The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [16]
The Other Club was an attempt to bring together Liberal and Tory leaders, and non-political figures of stature, in fortnightly social gatherings that would bridge the political gulfs and quarrels of the day. “Great tact will be necessary,” Churchill explained to the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, “in the avoidance of bad moments.” The Other Club met for dinner at the Savoy Hotel once every two weeks while Parliament was in session, holding its first dinner on 18 May 1911. A few weeks earlier, Churchill had been hit on the head by a book thrown by a Conservative MP opposed to Irish Home Rule, drawing blood. Politicians who might have come to blows in the House of Commons found at the Other Club the calm and conviviality that enabled them to maintain and preserve the essential civilities of parliamentary discourse.
As a parliamentarian, Churchill put great store in the power of argument. For every few minutes of oratory, he would present half an hour or more of detailed, patient explanation. As First Lord of the Admiralty after October 1911, he had to present complex facts and figures, projections and comparisons. During the Navy Estimates debate on 22 July 1912 he spoke for more than two hours on the new German Navy Law and Britain’s required firm response. On 28 April 1914, at the height of the Ulster confrontation, as civil war loomed, he put forward with patience and intricate argument a compromise designed to safeguard Ulster’s interests without denying predominantly Catholic Ireland the benefits of Home Rule.
After the second General Election in 1910, Churchill suggested to Asquith a compromise with the Conservatives so that the two parties could work together on a common social and imperial policy. During the Parliament Bill debates in 1911, Asquith—at times too affected by drink to conduct the behind-the-scenes evening negotiations with Balfour—entrusted them to Churchill. When the Parliament Act had been passed, Churchill wrote to the new King, George V, that it was to be hoped “that a period of co-operation between the two branches of the legislature may now set in & that the settlement of several out of date quarrels may lead to a truer sense of national unity.”
Churchill was again at the centre of a search for compromise in the early months of 1914, as negotiations took place in London between the Irish Nationalists, determined on Home Rule, and the Ulster Conservatives, equally determined not to allow any political power to be transferred from Westminster to Dublin. Churchill was in the Cabinet room during urgent talks on the latest border proposals between Ulster and the rest of Ireland when the discussion was brought to a somewhat abrupt and unexpected end by Sir Edward Grey, who reported that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had been assassinated in Sarajevo.
As war clouds loomed, Churchill put forward the idea of a Liberal-Conservative coalition, to ensure that the war crisis was met with unity and determination across the political divide. Several senior Conservatives supported the idea, but the party Leader, Andrew Bonar Law, did not.
4
The Parliamentary Scene in War and Reconstruction
When war came in August 1914, Britain had not been at war in continental Europe for almost a hundred years, since the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The First World War was the first to be fought with a parliamentary system based on universal manhood suffrage (women did not yet have the vote in Britain). At the outbreak of war, Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty for nearly three years. His new wartime responsibilities,