I Once Met… Lord Beaverbrook Reverend Jonathan Aitken

As a teenager, I met Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964), my great-uncle. The first question he asked me was ‘Are you the sort of boy who likes to stir up mischief?’

When I replied, ‘Yes, sometimes,’ he cackled and replied, ‘Wal, I was a mischiefmaker when I was your age. Still am!’

Even in his eighties, when I knew him well, Uncle Max was a firecracker of energy, journalistic crusading, political intriguing and boisterous trouble-stirring.

He loved dramas. He used the fortune he made as a financier to enjoy life to the full – deal-making, art-collecting, partygiving and wooing many mistresses. But when it came to his own newspapers and to politics, he was un homme sérieux.

Beaverbrook was Winston Churchill’s closest friend and occasional rival. They were the only two politicians to serve in the War Cabinets of both World Wars.

The historian Robert Blake once told me, ‘We would have lost the First World War in 1916 if Beaverbrook had not brought Asquith down. We would have lost the Second World War in 1940 if Beaverbrook had not got the Spitfires up.’

In a cloakroom at Cherkley Court,

Uncle Max’s Surrey house, three posters hung on the walls with these slogans: Committees take the punch out of War Organisation is the enemy of improvisation I always dispute the umpire’s decision These mementos of the period Churchill later described as ‘Max’s finest hour’ produced many stories about Uncle Max’s time as Minister of Aircraft Production.

‘I had to fight the brass hats and the bowler hats of the Air Ministry 24 hours a day,’ he told me. ’When I halted bomber production to concentrate on fighter production, all the air marshals except Dowding hated me. They hated me even more when I seized control from the RAF of all spares. I sent raiding parties to aerodromes to break the padlocks on hangers stuffed so full of spare air frames and spare engines that I called them my pots of gold.

‘I gave big contracts to small factories, against industrial policy. I bought planes from America, against Foreign Office policy. I cannibalised damaged aircraft, against Air Ministry policy. I made civil servants work seven days a week, against Whitehall policy. “No one knows the trouble I see,” I used to tell Winston, but he called it a miracle when I doubled the number of fighters coming into the front line for the Battle of Britain [marking its 80th anniversary this summer].’

In old age, Uncle Max grumbled that he’d be remembered only for his books; that his achievements as a wartime Cabinet Minister would be completely forgotten. He was almost right. The umpire of history seemed to have given him out.

Yet in 2020 the media is demanding a Minister for Medical Equipment Production, with Beaverbrook’s drive, at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. I can hear a familiar Canadian accent chortling, ‘Didn’t I tell ya? I always

dispute the umpire’s decision!’

Beaverbrook – Aitken’s great-uncle – in 1928