Winston Churchill by John Keegan

Author:John Keegan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

By 1923 Churchill was out of office, indeed out of Parliament. Since the general election of 1918 Lloyd George had led a coalition in which Conservatives greatly outnumbered members of his own Liberal Party, to which Churchill still belonged. In October 1922 the Conservatives rebelled against Liberal leadership and ousted Lloyd George as prime minister. In the subsequent general election, Churchill lost his Dundee seat, and he lost again in November 1923, when Stanley Baldwin, the new Conservative prime minister, called a second election. Baldwin had been defeated in the Commons by a combination of the surviving Liberals and the Labour Party, now a real political force. Labour was not yet attractive enough to the electorate to secure a national mandate, but it emerged from the election with enough seats to form, with Liberal support, a government. Churchill was alarmed by Labour’s rise. Despite his commitment in youth to Liberal welfarism, he feared Labour’s tenderness toward the Soviet Union and its increasingly socialist economic policy. He also doubted the capacity of the Liberal Party to restore itself as an effective party of opposition. During 1924 he began to adjust his political position, first offering to bring the support of the anti-Labour Liberals to the Conservatives in parliament, then speaking directly to Conservative constituency associations, as if he were offering himself as a candidate. In April he told the Liverpool Conservatives that their party alone could defeat socialism. In September, though still technically a Liberal, he accepted nomination for the safe Conservative seat of Epping, a London suburb. In October the Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was forced to call yet another general election. In his manifesto to the Epping voters, Churchill declared, “I give my whole support to the Conservative Party.” He was returned with a majority of nine thousand and was to hold the seat (later renamed Woodford) for the rest of his parliamentary life.

Churchill was later to make a joke of his erratic party allegiance; he had now crossed the floor twice. He returned to the Conservative Party with no expectation of prompt preferment to office. “I think it very likely that I shall not be invited to join the government,” he wrote at the time, “as owing to the size of the majority it will probably be composed only of impeccable Conservatives.” Impeccable he certainly was not; sincere he may yet be thought. Despite the then strong, and long-lingering, suspicion that he had left the Conservatives because the electoral mood doomed them to years out of office and had rejoined them again because by then it was the Liberals who looked the spent force, there was consistency in his conduct. Churchill, unlike most public men of the contemporary upper class, had strong political beliefs. Though not an intellectual, he was philosophically a libertarian who also held that the state had a responsibility to provide for the welfare of its poorer citizens. It was the welfare issue, characterized by him as “Tory democracy,” that had impelled him to change sides in 1904.

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.