The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History by Boris Johnson

Author:Boris Johnson [Johnson, Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Abdication Crisis.

In the late autumn of 1936 it became widely known that the King, Edward VIII, was having an affair with an American divorcee by the name of Wallis Simpson. Peculiar as it may seem to us today, this was thought to be a quite indefensible way to behave. Churchy, pipe-puffing Stanley Baldwin was quietly horrified. He decided that the King could indeed marry a divorcee—but that he would have to abdicate.

The young King’s plight was desperate. He could feel the ice floes shifting under him. He knew that his time on the throne could be running out. He needed someone to guide him, someone with experience, someone with weight in public affairs. He went—where else—to Churchill. The two men knew each other already: the King had been to stay at Blenheim; Churchill had got on well with him, and had even written a couple of speeches for him.

He had dinner with the King at Windsor, and then wrote a hilarious (and probably drunken) letter explaining how to survive, including the sensible observation that now was not the time to leave the country. Churchill became the unofficial leader of the ‘King’s Party’, and on 8 December, after a jolly good lunch at some Anglo-French binge, he decided to give the House of Commons a piece of his mind.

The heart of the matter, in his view, was that this was a matter of the heart, and the King was the King; and that if ministers had a problem with Mrs Simpson, then they, not the monarch, should step down. Alas, he completely misread the mood of the Commons. He was howled down by MPs, most of whom had spent the last few days listening to the peevish and puritanical mutterings of their constituents.

The yammering grew so loud that eventually he had to sit down, without finishing what he was going to say. Harold Nicolson said: ‘Winston collapsed utterly in the House yesterday . . . He has undone in five minutes the patient reconstruction works of two years.’ Many people—even friends of his—concluded that this time he really was finished. Let’s give the Abdication crisis a FIASCO FACTOR of 6 and a CHURCHILL FACTOR of 10, even if modern taste would award the argument to Churchill, of course.

Today’s electorate wouldn’t give a hoot if their monarch decided to marry a divorcee (come to think of it, the heir to the throne and his wife have both been married before). But that is emphatically not how it was seen at the time. Yet again, Churchill was written off: a progressive and compassionate instinct was seen as somehow ultra-monarchist and toadying.

He was by now sixty-one, and he looked obsolete, washed up, a great Edwardian sea creature flapping helplessly on the shingle and spouting empty nothings from his blowhole. Hardly anyone would have believed, at that point, that within three and a half years he would be Prime Minister.

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LET US REVIEW this list of debacles—the richest and most jaw-dropping to be borne on the battle honours of any politician.

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