Churchill (17 page)

Churchill survived the war by twenty years, and spent most of the first decade in active politics. Should he have retired? He thought the people wanted him. They said so, according to the polls. He had always bowed to the popular will when it expressed the national interest. He had said, in 1944, that an electoral defeat might be coming and must be respected: “What is good enough for the people is good enough for me.” After resigning the premiership, he moved from Downing Street to Claridge’s, until his house was ready, and was observed waiting outside the hotel for his car and singing an old popular song from his youth: “North Pole, South Pole, now I’m up the Pole, since I got the sack, from the Hotel Metropole.” At his farewell dinner party at Chequers, where a rehoboam of champagne was drunk, he made some remarks about his future conduct: “I will never give way to self-pity. The new government has a clear mandate which the opposition had no right to attack in principle. The new government will have the most difficult task of any in modern times, and it is the duty of everyone to support them in matters of national interest.” Churchill applied these rules to his own conduct as leader of the Opposition. Labour’s immense program was vigorously contested, but Churchill never threatened to destroy it if he returned to power. His chief contribution, he felt, was to voice the British view all over the world. So memorable speeches were made before immense audiences. At Zurich, he promoted European unity under Franco-German leadership, a prophetic notion. He stressed the importance of the “spiritual” element in such leadership, an aspect of unity which, alas, has been forgotten. A parliamentarian to the very roots of his political personality, he also stressed the importance of the Strasbourg parliament as opposed to the Brussels bureaucracy. Indeed, on August 11, 1950, he addressed a crowd of over twenty thousand in the open at Place Kléber, Strasbourg. The reception was overwhelming: nothing like it had been seen in the city ever before, or since. But alas here, too, Churchill’s wisdom has been ignored and bureaucracy has triumphed in every corner of the European community.

One reason Churchill hung on was that he loved the House of Commons so much. His speeches were still events, eagerly awaited. But there were also unpredictable “outbursts of charm,” as the parliamentary diarist “Chips” Channon put it. A sector of far-left Labour MPs disliked him and often subjected him to abuse. Once, when he was leaving the chamber, there were shouts of “Rat!” “Leaving the sinking ship!” “Don’t come back!” Churchill paused, turned round, then blew kisses at his assailants. This brought shouts of laughter from all parts of the House. Churchill did not win the 1950 election, but he returned greatly strengthened and full of mischievous glee. When Hugh Gaitskell, then the new chancellor of the exchequer, a “prissy Wykehamist” in Churchill’s view, who stood on his dignity a little too often, was making a solemn economic statement, Churchill began to search his pockets for something. First his trousers. Then his jacket. Then his top pocket. Then all his waistcoat pockets. This extensive search gradually attracted the attention of the House. Eventually Gaitskell, aware he had lost his audience, snapped at Churchill in irritation, “Can I help you?” Churchill replied sweetly, “I am only looking for a jujube.” Again, there was a roar of laughter from all parties.

At the end of 1951 there was another election, and this time Churchill was returned to office with a majority of seventeen. He quickly formed a government, taking over the defense portfolio himself for a time. Other wartime figures made an appearance: Ismay, Cherwell, the Earl of Woolton, Lord Leathers, Alexander. But increasingly, the main work was done by professional politicians like Eden, Butler, and Macmillan. Churchill was keen to introduce new young talent, employing the graceful manner he brought to even the routine jobs of the prime minister, such as the filling of junior offices. Lord Carrington, a young peer with a good war record in the Guards, was out shooting on his Buckinghamshire estate when a message came to phone Number Ten. On his return he found Churchill on the line. “Been out shooting I hear. Game good?” “Excellent.” “I am glad to hear it. Now I want to ask you: would you care to join my shoot?” That was how Carrington became undersecretary for agriculture, the first step in a career which ended as a distinguished foreign secretary. Churchill felt he had no mandate to reverse Labour’s nationalization measures, nor to “tame” the unions, nor to abolish the National Health Service, the creation of his old enemy Aneurin Bevan (indeed the two of them were sometimes seen sharing a whiskey and jokes: they were “incapable of resisting each other’s charm”). Labour’s work was left virtually untouched—Evelyn Waugh complained in his
Diaries,
“The clock has not been put back one single second.” There were even complaints that Churchill was slow to end rationing and other wartime egalitarian restrictions which Labour had prolonged. The country had to wait till Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s for the deadly burden of Attlee’s “Socialism and Water” to be drained away and replaced by privatization and the profit motive.

Churchill reserved his energy for foreign affairs. While unable to bring about a summit with Russia, he kept the “special relationship” with America in constant repair. He met President Eisenhower in Bermuda and paid an official visit to Washington in June 1954. The young vice president, Richard Nixon, left a vivid verbatim account of his conversation on that occasion covering the French predicament in Vietnam, the war against Communist guerrillas in Malaya, colonialism, imperialism, nuclear weapons, who was running Russia, and many other matters. “He enjoyed himself thoroughly,” Nixon wrote, “and was one of those rare great leaders who relished small talk as much as world-shaking issues.” Assigned the prestigious Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, where the bed was hard, he crept out in the middle of the night to the so-called Queen’s Bedroom, which was empty and where he knew from experience that the bed was luxurious. He told Mrs. Nixon that he had his first whiskey of the day at 8:30 in the morning, but deplored the habit of John Foster Dulles of drinking highballs during dinner: “For the evening is Champagne Time.” He joked about Dulles: “The only bull I know who carries his china shop around with him.” He said, “That man makes a beautiful declension: ‘Dull, Duller, Dulles.’”

