Winston’s War

As he wandered in search of distraction through the darkened corridors, he discovered a chink of light shining from beneath the door of the anteroom next to the Cabinet Room. The elfin grove. Muffled laughter. He was drawn to it like a moth.

The merriment ceased as Horace Wilson and Joseph Ball looked up in concern. ‘Everything in order, Neville?’ Ball enquired. They were used to the tides of exhaustion that had swept across their master in recent weeks, but the face at the door was more lugubrious, the moustache more determinedly drooped, than ever.

‘Things in order? Perhaps you should tell me. You two always seem to know so much more about what’s going on than do I.’

The Prime Minister sank into a chair and held out his hand. It was immediately filled with a glass of white wine. Tired eyes lifted in silent thanks. So often he found there was no need to use words with these elves, they had an uncanny ability to understand his needs – and particularly Wilson, whom he had inherited from the previous administration of Baldwin. At times it seemed to be the finest part of his inheritance. Softly spoken, pale eyes, fastidious by habit, understated but extraordinarily determined. From the start Wilson and the new Prime Minister had been natural colleagues, one the Government’s Chief Industrial Adviser, the other a former Birmingham businessman, both seeing virtue in compromise and believing pragmatism to be a guiding principle. Politics were, after all, simply about business, a matter of making deals.

Ball was different. He was a man of fleshy indulgence, which showed beneath the waistcoats of his broad chalk-stripe suits. His fingers were thick, like sausages, and his face was round, an appearance exaggerated by the manner in which his dark hair was slicked close to his skull. His demeanour was often deliberately intimidating – he would take up his position behind his desk, staring inquisitorially through porthole spectacles like the barrister and spy master he once was, stirring only occasionally to wave away the cigarette smoke in which he was half-obscured. Unlike Wilson he was not in the least fastidious, being entirely open about his prejudices, which he promoted through his role as the mastermind of propaganda at Conservative Central Office, and also through a newspaper he published entitled Truth. Truth, for Ball, consisted of destroying the reputations of all opponents – among whom he numbered most Americans and all Jews – and he was liberal only in the means he employed to achieve his ends. He was extremely wealthy and had access to many sources of funds, using them not only to support his own publications but also to place spies inside the headquarters of the Labour Party and amongst opposition newspapers. He was widely loathed and almost universally feared.

Yet he was even closer to the Prime Minister than was Wilson. Ball and Chamberlain shared a passion for country pursuits and particularly fly-fishing that swept them off in each other’s company to the salmon rivers of Scotland at the slightest opportunity, sometimes with unseemly haste. It was widely rumoured that the dates of many parliamentary recesses were set around the fishing calendar. Somehow there always seemed to be time for a little fishing.

‘So, how is our ungrateful world?’ Chamberlain pressed as he sipped the wine. It surprised him. An excellent hock.

The elves looked at each other with an air of conspiratorial mischief. It was Ball who spoke.

‘This will pain you, Neville, I’m sure. But I fear Winston’s got himself into a spot of bother.’

‘Truly?’ A thick eyebrow arched in anticipation.

‘More than a spot. An entire bloody bog.’

‘Drink?’

‘Money.’

‘Will he never learn?’ A pause. The hock was tasting better by the mouthful. ‘How much?’

‘More than forty thousand.’

‘My God!’

‘Forty-three thousand, seven hundred and forty, to be precise. Due by Christmas.’

It was a fortune. More than four times the Prime Minister’s own generous salary.

‘But how?’

‘Been gambling on the New York stock exchange. Losing. Now the banks are calling in his loans.’

‘We have him,’ Wilson added softly, as though announcing the arrival of a tray of tea.

‘Bracken’s been trying to help, find an angel to save him. But the angels don’t seem keen on saving the soul of a man who wants a war that would ruin them.’

‘So what will he do?’

‘Sell what’s left of his shares. Put Chartwell on the market. Pay off his debts with the proceeds.’

‘Chartwell’s been a nest of vipers for too long,’ Wilson added. ‘Time it was cleared out.’

‘No, no …’ Chamberlain was shaking his head, his brow furrowed in concentration. ‘That would be wrong.’

‘Wrong? What’s wrong?’ Ball muttered, as though grappling with a new philosophical concept.

‘He loathes you, Neville,’ Wilson objected. ‘Leads the opposition on all fronts.’

‘And he’ll do so again, given half a chance,’ Ball emphasized.

‘Precisely,’ Chamberlain agreed, steepling his fingers as though in prayer, urging them on.

