Authors: Michael Ridpath
‘See me in the House of Commons this afternoon.’
Churchill made his speech and then met the War Cabinet at four o’clock in a room in the Commons. Halifax went on the offensive immediately. He opened proceedings by stating that Vansittart had learned that the Italian government was prepared to act as mediator between Britain and Germany. The question was now firmly on the table. Should Britain discuss peace with Germany?
Halifax’s logic was persuasive. There could be no harm in seeing what terms would be acceptable to the Germans. And Britain would achieve much better terms before France was knocked out of the war and Britain’s aircraft factories had been bombed than after.
Persuasive, but wrong. Churchill made the point that once negotiations had been opened with Germany it would be impossible to back away from them and still maintain the defiance necessary to win the war. Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those that surrender are merely finished. Besides, Churchill believed the chances of Germany offering decent terms were a thousand to one against.
The War Cabinet wasn’t swayed one way or the other. Churchill adjourned the meeting to speak to the wider Cabinet, saying that the War Cabinet would reconvene at seven.
The Outer Cabinet met in Churchill’s rooms in the Commons, without the presence of the other War Cabinet members, including Halifax. It had become common practice for one or other of the members of the War Cabinet to brief the rest of the government on what was going on, but Churchill insisted on doing this particular briefing himself. The Outer Cabinet consisted of twenty-nine ministers, half Conservatives from Chamberlain’s government, half new men.
Churchill gave it his all. He said that it would be foolish not to consider discussing peace with Hitler, but that the peace terms would probably be harsh, involving giving up the fleet and naval bases. Britain would become a slave state and a puppet government would be set up by Hitler under Mosley or some such person. He concluded by saying that of course, whatever happened at Dunkirk, the British would fight on.
He had thrown in the last remark as a casual observation, but it was the key question. Would the British government fight on?
They would. Quite a few rushed up and patted him on the back. There wasn’t a voice of dissent.
Churchill was buoyed by their support, but he knew it would count for nothing if Halifax succeeded in pushing for peace in the War Cabinet. Everyone respected the towering figure of the Foreign Secretary, even Churchill himself. Unless he could win Halifax round, the war was lost.
So Churchill would find a way of winning him round.
Conrad watched Churchill’s speech to the Commons from the Strangers’ Gallery. It was grave. Belgium had surrendered. Things were clearly going badly in France, although the Prime Minister wasn’t specific about exactly what, promising instead to speak to the House at the beginning of the following week. He warned of ‘hard and heavy tidings’.
The House listened intently, and there were brief speeches of support from a Labour and a Liberal MP, but none from any Conservatives. Conrad wondered if that was a bad sign. The Conservatives were in a majority and it was they who would dump Churchill if he was going to be dumped.
Conrad picked out Sir Henry Alston’s disfigured face on the benches behind the Prime Minister. The scarring made it difficult to read the MP’s expression at distance, but Conrad was confident that it would show nothing more than outward loyalty and sincerity. Conrad was half hoping he would see either Lloyd George or Alston speak, but of course that was not part of the plan. They were waiting for their moment.
Churchill hurried from the chamber and Conrad left also. He made his way to the Prime Minister’s room in the Commons and told a clerk there that Mr Churchill had asked to see him. Then he waited in the corridor. At one point he saw the Civil Servant striding rapidly towards him. Conrad bent and tied his shoelace. Fortunately, the Civil Servant was too preoccupied to recognize him.
A string of Cabinet ministers filed past him in glum silence. A short time later they emerged from Churchill’s room chatting to each other. There was a buzz of barely suppressed excitement. Whatever the Prime Minister had said to them, he had said it well.
‘Mr de Lancey. The Prime Minister will see you now.’
Conrad entered the Prime Minister’s spacious room where he was shown to a sofa. Churchill occupied an armchair next to him and lit a cigar. He looked worried. He jabbed his cigar at Conrad.
‘You have ten minutes, Mr de Lancey. Tell me more about this threat.’
