Churchill's Folly by Christopher Catherwood

Author:Christopher Catherwood [Catherwood, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465060979
Publisher: Basic Books

CHAPTER SIX

WINSTON’S BRIDGE

One would think that Churchill would have returned home from his Middle Eastern trip delighted that he had achieved so much. Sadly, this was far from the case. According to Austen Chamberlain, the new Conservative Leader, Churchill was “cross like a bear with a sore head.” Even Lloyd George’s mistress-cum-secretary, Frances Stevenson, observed how angry Churchill was, so certainly it would have been obvious to the Prime Minister himself. Churchill was indeed angry, because he had not been made Chancellor of the Exchequer; worse, the comparative nonentity appointed to that post, Sir Robert Horne, was quite openly admitting his own inadequacies for the task.

Churchill even contemplated resignation, and, as Stevenson noted, his relationship with Lloyd George, hitherto so strong, had sunk to a new low. Since Churchill owed his political comeback entirely to the Prime Minister’s generosity after Gallipoli, this was not good news for the newly returned Colonial Secretary.

His main task on getting back to London was to prepare his defense of his Cairo policy, first to his colleagues and then to Parliament, focusing not so much on the Mesopotamian part of his decision as on Palestine and the creation of a safe Middle East air route.

His disillusionment can be seen most vividly in a very indiscreet interview he held with the editor of the Daily Mail, Thomas Marlowe, who instantly leaked all of it to the paper’s mercurial proprietor, the press baron Lord Northcliffe. Churchill revealed that he was “fed up” with Lloyd George. When it came to Mesopotamia, he told Marlowe that he was preparing to speak in the House of Commons on the costs of maintaining British personnel there. Money, and saving it, Marlow deduced, was at the heart of Churchill’s policy:

He is [Marlowe told Northcliffe] going to take a very detached attitude on this subject. The estimates for this year will be thirty million pounds sterling . . . he hopes that next year’s expenditure in Mesopotamia will be not more than ten millions and that this figure will not be exceeded for the next two or three years.

The following part of the interview is extraordinary, since it flatly contradicts the facts, but it does very much reflect Churchill’s brooding and angry state of mind:

Churchill is not responsible for Mesopotamia and Palestine either. So far as he is concerned they are inheritances. He did not initiate any of the liabilities there; the pledges were given and he is obliged to carry them out at the least possible cost. Mesopotamia and Palestine are twin babies in his care but he is not the father. He is reducing costs as drastically as possible. . . .

Churchill in Cairo and in his many rows with the War Office had done everything possible to start with a clean slate and make the best possible job of Britain’s Middle East position. As Colonial Secretary, he had actively fought to become responsible for the whole Middle East area; now he was pretending to the press that it was nothing to do with him.

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