‘But these debts will crucify him.’

‘What is to be gained by seeing him crucified now?’

‘For the pleasure of it!’ Ball cried.

‘To clean up Westminster,’ Wilson suggested.

‘But he can do us no harm,’ Chamberlain persisted. ‘It would be like stepping on an ant.’

The two elves fell into silence. They hadn’t caught on, not yet, but they knew the Prime Minister tied a mean fly.

‘Winston doesn’t matter, not now, at least. He has lost, we have won. That’s the truth of the matter. And if at this moment he were to fall over the edge, no one would even hear the splash. And how should we gain any benefit from that? Those who stand against us would only regroup, find a new leader and we would have to start all over again. No, there’s a better way. Not today, perhaps, not this month but sometime soon, there will be another crisis. How much better it would be, when that time comes, that their leader is a man who is on the brink. Vulnerable. Unstable as always. Whom we control and with one small nudge can send spinning into the abyss – if that were to prove necessary.’ There was colour in his face again, a spirit that had revived. The tips of his fingers were beating time, pacing his thoughts.

‘By God,’ Wilson breathed. ‘But how?’

‘Bail him out. Extend just sufficient credit for him to survive, for now. Play him on the line. Until he’s exhausted and we can net him whenever we choose.’

‘But he must not realize …’

‘Of course not. Do we know his bankers?’

‘Most certainly.’

‘Are they … friends?’

Ball snorted, struggling with the concept that bankers might be blessed with feelings more complex than those of black widow spiders. ‘Much better than friends. They’re the party’s bankers.’

‘Then they will co-operate. Tell them we want to help a colleague – but quietly, anonymously, to save embarrassment. Underwrite his loan. Let Winston survive – for the moment.’

‘Goes against the bloody grain. When they’re hooked, pull ’em in, Neville, that’s what I say. Don’t let them slip the line.’

‘You and I are a little too skilful for that, I hope, Joe.’

‘You let that forty-pounder go last August.’

‘You know very well he tangled the line in the roots of a tree. Winston is considerably less agile and will have much less stamina for the fight. Don’t you agree, Horace?’

Wilson had been quiet. He was no angler. He was a negotiator, looking for advantage. ‘If we’ve won and there’s no real opposition, as you say, then strike now. Not just for Winston but the whole damned lot. You have the King beside you and the country behind you. Call an election!’

‘An election? But it’s not due for another two years.’

‘There may never be a better time.’

‘Joe?’

‘It would call Winston’s bluff. Maybe get him thrown out in Epping, if he continues to be disloyal. Think of that. What a sign that’d be to the rest of the buggers! And the opinion polls are putting you a mile ahead, Neville.’

‘Are they? Are they …?’ But Chamberlain was uneasy.

‘A referendum on the peace,’ Ball encouraged.

‘But profiting from Munich?’ He looked tired once more, his sentences growing clipped.

‘Why not make a little profit?’

‘I signed the agreement at Munich. Doesn’t mean to say I have to like it.’

‘Peace with honour, Neville.’

‘Silly phrase. Borrowed it from Disraeli – what he said when he came back from the Congress of Berlin. I shouldn’t have. Moment of weakness. Did what I had to do, but how can I take pride in it? I gave my word. To the Czechs. Then I broke it. Sacrificed them to save the world. Not much of a manifesto, that.’

His eyes were cast down in confession, and for a moment silence hung heavily in the room until Wilson spoke up. ‘We did what we had to do, Neville. And the world rejoices.’

Slowly the head came up. ‘A fine thought to take me to my bed.’ Chamberlain rose.

‘But does that mean forgive and forget, Neville? Let the bastards off?’ Ball called out, evidently exasperated, as Chamberlain made to leave the room.

‘I think that’s for their constituencies to decide. And the press.’ He was standing at the door, leaning on the jamb. The exhaustion had returned and he could fight it no longer. His face was the colour of old linen yet his deep-set eyes still burned with a remarkable defiance and were staring directly at Ball. ‘I suspect some of them are going to be given a pretty rough ride, don’t you, Joe?’

‘Damn right,’ Ball said.

The eyes flickered and went out. ‘And so to bed.’ It was then Chamberlain noticed that he still had his glass in his hand. He drained it before setting it aside. ‘Incidentally, an excellent hock. Far better than our usual fare.’