So Conrad told him. About Sir Henry Alston and his plan to subvert the British government to concede its country’s independence to Hitler, without the British people even realizing what was happening. About how Lloyd George would become Prime Minister and the Duke of Windsor would become king. About powerful figures in the press, the army, the civil service and Parliament who would support this new government. About a Major McCaigue in the secret service who was in Alston’s pocket. About how Conrad’s own father had been sent to France to fetch the Duke of Windsor and had died on the way in murky circumstances.
Churchill puffed at his cigar thoughtfully. ‘It’s exactly what I fear most,’ he said. ‘A coup by stealth rather than by fascist mobs on the street.’ The cigar glowed. ‘What proof do you have that Lloyd George and the Duke of Windsor are involved?’
‘No direct proof. Just what I have told you.’
‘Do you know whether they are knowing accomplices? Or are they compliant dupes?’
‘I have no idea, sir,’ said Conrad. ‘My impression is that Alston keeps his plans very close to his chest. He likes to manipulate people if he can, rather than tell them openly what he is about.’
Churchill grunted. He stared at Conrad for a full minute.
‘Wait here, de Lancey,’ said Churchill. ‘I would like you to repeat all this to the Foreign Secretary. You have no reason to think that he is involved?’
‘None,’ said de Lancey.
Churchill summoned Lord Halifax. Within a couple of minutes the lean frame of the Foreign Secretary appeared at the door. He was six feet eight inches tall, very thin, with a left hand that took the form of a black clenched fist with a thumb on a spring. A birth defect, not a war wound. Despite the hand, Lord Halifax was a good shot, as Conrad had witnessed once on a grouse moor in Yorkshire.
His eyebrows shot up when he saw Conrad.
‘Do you know Mr de Lancey, Edward?’ said Churchill.
‘Indeed I do,’ said Halifax.
‘He has something to tell you,’ said Churchill.
Halifax frowned. ‘We don’t have much time, Prime Minister.’
‘I know that, Edward. But listen to him. Just for ten minutes. Listen to him.’
Conrad repeated to the Foreign Secretary what he had told the Prime Minister. Halifax listened closely, his face registering ever-deepening shock. Afterwards he asked more or less the same questions as Churchill had.
‘I find this very hard to believe,’ he said, when Conrad had finished.
‘Do you?’ said Conrad.
The lines in Halifax’s long face deepened. ‘Maybe not,’ he said. He stood up and went to the window, which overlooked the Thames. He spoke with his back to Conrad. ‘I find your father’s actions particularly disappointing. I know him... I knew him well, most of his life. We were at Eton together.’
‘I know,’ said Conrad.
‘I’m sorry about what happened to him. I would have said he was a good man, a great man.’
‘Except for this,’ said Conrad.
‘Yes,’ said Halifax. ‘You know we might lose this war, de Lancey?’
‘Yes,’ said Conrad. ‘But isn’t it better to lose it on the battlefield or in the Channel or in the air than in the back corridors of Westminster?’
‘That’s what the Prime Minister thinks,’ said Halifax. He shook his head. ‘What they are up to is treason pure and simple. I cannot be part of it.’
‘No, sir,’ said Conrad.
The War Cabinet met again at seven o’clock. Churchill told them of the enthusiastic reaction of the Outer Cabinet to his proposal to fight on. He reiterated that he was not in favour of making an approach to Germany at the present time.
He turned to his Foreign Secretary. Lord Halifax looked thoughtful. But he said nothing.
The conversation turned to whether and how to make an appeal to the United States.
It was decided. Britain would fight on.
Conrad stood in the square and turned back to look up at the Houses of Parliament, the place where his father had spent so much of his time over the previous ten years, and, if France fell, the one place where democracy would live on in Europe. Conrad had done all he could – he had persuaded Churchill and he had persuaded Halifax. It was up to them to deal with Alston and his co-conspirators and to fight the war to its end.
Conrad knew there was a good chance that the end might mean defeat for Britain. But after all the turmoil and confusion of the previous year, the prevarications of the phoney war, the loss of his sister and his father, and the imprisonment of Anneliese, there was one thing of which he was certain: it was a war that had to be fought and he had to fight it.
Hôtel du Palais, Biarritz
‘Dave, what did that Veronica woman say to you, when you were outside on the balcony?’
