Andrew ROBERTS
MPS love to complain about Boris. But his hero also endured a barrage of unhelpful criticism
The House of Commons was in a restive mood as one MP after another, from both sides of the aisle, rose to attack the government for its performance in the crisis. The MP for Seaham complained that no one could rely on the prime minister’s “optimistic assurances”; the MP for Bethnal Green charged that when the prime minister had been absent, “the machinery of government was not effective for its purpose. There was a general feeling that there was no one with the real authority to handle the ever-changing position.” The MP for Kelvingrove said: “I do not believe that scientific thought is being employed as fully as it might be.”
The time was late January 1942, and the crisis in the Far East was developing so quickly that a fortnight later, on February 11, Singapore fell to the Japanese. The debate was nothing less than a full-scale vote of confidence in Winston Churchill’s National Government, and nor was it to be the only one that year, as there was another in August.
When Boris Johnson cited 1942 in his Zoom speech to the Conservative Party conference earlier this week, it was to draw a comparison with the way that the Churchill government planned for the building of a better Britain after victory was won, albeit a “New Jerusalem” that was in fact carried into effect by Clement Attlee’s Labour Party. The analogy was thus a dangerous one, considering how much Sir Keir Starmer is clearly modelling himself on the forensic but uncharismatic Attlee.
Boris, a Churchill biographer, also well knows that 1942 saw the lowest moment of his hero’s premiership, with endless griping and criticism of every aspect of his leadership. In the January 1942 confidence debate, one MP confided his “very real suspicion that the Prime Minister is the obstacle to any progress”, arguing that “everybody agrees that it is absolutely vital at the present time to have the best possible government, and I think everybody agrees that we have not got it.”
Of Churchill’s repeated mantra that he bore full responsibility for everything that had happened, the MP went on to say: “It is very nice, fine and loyal that a big man should stand up and say that he takes the fullest responsibility, but if he had a good government around him, there would not be such horrible things for him to take responsibility for.” If anything, that response was a good deal kinder than the remarks being made about Boris today.
The pro-churchill MP Somerset de Chair (incidentally, Jacob Rees-mogg’s father-in-law), pronounced after fighting in the Middle East for a year that “it is a shock to come back to a House in which there is so much criticism of the way in which the war is being carried on by the government. Why should there now be an atmosphere of such violent criticism of the prime minister’s conduct of the war?”
The answer came from the former war minister Leslie Hore-belisha, who said: “There has been a terrible, indeed an almost incredible, series of disasters.” Lord Winterton added of Churchill that “if the time comes when the least of us think that his methods are losing [the war], it will be our duty to attempt by every means in our power to overthrow him.” When people today decry Boris for not showing Churchillian leadership, they should recall that when Churchill himself did show that leadership in the Second World War, he was lambasted on every side, and especially his own. It is something, indeed, from which Boris should take solace.
The Tory MP Sir John WardlawMilne complained in the 1942 debate that when Churchill returned from his meeting in Washington with President Roosevelt, “he could not have been surprised that he was met with considerable anxiety and unrest in the country”. He claimed that the government “have misled this country for months past. I am willing to say that the blame rests upon the government.” “Somebody must be blamed for it,” chimed in the MP for Wrexham. “Why is it that, when the country really undertakes a job, somehow or other we never seem to carry it out?”
This avalanche of criticism continued for three whole days, in which the government was blamed for inadequate preparations (“If we were not prepared, we ought to have left it at that and not boasted that we were quite ready”), and for “mistakes in regard to production: the machine is creaking in many places,” and for the way the public supposedly “do not know what is going on”. The supply department were responsible for producing aircraft and ships, of course, rather than PPE and ventilators, but the main thrust of the complaints was much the same as they are now.
“Are we certain that all the knowledge that has been acquired is shared out over the whole field?” asked one MP. “Every now and then there comes a moment in the life of every government when things go wrong,” said the Tory Victor Cazalet MP. “I believe that moment has arrived now. Some people are genuinely anxious. Others rather enjoy it when uneasiness and anxiety are thrust upon them. I believe it would be catastrophic for the government to underestimate it.” Such advice is being flung at Boris all the time, just as it was at Churchill.
In one sense it was a triumph of the democracy and free speech for which Britons were fighting that the government could face two votes of confidence in one year during a world war (both of which it comfortably won). “The government must be given a jolt,” said the MP for the Forest of Dean, “the time has come when some protest must be made.” Yet equally there must be moments when Boris, as he has to try to balance the struggle against Covid with the necessity of protecting the economy, must agree with Churchill about the “moaning minnies” among his critics. Churchill waited for the war to end before he described the Left-wing Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, whose wartime criticisms had been unending and uniformly unhelpful, as having been “a squalid nuisance”.
Churchill never minded constructive criticism, especially in areas in which the critic was an acknowledged expert. Indeed, he welcomed it. “Criticism in the body politic is like pain in the human body,” he said in January 1940. “It is not pleasant, but where would the body be without it?”
Yet the blanket remarks of MPS like Emanuel Shinwell – who opined during the January 1942 confidence debate: “It is monotonous and distressing. One setback after another is reported, and, apparently, worse will befall us in the coming months” – Churchill considered just useless windbaggery, and defeatist into the bargain. “Nor have we any assurance that the blows can be warded off,” said Shinwell, knowing his words would be widely reported, not least to the Germans, “for neither the means of attack nor adequate defence are in our possession”.
Fortunately, as Boris pointed out earlier this year, coronavirus does not have an intelligence unit, and can’t hear what we are planning for it, but keeping up morale is an important aspect of getting through the coming months of waiting for a vaccine. Speeches setting out what the “sunlit uplands” might look like when it is all over are therefore worthwhile. Hopefully, unlike Churchill as it turned out, Boris will also be the person to take us there.