Churchill returned to London on Monday, 30 July. While Clementine supervised the removal of their possessions from 10 Downing Street, the couple took up temporary residence in a sixth-floor penthouse at Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair. Long prone to bouts of depression, Churchill worried about sleeping near a balcony at a time when he was haunted by what he described as ‘desperate thoughts’.
A sense of incompleteness gnawed at him. He could hardly believe that other hands had taken over with Stalin when it was he, Churchill, who had established a relationship with the Soviet leader, understood him, and saw what needed to be done. Not for the first time in his life, Churchill despaired that his peculiar powers and gifts were being wasted.
The shift in his political fortunes had left him feeling hurt, humiliated, and confused. Because he had cast the election as a referendum on his conduct of the war, he was tortured by the idea that the outcome had called his record into question. Though he was no stranger to rejection, he had never developed the thick skin that is so useful to a politician. No analysis of the Labour vote prevented him from interpreting the numbers as a personal disgrace. No references to an overall leftward swing in British politics, to the public’s desire for a better material life after the war, or to festering public resentment of previous Conservative leaders’ failure to prepare adequately for the struggle against Hitler were capable of lessening the blow to Churchill’s ego.
For all that, he was able to make light of his defeat, as when he sang an old music hall song to the doorman at Claridge’s:
I’ve been to the North Pole
I’ve been to the South Pole The East Pole, the West Pole And every kind of pole The barber’s pole The greasy pole And now I’m fairly up the pole Since I got the sack From the Hotel Metropole.
Sometimes, others sang to him. On 1 August, six days after the Conservative rout, the new Labour-dominated Parliament assembled to elect the Speaker of the House of Commons. The chamber was packed and tensions ran high as, flushed with victory, the ‘new boys’ on the Labour benches taunted and jeered at the Conservatives sitting across from them. At a quarter to one, when everyone else was in place, Churchill made his much-anticipated entrance. With chin up, he sauntered to his seat on the Opposition front bench. Conservatives greeted him with raucous cheers. One Tory began to sing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and others heartily joined in.
Labour countered with their party anthem, ‘The Red Flag’. In boisterous spirits, a Labour member dashed to the front to pretend to conduct what a witness likened to ‘the chorus of birds and animals sometimes to be heard in a Disney film’. Some of the newcomers did not really know the words and struggled to improvise. Meanwhile, whenever the Labour majority threatened to drown the Conservatives out, the latter raised their voices.
At Chequers the previous weekend, Churchill had made it clear that he hoped to go on leading the Opposition and the party as long as Conservatives wished him to and as long as his strength held. The cheers from the Tory benches suggested that he had his party’s unanimous support. The British people might have rejected him, but the warm emotional reception accorded him by fellow Conservatives left him in no doubt that they at least wanted him as their leader.
Sadly, as he had done at the time of his electoral tour, he misconstrued the meaning of those cheers. Now, as then, the fact that people were grateful to their wartime prime minister did not necessarily mean that they wanted him to remain in power during what promised to be very different circumstances.
Hardly had Churchill left Westminster after his debut as Opposition leader when a trio of Conservative heavyweights met to find a way to manoeuvre him out of the job. The driving force in the effort was Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, leader of the Opposition peers. The fifty-one-year-old heir to the 4th Marquess of Salisbury was a grandson of the prime minister Lord Salisbury and a cousin of Churchill’s wife. His politically prominent family had been advising monarchs since the sixteenth century and one ancestor had been instrumental in the accession to the English throne of James VI of Scotland. In the Conservative Party as well, the Cecils (pronounced to rhyme with ‘whistles’) were noted as kingmakers and power-brokers. They had had a long and complicated relationship with the Churchill family. ‘Your family has always hated my family,’ Winston was known to grumble, at which Cranborne would ‘laugh uproariously’ in response. In 1886, the prime minister Lord Salisbury had been responsible (at least as Winston saw it) for the political ruin of Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the second surviving son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. In the 1930s, Cranborne himself had done much to obstruct Winston’s career despite the fact that both men opposed the policy of appeasement. Nevertheless, Winston had long found it impossible to decide whether he admired the Cecils or resented them on his late father’s behalf. Salisbury had been kind to Winston when he was in his mid-twenties, and Winston later dedicated a book to him. Winston had enjoyed friendships with Cranborne’s uncle, Hugh Cecil, who served as best man at Winston’s wedding, as well as with, however improbably, Cranborne himself. He adored Cranborne’s wife, Betty, whose acerbic conversation he prized, and through the years he and Cranborne had managed rigorously to keep their political differences in one compartment and their private friendship in another.
Known familiarly by his boyhood nickname, Bobbety, Cranborne was tall and gaunt, with a long nose and protruding teeth. A speech impediment caused his r’s to sound like w’s and he spoke at the breakneck speed characteristic of his family, who were famous for their ability to utter more words in a minute than most people can in five. He was an ugly man, slightly bent and often shabbily dressed, whose great personal charm caused many women to find him immensely attractive. He was an invalid and a hypochondriac, whose frail frame housed a will of iron. And he was a political powerhouse, who, like other Cecils before him, preferred to operate behind the scenes, often so subtly that it was difficult to perceive his hand in events. Invisibility appealed to him because he prided himself on basing his actions not on the dictates of personal ambition, but on duty and principle. Since he ostensibly wanted nothing for himself, he had a reputation in party circles for ‘objectivity’ that gave his pronouncements particular weight. Past disagreements notwithstanding, Cranborne warmly acknowledged the greatness of what Churchill had done in the war. He marvelled, as he later said, that in 1940 Churchill ‘did not talk of facing the realities: he created the realities’. Now that victory had been secured, however, Cranborne maintained that Churchill ought to ‘face facts and retire’ without delay. Had not Churchill himself taken a similar view of Cranborne’s grandfather in the twilight of his career?
During the war, the Tory party had been allowed to disintegrate on almost every conceivable level. Churchill was not a party man and never had been, and from the time he became the party’s leader in 1940 he had shown no interest in overseeing its affairs. As a consequence, by 1945 there was no management, no organization, and no programme. Lacking specific policies, Tories had fought the general election on the aura of the Churchill name and record. In the wake of overwhelming defeat, there was broad agreement that Conservatism needed to be drastically rethought. In Cranborne’s view, the effort needed to begin immediately under younger leadership. Anthony Eden had long been his ‘horse’ in the political race. From the outset, Cranborne’s career in politics had been closely tied to Eden’s. Cranborne started out as Eden’s parliamentary private secretary, and Eden and he grabbed headlines together in 1938 when they resigned as Foreign Secretary and Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs respectively in protest at the Chamberlain Government’s appeasement of Mussolini.
The description of Cranborne as Eden’s under secretary belied a more intricate relationship. Cranborne was Eden’s most powerful political supporter. Cranborne did not himself aspire to the premiership; influence was what he was after, and he viewed an Eden Government as the best way to secure it. As a politician, Eden benefited from the prestige of a connection to the house of Cecil, as well as from Cranborne’s superior intellect and cunning. Cranborne was also the nervier by far. He often quietly but insistently pressed