The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [21]
Five days later, in a speech at Manchester, Churchill appealed for the Lloyd George and Asquith Liberals to unite—under Asquith’s leadership. In his speech he described Liberalism as the only “sure, sober, safe middle course of lucid intelligence and high principle.”
Three days after his Manchester speech, Churchill agreed to stand as a Liberal at West Leicester. The Liberal Party had failed to unify, as he had hoped, and its electoral chances were poor. The election was held on December 6, a week after Churchill’s forty-ninth birthday. He was defeated, gaining only 9,236 votes, compared with 13,634 for Labour. The Conservative candidate came third with 7,696.
Churchill much wanted to return to Parliament. His aunt Lady Sarah Wilson, one of his father’s sisters, reported to him that even a “stodgy” old Tory had said to her, when the election result was announced: “Well, I am genuinely sorry. We wanted Winston in the House of Commons.” The “stodgy” voice was that of Lord Midleton—the former St. John Brodrick against whom Churchill had conducted his first House of Commons battle twenty-two years earlier.
Following the 1923 General Election, Baldwin remained Prime Minister, but the Conservative seats had fallen from 346 to 258. Liberal and Labour combined had 349, a dangerous situation for the Conservatives should they combine.
That was exactly what they decided to do. Churchill, furious that the Liberals intended to work with Labour to bring down the Conservatives, and thereby to bring in a Labour Government, wrote to The Times that he refused to be party to “the enthronement in office of a Socialist Government.” His letter constituted an effective public breach with the party in whose parliamentary ranks he had done so much over so many years for the good of so many people.
Churchill’s letter was published on January 18. Three days later the Conservative Government was defeated in the House of Commons, and on the following morning the Leader of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, became Prime Minister. Churchill was appalled at the arrival of Britain’s first Socialist Government. Yet the essence of parliamentary democracy was such that MacDonald and his party were now the governing power in Parliament, albeit dependent on Liberal Party support to survive.
Churchill hastened to congratulate MacDonald, who had entered the House of Commons in 1906; they had been fellow parliamentarians for sixteen years. His letter of congratulation has not yet been found, but from MacDonald’s reply it is clear that Churchill had written to his political adversary in the true spirit of parliamentary democracy, setting political rancour aside and recognizing the importance of the task that had devolved upon his adversary. “No letter received by me at this time,” MacDonald wrote in his own hand, “has given me more pleasure than yours. I wish we did not disagree so much! But there it is. In any event I hope your feelings are like mine. I have always held you personally in high esteem, & I hope, whatever fortune may have in store for us, that personal relationship will never be broken. Perhaps I may come across you occasionally.”
Churchill was determined to return to the House of Commons, when, two weeks after the election, he was asked by the Liberal Association of Bristol West to stand as their candidate in the coming by-election, he declined, stating he would not be prepared “to embark upon a by-electoral contest against the Conservatives.” Three weeks later, intervening in a by-election in Burnley, where a Conservative and a Labour candidate were contending, he urged Liberal voters not to vote for the Labour candidate. The Glasgow Herald commented: “Compelled by his temperament to be in the thick of the fighting, Mr Churchill seems a predestined champion of the individualism which he has served all his political life—under both of its liveries.” His intervention at Burnley, the paper added, was without a doubt “preparing the way of return to the Party he left many years ago.”
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