.
As it happened, Churchill was asked for his thoughts on both the secretary generalship and the Tory leadership when the Queen Elizabeth docked in New York on the evening of 14 January. Flags whipped in the frosty Hudson River winds and a US Army band struck up ‘Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here’ as he descended the gangplank. Observed by the Canadian troops, whose heads stuck out of many of the ship’s portholes, Churchill made one of his dainty half-bows to a large crowd of press and American, British, and Canadian officials.
Afterwards, in a heated waiting room on the pier’s upper level, he thanked reporters for coming out on such a cold night and gamely took their questions. Clementine Churchill, swathed in black furs, helped with any words he failed to hear. In the course of bantering with reporters, Churchill addressed topics that had been the subject of speculation and gossip in London for weeks. His remarks were of particular concern to certain personally interested parties at home.
Did Churchill plan to retire from active politics? ‘I know of no truth in such reports,’ he fired back. Was he going to hand over the Tory leadership? ‘I have no intention whatever of ceasing to lead the Conservative Party until I am satisfied that they can see their way clear ahead and make a better arrangement, which I earnestly trust they may be able to do.’ Was Churchill prepared to serve as the first UN Secretary General? This question appeared to puzzle him. Churchill knew that Eden wanted the job, and before he left the country he had ‘strongly’ advised him to accept were it to be offered. (Eden, for his part, assumed Churchill wished to see him settled elsewhere so he would feel easier in his mind about staying on. Churchill similarly had counselled Eden to take the viceroyship in 1943 on the explanation that he hoped ‘to go on some years yet’.) At the time of the press conference in New York, Churchill had no idea that