‘It’s a Hochheimer Königin Victoriaberg, from a vineyard once owned by Prince von Metternich. I thought it would be appropriate for you. Full of subtlety, nobility, audacity …’

‘And where did you get this liquid jewel?’

‘From Ribbentrop. He sent several cases back with us from Munich as a goodwill gift.’

‘Always the wine salesman … eh?’

Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, had until recently been his country’s Ambassador to London. He had been a natural choice for the post since he was a Nazi of long standing who knew the British capital well, having run a wine business there for many years and established a reputation as an excellent host. He had been – and in many eyes still was – the acceptable face of Hitlerism, and much of London society had beaten a path to the dining table of his embassy in Carlton House Terrace.

‘I was his landlord for a time, you know,’ Chamberlain muttered. ‘He rented my family house in Eaton Place. After I moved in here. Like clockwork with the rent. Always told me – raise glasses, not guns. Good man, good man …’ The rest was lost as he stumbled up the dark stairs of Downing Street.

FIVE

Guy Fawkes Night – 5 November 1938.

It was one of those nights that would change everything – although, of course, no one knew it at the time. And as was so often the case Max Aitken, the first Baron Beaverbrook, was to be its ringmaster.

They had gathered together at the summons of the mighty press baron to celebrate the torture and execution more than three centuries earlier of that quintessentially British traitor, Guy Fawkes, who had attempted to destroy the entire Houses of Parliament, King included, by stuffing a cellar full of gunpowder. He had been apprehended at the critical moment with candle in hand, and executed by having his entrails dragged from his still-living body, burnt in front of his face, then having his beating heart plucked out. Sadistic, mediaeval Europe – before the twentieth century turned torture into a modern science of factories and furnaces.

The weather had relented after weeks of skies filled with rain and Roman auguries. A full moon hung overhead, an ideal evening for the lighting of the traditional bonfire which had been constructed in the grounds of Beaverbrook’s country home at Cherkley. The garden and walkways had been turned into a fairy grotto by countless candles concealed in old tin cans, while Boy Scouts from the local troop were on hand to cook sausages and chicken legs over charcoal barbecues and to dispense mulled wine loaded with cinnamon and pepper. They had also erected tents and canvas awnings to provide shelter if the sky changed its mind and turned against them. Beaverbrook, ever the showman, had even instructed that chocolate eggs and sweets should be hidden around the grounds for the children. No one was to be left out of the fun. So to Checkley they had come, the good and the great, the famous and those still seeking fortune, more than two hundred of them wrapped in their furs and astrakhans and silk scarves and hand-warmers, giving thanks for the column inches they hoped they would receive from the Express and the Standard and putting aside how many of those past inches had been cruel and indecently unkind. Yet press barons have no monopoly on unkindness.

‘You are …’ – the Minister paused for thought, but already it was past thought, too late for anything other than gut emotion – ‘being ridiculous, woman. Hysterical. A disgrace to your sex.’

‘Only a man could be so stupid.’

‘Ask anyone. Neville is the greatest Englishman who ever lived.’

‘He makes me ashamed to be British.’

‘You dare talk of shame!’

‘Meaning?’

‘God’s sake, aren’t you tired of climbing into Winston’s bed?’

‘He might yet save us all.’

‘What? The man who’s killed off more careers than Caligula. Who’s filled the graveyards of Gallipoli.’

‘He’s a prophet –’

‘Nigger in a woodpile with a box of matches.’

‘… pointing to our mortal peril.’

‘All the more damned reason for doing a deal with Hitler, then.’

‘You’d deal with the Devil.’

‘I support my Prime Minister. Loyalty to my own. Something you wouldn’t recognize.’

‘I recognize naked cowardice.’

‘I resent that, madam. I oppose your silly war because it will destroy civilization.’

‘War against Hitler may be the only way to save civilization!’

‘Madness. Pure madness. Are you Jewish, or what?’

And all that from colleagues who sat on the same Conservative benches.

It had started with laughter and gaiety and one of Beaverbrook’s little jokes. (He had a notorious sense of humour – some argued that it had been developed to compensate for his notoriously absent sense of fidelity.) He had given specific instructions about the making of the guy that was to be burnt on the fire and it had arrived with some pomp, seated on an old wooden chair decorated with flowers from the hothouse and pushed in a wheelbarrow by a groundsman. The guy was large and overstuffed, as all good guys should be, bits of straw and paper sticking out from an old woollen three-piece suit that had been plundered from the back of a wardrobe for the occasion. Particular attention had been given to the face, which was round, bald, with a scowling expression and an open slit for a mouth. The arms were spread, as though making a speech. The guests who were crowding about Beaverbrook in the darkness applauded its entrance and drew closer to inspect.