In 1953, after long resisting, Churchill allowed the queen to make him a Knight of the Garter. This was a sign he was thinking of retiring, for he had always declined honors which involved a change of name: he valued being “Mr. Churchill.” There was a stroke later that year. Recovered, he found reasons for hanging on. He thought Eden “not up to” being prime minister physically and emotionally, but he also felt “he deserves his turn. Who knows? All may be well.” In fact, Eden’s brief turn ended in the fatal invasion of Egypt and the equally disastrous withdrawal. Churchill commented, “I would have been afraid to go in. But being in, I would have been even more afraid to go out.”

Churchill, aged seventy-nine, handed over in April 1955. His last speech had been on March 1, a virtuoso effort he prepared carefully and “dictated every word himself.” He said:

However, he added, he was not despondent:

The last ten years of Churchill’s life were an age of dying embers, with occasional flickers of flame and fiery glows. He finished his
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
. He painted: “I love the bright colours. I feel sorry for the dull browns.” He thought the best thing about heaven would be the infinitely brilliant color scheme. But he also saw the afterlife as “some kind of velvety cool blackness.” He then paused. “Perhaps I may be reborn as a Chinese coolie. You know, those were the people employed in South Africa whom I referred to in my first ministerial speech in the Commons. I said that to call them slaves would be to be guilty of a terminological inexactitude. Oh, how glorious English words are! However, if I am reborn a coolie, I shall lodge a strong protest at the Bar of Heaven.”

Much of his time was spent in the south of France, at the villa of Emery Reeves, whose pretty wife fussed over him enjoyably. There were many other houses open to him there, notably Beaverbrook’s La Capponcina, which was put at his disposal six months of the year. He made the acquaintance of Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipowner, and went for eight cruises in all on his capacious and luxurious yacht, the
Christina
. Churchill was particularly fond of it because it was a converted destroyer with huge, fast engines. For a time he was still adventurous. There is a vignette of him insisting on descending to a Mediterranean beach by a rocky cliff, and then being unable to climb up it again. He had to be hauled up (all five foot seven of him, and 154 pounds) in a bosun’s chair, pulled by a gang of fellow guests which included the ravishing Lady Diana Cooper and the ballet star Margot Fonteyn.

In his eighties Churchill was often forgetful, deaf, and lost in thought. The writer James Cameron, who had dinner
à trois
with Churchill and Beaverbrook at La Capponcina, describes a silent meal. Suddenly Churchill asked, “Ever been to Moscow, Max? ”—“Moscow” pronounced to rhyme with “cow.” “Yes, Sir Winston—you sent me there, remember?” Churchill went back into silence. At the end of the evening, saying good-bye, Cameron in his nervousness grasped Churchill’s hand too roughly. The old man reacted with fury, blue eyes blazing: “Goddamn you!”

Churchill often stayed at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, in a penthouse flat prepared for him. But he liked to dine downstairs with Mrs. Reeves, known as “Rhinestone Wendy.” Evelyn Waugh, also staying there, wrote to Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann:

He had a bad fall at the hotel, and that was the beginning of the end. He had been reelected to the Commons in 1959, though he never spoke thereafter, and paid his last visit to the place he loved on July 27, 1964. He celebrated his ninetieth birthday in November and died the following January, the twenty-fourth. His final days were painless and without incident. His last words were: “I am bored with it all.” But then he added, looking at the faces around his bedside, “The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making—once!”

Epilogue

O
n January 27, 1965, Churchill’s coffin was taken from his house in Hyde Park Gate to Westminster Hall, where it lay in state. Over three hundred thousand people filed slowly past the catafalque. At 9:45 on January 30 the coffin was taken from Westminster to St. Paul’s on a gray gun carriage last used at the funeral of Queen Victoria. The state funeral ordered by Parliament was the first for a politician since Gladstone’s. But in its somber magnificence its only precedent was the burial of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. From the funeral, attended by the queen, five other monarchs, and fifteen heads of state, the coffin went across the Thames by boat, then from Waterloo Station by train to Long Hanborough, the nearest station to Bladon, parish church of Blenheim Palace. Churchill was buried in the churchyard next to his father and mother and his brother, Jack, less than a mile from the room in the palace where he was born.

In his ninety years, Churchill had spent fifty-five years as a member of Parliament, thirty-one years as a minister, and nearly nine years as prime minister. He had been present at or fought in fifteen battles, and had been awarded fourteen campaign medals, some with multiple clasps. He had been a prominent figure in the First World War, and a dominant one in the Second. He had published nearly 10 million words, more than most professional writers in their lifetime, and painted over five hundred canvases, more than most professional painters. He had reconstructed a stately home and created a splendid garden with its three lakes, which he had caused to be dug himself. He had built a cottage and a garden wall. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, an Elder Brother of Trinity House, a Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a Royal Academician, a university chancellor, a Nobel Prizeman, a Knight of the Garter, a Companion of Honour, and a member of the Order of Merit. Scores of towns made him an honorary citizen, dozens of universities awarded him honorary degrees, and thirteen countries gave him medals. He hunted big game and won a score of races. How many bottles of champagne he consumed is not recorded, but it may be close to twenty thousand. He had a large and much-loved family, and countless friends.