Churchill by Andrew Roberts

Author:Andrew Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

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Chamberlain was now in the terminal phase of his cancer. ‘I can’t bear to think of Neville being under this continual bombardment in London,’ Churchill had written to Chamberlain’s wife Anne on 20 September. ‘He must give himself a decent chance to recover full efficiency. I have been very much worried about you both during these last ten days.’46 When it was clear that would not happen, Chamberlain resigned on 1 October, turning down Churchill’s offers of a peerage and the Order of the Garter, saying, ‘I prefer to die plain Mr Chamberlain, like my father before me, unadorned by any title.’47 Churchill offered Eden the choice of either the ‘entirely domestic’ job of lord president of the Council within the War Cabinet, chairing committees concerning the home front, or continuing outside it as secretary for war, with responsibility for the Army, because he could not have the ministers for the Navy and RAF inside it too. Eden opted for the latter. Churchill would have liked to move Eden to the Foreign Office, but he could not risk having Halifax leave the Government at the same time as Chamberlain.48 ‘He reiterated that he was now an old man,’ Eden told his diary, ‘that he would not make LG’s mistake of carrying on after the war, that the succession must be mine – John Anderson could clearly not be in the way in this respect.’49 It was the first of fifteen years of such promises to Eden, of which the kindest thing that can said was that he meant them at the time.

In the Cabinet reshuffle three days later, which Churchill admitted to Chamberlain was partly designed to distract attention from the Dakar fiasco, Anderson became lord president of the Council and Herbert Morrison took over as home secretary, while Ernest Bevin and Kingsley Wood entered the War Cabinet in their present posts of minister of labour and chancellor of the Exchequer.50 ‘The people are not ready to take heed of good counsel,’ Lloyd George wrote to Frances Stevenson. ‘They still cherish illusions of “complete victory”. Maybe Hitler is not ready to agree to the only peace which a British Government can accept.’51

At the same time as the Cabinet reshuffle, Churchill shook up the Services. Sir Charles Portal had impressed Churchill and became chief of the Air Staff, at the age of only forty-seven, in place of Sir Cyril Newall. There were changes in the upper echelons of the Admiralty – Churchill had long wanted to promote the fighting admirals Phillips, Harwood and Tovey, though Pound stayed on as first sea lord, and General John Kennedy became director of operations at the War Office. ‘He is extraordinarily obstinate,’ Kennedy was soon writing of the Prime Minister. ‘He is like a child that has set his mind on some forbidden toy. It is no good explaining that it will cut his fingers or burn him. The more you explain, the more fixed he becomes in his idea.’52 Kennedy never really

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