‘So, whaddya think of the villain of the piece, Sam?’ The question was delivered in Beaverbrook’s characteristic style, with a broad Canadian accent and out of the corner of his mouth.

Sam Hoare, the Home Secretary and one of the four most powerful men in Government, studied it carefully, his wife by his side.

‘Guy Fawkes tried to blow up every politician in the land. No wonder they remember him, Max.’

Laughter rippled through the guests. They included diplomats and entertainers as well as politicians and press, all gathered around a charcoal brazier for comfort while they waited for the ceremonial lighting of the large bonfire.

‘Fawkes was a foreigner, of course. Spanish,’ someone added from the darkness.

‘Hey, ain’t nothing wrong with foreigners,’ Beaverbrook insisted in a theatrical hokey twang.

‘Just so long as we can ignore most of them, eh, Max,’ Hoare added.

‘But we can’t ignore them, Sam, that’s the whole point.’

The Home Secretary turned, a shade wearily. Even in the darkness he’d recognized the unmistakable trill of Katharine, the Duchess of Atholl and Member of Parliament for the seat of Kinross and West Perthshire. What was the point? He didn’t want any points, not now, he was trying to enjoy himself. For pity’s sake, they all had points, all passionately held and honed to a razor’s edge, but surely this wasn’t the time or the place. Not here. So the Duchess was a long-standing opponent of the Prime Minister and appeasement, they all knew that, an opponent so venomous she had earned herself the nickname of ‘Red Kitty’. She paraded her conscience everywhere, rehearsed her arguments a thousand times before breakfast and again over lunch until her intransigence had pushed her to the furthest limits of the party and, in truth, almost beyond. But Sam Hoare was a party man, loyalty first, and wasn’t going to allow her to forget it.

‘Kitty,’ he hailed his colleague, ‘didn’t see you there in the darkness. About time you came back into the light and enjoyed yourself with the rest of us, isn’t it?’

Kitty Atholl bristled. ‘Enjoyment? Is that what it’s supposed to be about, Sam? Is that why we gave Czechoslovakia away? For fun?’

‘Let’s not trespass on Max’s hospitality …’

‘Don’t mind me, Sam,’ the Beaver interjected. ‘Always encourage a healthy disagreement. Except amongst my employees, of course.’

And so it had begun. A discussion that became a debate that transformed into a character-ripping confrontation in the middle of a moonlit field and in a manner that had been matched across the land for weeks, and yet still showed no signs of exhausting itself. As they faced up to each other a squad of Boy Scouts ran around with jugs of mulled wine to top up the fuel tanks.

‘Hey, how about a toast to the guy?’

‘And death to Ribbentrop. May he die in pain.’

‘You callous witch.’

‘I’m not the one with my head buried in my red box desperately trying to ignore everything that’s happening in Europe.’

‘There you go again, fussing about Hitler. Fellow’s only digging over his own back yard.’

‘Digging graves.’

‘He’s cleaning up Germany, that’s all. He may be a dictator, but he’s also a bit of a Puritan. Like Cromwell.’

‘Cromwell didn’t slaughter Jews!’

‘For God’s sake, listening to you you’d think that pogroms started yesterday. It’s the history of Europe, woman, centuries old.’

‘Where’s your sense of justice, Sam?’

‘Kitty, we all have our consciences. But only you dine out on it.’

‘Put yours away in the closet, have you? All wrapped up in tissue paper?’

‘Any fool can go to war. And right now, only a fool would go to war.’

‘Conquest. Bloodshed. That’s what you’ll get with Hitler.’

‘Bugger it, Kitty, it’s how we won the Empire.’

‘And cowardice is how it’ll be thrown away!’

Gradually it had just become the two of them. Others fell by the wayside until it was just Sam Hoare and Red Kitty, and he had accused her of being weak-minded and a xenophobe and every other calumny that came to hand. It had gone too far. Neither could find the words to stop it and their host refused to intervene – hell, he was enjoying the game, every minute of it, one arm waving a huge cigar, the other arm linked through that of Joe Kennedy, another spectator who had stepped out of the fight several insults earlier. Beside them, out of the darkness, appeared the rotund form of Joseph Ball. Hoare saw him, and even though he was Home Secretary, feared him a little. It gave him his cue.