The Duke of Windsor glanced at his wife, who was trying on earrings for dinner. They were in the bedroom of their suite. She had made a point of not asking him about Veronica de Lancey, but she couldn’t resist any longer.
‘Oh, it was nothing, darling,’ said the duke.
That didn’t satisfy her. He should have known it wouldn’t. ‘It can’t have been nothing! Did you see how fast she bolted?’
The duke sighed. Time for a little lie. ‘You know how these young women can be? You would think that now we are married and with you actually sitting inside, she would have known better. It’s extraordinary! So I sent her away with a flea in her ear.’
Wallis’s eyes flicked up from the mirror. The duke knew she was considering whether Veronica de Lancey might be a ‘good friend’ from the old days. But she wasn’t, and Wallis knew it. She let it drop.
The duke left the bedroom and moved through to the sitting room. He lit his pipe and went out on to the balcony to watch the sea. He fished out the cable he had received from Sir Henry Alston in London the night before and quickly reread it.
Then he struck a match and lit the corner of the telegram, letting the ashes scatter in the soft Atlantic breeze.
Summer 1940
It was seven o’clock in the morning when the bell rang in Alston’s flat in London. He pulled on a dressing gown and went downstairs to answer it. He was still drunk from the copious amounts of whisky he had put away the night before when he had heard that Constance had been killed a week earlier in France, together with Lord Oakford.
There were four policemen at the door: two detectives and two uniformed constables. They were arresting him under Defence Regulation 18B. They asked him to get dressed, pack a few things and accompany them.
Alston wasn’t surprised. He invited them in, and then went through to his bedroom. Before the constable following him could stop him, he had grabbed the revolver which he kept in his bedside drawer, turned it to his temple and pulled the trigger.
Hundreds of other men and women were rounded up that morning and in the following month, including many members of the Right Club and the British Union of Fascists. But none of the senior members of the government, the armed forces or the civil service whom Alston had courted were imprisoned, nor the dukes and other aristocrats who had sympathized with him and Freddie.
Major McCaigue was helpful in identifying who needed to be kept under observation; it turned out that he had cultivated useful sources within Alston’s conspiracy. He stuck by his assessment that Conrad de Lancey was a Soviet spy and by his decision to send de Lancey’s ex-wife to keep tabs on him. Although de Lancey had Churchill’s support, McCaigue ensured the SIS kept an open file on him. A reliable man in a crisis, Major McCaigue.
A fear of a ‘fifth column’ of foreign spies and British Nazi supporters swept the nation, a fear shared wholeheartedly by the Prime Minister. In addition to the Britons suspected of sympathy with the Nazis, thousands of Germans and Italians were interned, including most of the Jews who had escaped to Britain from Germany and Austria. Anneliese was released from Holloway, only to be rearrested with her parents a week later. She and her mother were sent to Huyton near Liverpool, and her father was despatched to the Isle of Man.
Theo returned to Germany from his mission in Spain. Joachim von Ribbentrop mourned the loss of his star protégé, Otto Langebrück, on a dangerous mission in enemy territory. Intelligence from the Abwehr suggested that British spies had been responsible for Langebrück’s death in an attempt to keep the Duke of Windsor away from Britain.
Theo’s intelligence duties switched to Britain, which was natural given his education there. He read with great interest Abwehr intelligence reports of the collapse of Alston’s plans and of his suicide, and that the Duke of Windsor had decided to drive to Antibes from Biarritz instead of returning to England. With the defeat of France, invasion of Britain was becoming a real danger. But Admiral Canaris had Theo working on exaggerated reports from southern England of the number of British divisions available and the strength of their secret fortifications: armoured cars lurking in the bunkers of the golf courses of St Leonards, a catacomb of gun emplacements underneath the hill at Rye. These the admiral passed on to Hitler with gloomy assessments of the likely failure of a German invasion attempt. Theo was pleased to see his chief gradually moving towards his own position on where his true loyalty to his country should lie.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor travelled first to Antibes, and then, when France fell, on to Madrid and Lisbon. Concerned that his inclinations were known to be pro-Nazi and that he might become a focus for intrigue, Churchill forbade the duke from returning to England, and ordered him to take up a position as Governor General of the Bahamas, well out of the way.