Few things could have been more insulting to Eden than the suggestion that he still had anything to prove, and few could have been more exasperating than the implication, heard so many times before, that he need wait only a bit longer before the prize was his. Again, the details of the handover were hazy. Again, Churchill set no firm date for his departure.
There was resentment on Churchill’s side as well. An old man does not like to feel that he is being watched by ‘hungry eyes’. When at some point in the discussion Eden managed to suggest that Churchill give up the leadership altogether, Churchill refused. And Eden, though he did not reject Churchill’s offer in so many words, did not accept it either. The encounter on which Eden had pinned his hopes ended in bitter stalemate.
Having informed the press that he had no idea when he would next visit the House of Commons, Churchill disregarded his state of exhaustion and made a strategic surprise appearance on the Opposition front bench the next day. Entering to his usual ovation, he let it be known that he intended to make his first speech in April during the budget debate. Eden, whose deputy leadership was widely deemed to have been a success, shrank to a subordinate position beside Churchill.
Moran arranged for his patient to be examined by the neurologist Sir Russell Brain, who concluded that the dizzy spells were nothing to worry about, that Churchill had merely overstrained himself in America, and that the episodes would soon pass. Thus reassured, Churchill seemed to forget his worst health worries and began to recover. He did not, however, forget Eden’s bid to unseat him. When, over the vehement objections of his wife, Churchill took on the party leadership in 1940 in addition to his duties as wartime prime minister, it had been in part to keep the job from going to a younger rival who might later pose a threat to his premiership. In a similar vein, when he anointed Eden during the war he had been blocking the emergence of a more potent rival, someone less reluctant to seize the crown. In that sense, Eden’s designation as heir apparent had been far from a sign of approbation.
Eden was still stoutly insisting to supporters that he would never accept Churchill’s offer of the Opposition leadership in the House without the party leadership overall when Churchill tripped him up by abruptly withdrawing it. Suddenly it was no longer in Eden’s power to accept or refuse. Churchill indicated that as he was already feeling better, a formal arrangement was no longer necessary. Eden would still be called on ‘in an ever-increasing measure’ to fill in for him in the House, but without any official status or salary. Churchill now expected Eden to do it all for nothing. The object of this division of powers was no longer to conserve an ailing man’s strength; it was to spare Churchill what he saw as the drudgery of routine party business. In essence, Churchill wanted to do the work he chose, when he chose to do it. He wanted to speak and act when the spirit moved him – and to dump the rest of the job on Eden.
This time there was no display of temper on Churchill’s side. On the contrary, in his note to lay out the new terms, he addressed Eden with ironic courtesy, assuring him, even as he joyously twisted the screws, that he looked forward to working together ‘in all the old confidence and intimacy which has marked our march through the years of storm’.
Still, Churchill made it clear that this was an offer Eden could not refuse – if, that is, he hoped to retain his claim to the succession. As if Churchill were innocent of Eden’s nightmare of being overtaken by other claimants, he went on enthusiastically to propose Macmillan (‘certainly one of our brightest rising lights’) as a candidate to become the next party chairman. There was probably only one other name Churchill might have mentioned that would have been as likely to cause Eden to gag. Reminded that he was dispensable, Eden backed away from his demands. Eden timidly assured Churchill that he could count on him ‘to play my part’.
Cranborne was horrified. He had spent the past few weeks in Portugal for his always precarious health, but he had been avidly monitoring all the moves and counter-moves from afar. He worried that under Churchill’s leadership the postwar Conservative Party was fast becoming a kind of dictatorship. Cranborne fully shared Churchill’s anxiety about the Soviet threat in Europe. Nevertheless, he was appalled that Churchill had delivered the Fulton speech without bothering to consult his Conservative colleagues beforehand. In the process, Churchill had committed what Cranborne saw as a political blunder which could have been avoided had Churchill taken the trouble to listen to other views. To date, Cranborne had been pleased to see the Labour Foreign Secretary consistently stand firm against the Soviets. On this matter at least, the Conservatives had been in the position of being able to sit back and support Bevin when necessary. Bevin had had to endure a good deal of sniping from the left wing of his own party, which remained infatuated with Moscow, but the broad unity of the country had been maintained. To Cranborne’s eye, Churchill had unwisely destroyed that ‘happy unity’: thanks to Churchill, opposition to the Soviet Union had become the policy of the party of the right, and not of Bevin, whose position with his own supporters had thereby been made vastly more difficult.
Apart from all this, Cranborne believed there was a larger issue at stake. In important respects, Churchill was a lone wolf who disdained the pack. Cranborne regarded the Fulton speech as typical of Churchill’s lifelong tendency to act without concern for his colleagues’ opinions or his party’s best interests. As far as Cranborne was concerned, this was the sort of high-handed, self-serving behaviour he and Churchill’s legion of other critics had long fervently complained of. Churchill for his part shrugged off such criticism. In the present instance, he saw it as a matter of perspective: why concern himself with relative trifles like party interests or colleagues’ wounded feelings when he was trying to head off another world war?
Thus the battle lines were drawn. Cranborne viewed Churchill as ‘imperious Caesar’ who simply had to be stopped. If Eden lacked the will to force the issue of Churchill’s retirement, it seemed to Cranborne that others were going to have to do it for him. Within days of his return to London, Cranborne was discreetly proposing that party leaders ‘take their courage in both hands’ and make a joint approach to Churchill. He acknowledged that Churchill would probably never forgive them and that they might very naturally hesitate to participate. But, Cranborne stressed, he saw no alternative. When Eden discouraged him, Cranborne wrote in disgust to his father, Lord Salisbury, that he had been ready to lead a cabal against Churchill but that there was no reason to go forward as long as Eden refused to act.
Some of Churchill’s long-time friends were also quietly advising him to retire, but their motives were very different from those of the Edenites. There was feeling among some of Churchill’s contemporaries, such as the seventy-six-year-old South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts and the seventy-one-year-old Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, that by allowing himself to be caught up in party strife he was tarnishing his reputation. An incident in the House of Commons on 24 May was a case in point. Churchill had caused a furore when, during a particularly fierce dispute, he stuck out his tongue at Bevin.
In contrast to those who wished to give Churchill the hook for personal or party ends, Smuts and King, who were in London for a meeting of Dominion leaders, were concerned solely with what was best for him. Churchill was especially fond of the South African leader, of whom he once said, ‘Smuts and I are like two old love-birds moulting together on a perch but still able to peck.’ On the present occasion, Smuts advised Churchill to retire immediately.
In a similar vein, Mackenzie King, who was then beginning his twentieth year in office, recommended that Churchill remove himself from the hurly-burly of domestic politics in favour of taking a larger view in keeping with his titanic stature. Both he and Churchill were now the very age Lord Fisher, the former First Sea Lord, had been in 1911, when, Churchill recalled in The World Crisis, ‘I was apprehensive of his age. I could not feel complete confidence in the poise of the mind at 71.’ As Churchill well knew, King had begun to worry about his own fading powers. As a consequence of the uproar over Churchill having stuck out his tongue at Bevin, claims had been heard from the Labour benches that Churchill had entered his ‘second childhood’. Might the time have come to bow out for dignity’s sake? Churchill was firm that it had not.
He made his intentions clear at a dinner party on 7 June in honour of Mackenzie King’s long service, hosted by Clement