‘Loyalty. That’s what this is really all about,’ Hoare offered, trying to find a way out of the confrontation with a final jibe. ‘You go sleep with your strange friends but I’m a party man, Kitty. Always been a party man. And I’ll die a party man.’

Her lip twisted in mockery. ‘Dying for your principles, that I can understand, Sam. But to die for your party?’

She reached sharply towards him. He swayed back in apprehension, alarm flooding his eyes, afraid she was intent on slapping his face, but she did nothing more than grab the umbrella that was dangling over his arm. With her trophy she walked over to the stuffed guy, stared at it as though it might spring to life, then thrust the umbrella beneath its armpit and with a final glance of dark-eyed derision swept away into the night. Hoare was left standing on his own, suddenly isolated, feeling like an abandoned bicycle.

A gust of English embarrassment blew around the ankles of the onlookers until Beaverbrook was once again centre-stage, demanding their attention, strutting theatrically over to the guy as though on a tour of inspection. He was ridiculously small with a face that would not have been distinguished even on a gnome, but his money more than made up for it. A Napoleon in newsprint and an astrakhan collar. ‘So – what do we have here?’ he demanded. ‘Munich Man, eh? Not quite what I had in mind.’ He retrieved the umbrella and used it to prod the guy. ‘Whaddya think?’ he addressed the gathering. ‘Who is he? Had him made specially, so don’t disappoint me.’

‘A clue, Maxie darling, give us a clue,’ a giggling voice pleaded.

‘OK. So he’s a little like Guy Fawkes, maybe. Someone who tries to blow up everything in sight. Over-stuffed. Over-blown. Come on, any ideas?’

A brief silence from the crowd and then: ‘Mussolini. It’s got to be Mussolini!’

‘Signor Mussolini to you,’ Beaverbrook growled. ‘Hell, he hears that and he’ll confiscate my villa in Tuscany. No, not Pasta Man. Another guess.’

A woman’s voice: ‘With a stomach like that it’s got to be Hermann Goering.’

‘No, no, no. And if you’re listening up there, Hoyman’ – Beaverbrook swapped his Canadian brogue for a thick Brooklyn accent and raised his eyes to the dark skies – ‘we loves ya!’

Amidst the bubbling of laughter other names were thrown in – Hore-Belisha, Herbert Hoover, Generalissimo Franco, even Wallis Simpson (‘It’s got to be her with the mouth open like that …’) – but Beaverbrook continued stubbornly shaking his head until: ‘Give us another clue, Maxie. Don’t be such a tease.’

The diminutive press baron waved his hands for silence, the gleam of mischief in his eye. ‘One more clue, then,’ he conceded. Taking the large cigar from his own mouth, he inserted it into the slit in the face of the guy, where it remained gently smouldering. ‘I give you …’

‘Cigar Man. It’s Cigar Man! Oh, Maxie darling, you’re so wicked!’

They cheered Beaverbrook from all sides. Only one or two of those present drifted off into the night, declining to be carried along on the tide.

The smell of sausage and singeing onion that wafted on the breezes of that night had proved irresistible, and the canvas awning erected by the Boy Scouts as a hospitality area was crowded. Brendan Bracken had lingered on the edge for some time, fighting the urge to join their number. He was hungry but it was a question of image and image to Bracken was most of what he had. A workman could eat sausages in public, so could an earl or an actress, but an Irish impostor had to be careful of such glancing blows to his reputation. The English insisted that things be in their rightful place, and the place for a would-be statesman who wanted to be taken so terribly seriously was not on his own in a sausage queue. He imagined them all talking about him – but he always imagined people talking about him, dreamt of it, insisted on it, for to be ignored would be the biggest humiliation of all. But not about sausages. So he fought his hunger, feeling weaker with each passing minute, twisted inside by childhood memories of the kitchens of Tipperary until, despite his reservations, he could resist his cravings no longer. He grabbed a sausage and bun with all the fillings and wandered a little way from the other guests to enjoy in solitude the sensation of simply stuffing himself. That, he knew, was where the danger lay. These bangers-in-a-bun were impossible to eat delicately, you had to wolf them down before they turned on you and attacked, dripping grease and ghastliness everywhere. Bracken was notoriously fastidious, a desperate hypochondriac who took meticulous care over his appearance, washing his hands many times a day. This public encounter with a sausage was definitely a one-off, so he prepared himself. He found a spot where he could turn his back on the crowd, place his feet carefully in the sticky grass for security, lean gently forward and –