The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [31]
It was not a party question, Churchill declared. It had “nothing to do with Party.” It was “entirely an issue affecting the broad safety of the nation.” Churchill’s call for an independent stance was a total failure. He hoped that fifty Conservative MPs would defy the Whip and join him in the lobby. Not fifty, but two, went with him. One of them was his friend Brendan Bracken; the other was a future Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.
Churchill did not know where to turn. If Parliament could not alter the policy, he knew no alternative method. Even his own attempts to rally public opinion, through speeches and newspaper articles, were, he felt, of no avail. It was Parliament that had to speak. But Conservative Central Office was trying to remove him from that essential forum, almost four decades after he had first taken his seat. An attempt was being made by the party organizers to have him de-selected from his Epping constituency. When, as a Christmas gift, the Leader of the Ulster Unionists, Viscount Craigavon—who, as James Craig, had negotiated the 1922 Irish Treaty with Churchill—sent him an engraved silver cup as a token of appreciation, Churchill wrote to Clementine: “I wish some of these dirty Tory hacks, who would like to drive me out of the Party, could see this trophy.”
There were those who urged Churchill to form a new political party, to challenge the government. “I am sure,” he wrote to one such suggestion, “if there were any reasonable alternative to the present Government, they would be chased out of power by the country. But the difficulties of organising and forming a new party have often proved insuperable.”
In December 1938, as the dictator powers of Europe were each week gaining in confidence and arrogance, Churchill set out in the News of the World—on December 18—the case for the parliamentary system. Not only in the House of Commons but on the hustings it was the essential bulwark of democracy. “I have seen many excited election crowds in England where everyone is apparently in a frenzy,” he wrote. “You see their faces convulsed with anger, but there seems to be a great inhibition against actually striking a public man. This is as it should be. There ought to be intense feeling kept under proper restraint.” For this reason, Churchill explained, after “all my years of rough fighting at elections,” he could repeat “with the greatest confidence” his father’s declaration: “I never feared the English democracy.”
In this article, Churchill contrasted the power and independence of the House of Commons of earlier years with the House in 1938. In earlier years, he argued, it was “a far more living powerful entity in our national life than it is now.” Churchill believed that the overwhelming numerical strength of a single party, such as the Conservatives under Neville Chamberlain, could lead to weakness in the democratic process. That process, as seen in the contrast between the serried ranks of the Government benches and the much-reduced Opposition benches, could strengthen rigidity of doctrine, especially when two points of view were at loggerheads: appeasers with their overwhelming parliamentary majority, and anti-appeasers, despite the strength of their convictions, always a minority on both the Government and the Opposition benches.
In such a circumstance, parliamentary democracy had its sinister opponents, including those in Churchill’s own party at Conservative Central Office, who, at the end of 1938, continued to seek to de-select him from his constituency, so that he would no longer be a Member of Parliament. He was distressed that an attempt should be made to remove him at such a low ebb in the influence of the few independent-minded members. “It is remarkable,” he wrote in the News of the World on 1 January 1939, “that at a time when parliamentary institutions are most threatened,