He dropped his bombshell to Eden when the latter returned from a three-week trip abroad. Mindful of the work that faced him in preparing his memoirs, Churchill suggested that he might be willing to renew the offer of officially dividing the Tory leadership and of transferring his salary to Eden. This new offer would differ from the previous one in a crucial respect. In March, Churchill had assured Eden that he meant to keep the leadership for a limited time. Three months later, he told him what he had already told Mackenzie King and others about his determination to recapture the premiership.
It took Eden a while to absorb the astonishing news. Churchill, after all, had gone from pledging to retire at the end of the war, to promising to stay on as party leader for no more than two years, to this. After the Conservative rout, Eden’s sole consolation had been that when next the tide of Toryism came in, Churchill could not possibly still be in position. Now, Churchill was confidently suggesting it was possible.
In the tortured weeks that followed, Eden by turns doubted that Churchill could be right about his prospects, wondered whether in light of Churchill’s comments he had better give up politics in favour of a career in finance, told himself and others that Churchill was likely to take a more realistic view by the end of the summer, and strongly considered trying to find a way to accept Churchill’s offer – if, that is, he ever actually made it.
Cranborne suggested to Eden that, under the circumstances, it might be best at this point simply to stand down as second-in-command and take his own independent line in Parliament. He was urging Eden, in effect, to abandon the security of his role as designated heir and to fight for the crown alongside any other contenders. The proposal reflected the considerable freedom of action Cranborne’s position as heir to the Marquess of Salisbury conferred. He cared a good deal less about office and security than Eden, but then he had the luxury to be inflexible and to put practical considerations aside. In 1938, when Eden and Cranborne resigned as Foreign Secretary and Under Secretary respectively, some observers who knew both men believed that Eden had bailed out only because he had been pushed (or was it shamed?) by Cranborne. Eden’s resignation speech in the House of Commons had been, to some tastes, disappointingly soft and vague in contrast to his friend’s forthright remarks. Cranborne had bluntly accused the Prime Minister of surrendering to Italian blackmail. (Chamberlain said of Cranborne: ‘Beware of rampant idealists. All Cecils are that.’) Hoping to protect his claim to succeed Chamberlain, Eden had been careful not to burn his boats irretrievably with the party. In any case, Eden would long be distressed by the perception that he had been – indeed, still was – in thrall to Cranborne’s more powerful personality.
What made this all so painful was that there was much truth to the picture. To Eden’s simmering frustration, with Cranborne, as with Churchill, he was and perhaps always would be number two. On the kingmaker’s side there was friendship and loyalty, to be sure, but there was also a tendency that did not go unnoticed in their inbred aristocratic world to treat Eden ‘rather as if he were the head butler at Hatfield House’ (the Cecil family seat).
Eden, meanwhile, continued to vacillate, and Churchill went off to Switzerland without having made another concrete offer to share power. Churchill drew more world headlines when he spoke at the University of Zurich on 19 September. His remarks were the second instalment of his prescription for confronting the Soviet danger. Having already called for an Anglo-American partnership to counter the massive Soviet presence in the occupied territories of Europe, he now proposed an end to retribution against vanquished Germany. He declared that Germany must be rebuilt and he argued that France must lead the effort. Churchill urged listeners to turn their backs on the horrors of the recent past and to look to the future – in other words, to welcome the Germans into the community of nations. So soon after the war, his recommendations were strong medicine, but, as he admitted privately, he saw a rebuilt Germany as a necessary defence against the Soviet Union. It was Churchill’s hope that the creation of a strong Europe led by a revitalized France and Germany would do much to avert a war with the Soviet Union, and to produce a lasting settlement at the conference table.
In reaction to Churchill’s call for the rebuilding of Germany and the formation of a ‘United States of Europe’, Moscow radio accused him of seeking to unite the continent in preparation for war. When Churchill went on to ask publicly why the Soviets were maintaining so many troops on a war footing in the occupied territories of Europe, Stalin called him the worst threat to peace in Europe.
Churchill was already under heavy fire from Moscow when he turned up in Paris to discuss the situation in Europe with US Secretary of State Byrnes, who was there for the peace conference. Frustrated by his inability to extract the information from his own Government, Churchill was eager to be brought up to date on current thinking in Washington. He also wanted to maintain his personal contacts with the Americans. Bevin, for his part, could not see why. Was Churchill’s party not out of power? What business did he have in Paris? To the acute irritation both of the Labour Government and of certain of his Conservative colleagues, Churchill seemed to be running some sort of high-flying, out-of-control, one-man foreign policy shop. Official negotiations with Molotov continued to drag, and the British Foreign Secretary was furious at the prospect of Churchill, who had not been invited to participate, doing or saying anything in the course of his short stay to complicate matters.
In anticipation of Churchill’s arrival in Paris, there had been much agitated discussion within the British delegation about how best to cope. Bevin worried that allowing Churchill to stay at the embassy would seem to confer Government approval on his private talks with Byrnes and other officials, when in fact Britain had no control over anything he said. Duff Cooper, the British Ambassador, successfully argued for accommodating him there, the better to manage him. Afterwards, the Ambassador wrote of his fellow Conservative’s whirlwind visit with a mixture of amusement and annoyance (clearly more of the former than the latter), ‘Having possibly endangered international relations and having certainly caused immense inconvenience to a large number of people, he seemed thoroughly to enjoy himself, was with difficulty induced to go to bed soon after midnight and left at 10 a.m. the next morning in high spirits.’
A year after Churchill returned from his Italian holiday, he had reason to be high-spirited. Though out of office, he had handily regained influence. Though Britain had a new Government, he regularly managed to upstage it. Whether or not one sympathized with his arguments in Fulton and Zurich, there could be no denying that he had framed the international debate on such matters as Soviet expansionism and European reconstruction and unification. At the first annual Conservative Party conference since the war, held in Blackpool in October 1946, Churchill avowed that while it would be easy ‘to retire gracefully’, the situation in Europe was so serious and what might be to come so grave that it was his ‘duty’ to carry on. As he approached his seventy-second birthday, he spoke with assurance of turning out the socialists and he remained confident of his ability to secure the peace if only he could get back to the table with Stalin.
Still, there was growing dissatisfaction in Conservative quarters with a leader who was absent much of the time, travelling, speaking, writing, and collecting awards. A fresh round of defeats in the December by-elections intensified Conservatives’ hunger for a leader willing to devote his energies to remaking the party. It was a measure of how much the tide had begun to turn against Churchill that the Conservative Chief Whip, James Stuart, went to Cranborne to discuss the need for a change of leadership. Though at the end of 1946 Stuart remained distinctly unimpressed by Eden, he had sadly concluded that Churchill’s spotty attendance in the House of Commons was making the conduct of business almost impossible. In conversation with Cranborne, Stuart proposed