The Roar of the Lion by Toye Richard

Author:Toye, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2013-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

7

‘Throwing a Temperament Like a Bloody Film Star’

In terms of his speech-making, 1943 had not posed very severe challenges for Churchill. With the war—at last—going pretty successfully for a sustained period, he could finally count on having security of tenure in Downing Street at least until the end of hostilities. But at the end of the year, the scale of his future problems came home to him. His hoped-for meeting with Stalin and Roosevelt convened at the end of November, but over the next few days the President cosied up to the Russians at the expense of the British. Britain could not command equal political weight with the two emergent superpowers, and Churchill found the experience humiliating. ‘I realised at Teheran for the first time what a small nation we are,’ he said later. ‘There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched […] and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little British donkey, who was the only one of the three who knew the right way home.’1 During 1944–5, Churchill faced the necessity of making difficult geopolitical compromises, which in turn required him to rationalize them in public. At the same time as he made unpalatable concessions to Soviet and American power he showed sympathy for authoritarian regimes elsewhere, leading to awkward questions about his judgement. In combination with a new challenge to civilian morale at home, in the form of German V-weapon attacks, these factors presented him with some tough rhetorical dilemmas even as the Allies’ final military triumph approached.

En route back to Britain from Tehran, Churchill again contracted pneumonia; for a time his life hung in the balance. Following his convalescence at Marrakesh, he returned home in mid-January 1944. When he arrived he ‘went straight to the House, where he made a “dramatic” entry’ and answered questions, although he was still feeling weak.2 Equally dramatic was his intervention in a by-election at Brighton, normally a safe Tory seat. (Skipton, a Conservative seat, had fallen to the radical Common Wealth party a few weeks earlier.) An Independent candidate was running, claiming to be standing ‘in full support of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet’. Churchill issued a letter denouncing this as ‘an attempted swindle’.3 The Conservatives held the seat only narrowly, suggesting that his tactic backfired. There was considerable resentment at the Prime Minister’s attempt at ‘dictation’ to the voters.4 ‘Very entertaining, the present temper shown to Churchill’s dictatorship’, wrote Margaret Kornitzer, a journalist, in her diary. ‘He of course is an autocratic old devil, ruling a turbulent people—no doubt he appreciates the historical continuity of the whole position as much as anyone does. But he continues to bring his best broadsides to bear on local issues—it is rather like trying to crush a nit with a steam-hammer.’5 Housewife Edith Dawson wrote: ‘He’s not the favourite he thinks he is. […] He’s a born dictator if he can get away with it’.6 The charge that ‘Winston is a dictator; he cannot be overruled’ had been around for years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.