The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [1]
Throughout his long life, Churchill considered the people to be sovereign, through Parliament, in deciding the destiny of the nation. During more than fifty years of political life, he did his utmost to ensure that the efforts of Parliament were effective and that its will was not undermined or bypassed.
The defeat of the Conservative Party in the General Election of 1945, which ended his wartime premiership, in no way altered Churchill’s faith in parliamentary democracy or its procedures. Reflecting on his defeat the day after the results were known, he told a small gathering of family and friends: “It is the will of the people.”
Not only did Churchill serve as a parliamentarian for more than half a century but he faced the electorate and campaigned for election or re-election eighteen times. In five of those campaigns he was unsuccessful. Those five defeats—the first, in 1899, a year before he entered Parliament—did not deter him. Nor did the defeat, twice, of his party, first in 1922 (the Liberal Party, of which he was a stalwart), and then in 1945 (the Conservative Party, of which he was then leader). Indeed, each of these defeats spurred him on to make effective use of the democratic and parliamentary process, to make democracy work.
For just over five years during the Second World War, Churchill headed an all-party coalition. Within it, Conservative, Liberal and Labour politicians all had important positions in every aspect of his administration, from the War Cabinet to the running of government departments. His path to the leadership of these combined political forces—hitherto almost always beset by disagreement—had begun almost forty years earlier, in 1901, shortly after the death of Queen Victoria. That year, after six crowded years as a soldier and journalist, he entered the House of Commons. From that moment, he was first and foremost a parliamentarian: a supporter, practitioner and upholder of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.
Even before he entered Parliament, Churchill knew, and had become steeped in, many aspects of the parliamentary world. When he was nine years old, Woodstock, the parliamentary constituency represented by his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was abolished. It was one of the notorious “rotten boroughs” whose electorate was small and controlled by the local landlord: in this case, his grandfather, the seventh Duke of Marlborough. Lord Randolph had therefore to find a constituency with an independent electorate. He chose to fight a largely radical Birmingham seat and, defiantly, to raise the flag of Tory Democracy there.
The young Churchill watched this process with fascination. When his headmaster’s wife visited the Midlands, Churchill wrote to his mother, “they were betting two to one that Papa would get in for Birmingham.” Lord Randolph was indeed successful. The concept of Tory Democracy, whereby Conservative Party policy could encompass all classes in the nation, was one that attracted the young Churchill. It enshrined one of his basic understandings of parliamentary democracy: that no one class, no one interest—economic, social or political—no one segment of the political spectrum could use the system for its own exclusive interests.
At the centre of Churchill’s lifelong involvement in, and pugnacious support for, the parliamentary system was his familiarity and fascination with it from an early age. As a schoolboy in Brighton, aged ten, Churchill reported enthusiastically to his father that he had been out riding with a man “who thinks that Gladstone is a brute” and that “the one with the curly moustache”—Lord Randolph—“ought to be Premier.” After Gladstone’s defeat at the election of 1884,