The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [20]
For the previous seventeen years, Churchill had been a leading figure in the Liberal pantheon. Two weeks after his electoral defeat, he celebrated his forty-eighth birthday. He was still a Lloyd George Liberal. “The Whips will find me a seat if I wanted one,” he wrote to a newly elected MP who had offered to stand down for him at Loughborough, “but what I want now is a rest.”
In the months ahead, Churchill kept himself busy painting in the South of France, rebuilding the country home he had recently purchased at Chartwell, in Kent, and writing his First World War memoirs. In May 1924 he told a private dining club: “After seventeen years of rough official work, I can assure you that there are many things worse than public life.”
Was Churchill still a Liberal? That May he lunched with Sir Robert Horne, a Conservative MP and former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lloyd George. During the lunch, Horne asked Churchill where he stood politically. Churchill replied, according to Horne’s report to a friend: “I am what I have always been—a Tory Democrat. Force of circumstance has compelled me to serve with another Party, but my views have never changed, and I should be glad to give effect to them by rejoining the Conservatives.” Horne went so far as to suggest to the new Conservative leader, Stanley Baldwin, that Churchill be invited to join the Government, but although Baldwin was “impressed by the idea, he was doubtful about giving effect to it.”
Baldwin did not forget Horne’s suggestion. On 14 August 1923 he invited Churchill to 10 Downing Street. To avoid comment, Churchill entered the Prime Minister’s residence by a side way, through the Treasury. After the meeting, he wrote to Clementine: “My talk with the PM was quite general & I did not raise the personal aspect at all at this preliminary & non-committal stage.” His return to the Conservatives and to the Cabinet had, however, clearly been in both men’s minds, although not discussed. Churchill’s letter to his wife continued: “I shall proceed further before making up my mind.”
There were rumours in political circles that the Conservatives intended to abandon Free Trade and to push for Protection—just as they had done, so disastrously for themselves, almost two decades earlier. Churchill, still contemplating the possibility of office in a Conservative administration, was alarmed. In late September he saw the Conservative First Lord of the Admiralty, Leo Amery, and, Amery noted in his diary, “sounded me very anxiously about what our intentions were on the tariff issue, strongly urging us not to throw away a good position but to continue peacefully in office for the next two or three years.” Churchill added, according to Amery’s account, “that the Liberals were very anxious to have him back, but he was not having any, and was enjoying his present holiday immensely.”
Six weeks after Churchill’s talk with Amery, and before any further development could take place on Churchill’s potential return to the Conservatives, Stanley Baldwin announced that he was calling a General Election and that, if re-elected, the Conservatives would introduce Protection. Churchill, the Free Trade warrior of two decades earlier, the Free Trader of his 1922 election manifesto, was roused to action. Once more he wanted to be in Parliament to fight for the things he believed in. After publicly denouncing Protection as “a monstrous fallacy,” he was approached by no fewer than seven constituencies, asking him to stand in the Liberal interest. The first of them was Glasgow Central.
On November 11 Churchill returned to the political arena, sending a letter to the newspapers stating that, while he would not stand at Glasgow, he would no longer be uncritical of the Conservatives—as he had been since the General Election a year earlier—because they had now levelled “an aggressive attack, needlessly and wantonly,