The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [3]
In 1895 the Liberal Party was defeated at the polls, and the Conservative and Unionist Party came to power, with Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. The Unionist section of the party was made up of former Liberals, led by Joseph Chamberlain, who had broken with Gladstone and made common cause with the Conservatives. From his army barracks, Churchill wrote to his mother: “To my mind they are too strong—too brilliant altogether. They are just the sort of Government to split on the question of Protection.” Churchill could not know that when the split came a decade later, he, as young Conservative Member of Parliament, was to be a leading figure in the campaign within the party to preserve the Free Trade system and to denounce the new Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour (Lord Salisbury’s nephew), for committing the party to the cause of tariffs and protective trade barriers.
While soldiering, Churchill nurtured his growing interest in politics. He was reading and rereading his father’s speeches, he told his mother, “many of which I almost know by heart.” His aim, he told her in 1896, shortly before his twenty-first birthday, was to win some military decorations and then “beat my sword into an iron despatch box.” From India, where he travelled with his regiment, he learned that there was a parliamentary vacancy at East Bradford, the scene of one of his father’s great speeches a decade earlier. “Had I been in England,” he wrote to his mother, “I might have contested it and should have won.” A few weeks later he wrote to her again: “What a pity I was not home for East Bradford. I see a soldier got in.”
Two years of military service, “with a campaign thrown in,” Churchill confided to his mother, “would I think qualify me to be allowed to beat my sword into a paper cutter & my sabretache into an election address.” From India, he sent her an account of what he would include in his election address: extension of voting rights to every adult male, universal education, the establishment of all religions (not just the Church of England) and a progressive income tax. Churchill added, “I am a Liberal in all but name.”
While Churchill was still in India, his mother sent him past issues of the Annual Register of World Events, which contained substantial extracts from parliamentary debates. As he read each volume, he annotated the debates with thoughts of his own. The method he pursued, he told his mother, was not to read any particular debate “until I have recorded my own opinion of the subject on paper, having regard only to general principles.” Then, having read the debate, “I reconsider and finally write,” setting out, in pencil notes that he pasted into the volumes, what he would have said in the debates had he been a Member of Parliament. His hope, he explained, was “to build up a scaffolding of logical and consistent views, which will perhaps tend to a logical and consistent mind.”
In the summer of 1897, when he was twenty-two, Churchill returned to England on leave. Making his way to Conservative Party Central Office in London, he asked the party organizers to arrange a speaking engagement for him. Thus is was that on 26 June 1897 he made his first public political speech, at a Conservative rally at Claverton Manor just outside Bath. If he began, he said, with the “well worn and time-honoured apology ‘unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,’” it would be “pardonable in his case” because the honour he was enjoying at that moment of “addressing an audience of his fellow-countrymen and women was the first honour of the kind he had ever received.”
Among the points Churchill made in his speech was the hope that the British worker would become a shareholder in the enterprise in which he worked, making him willing to stand the pressure of a bad year “because he shared some of the profits of a good year.” As for the British Empire, Churchill wanted Britain’s voice to