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By Root 285 0

was another outside factor that Churchill believed was important in the maintenance of parliamentary democracy—the Parliamentary Press, the journalists with their special place in the Chamber overlooking the debates from the gallery and reporting on them. On 28 October 1952, a year after returning to power, Churchill told the House of Commons that the Parliamentary Press “has a most important function to discharge, which is to give a fair and truthful report of what passes in the House of Commons.” And, he added, with his familiar verbal twinkle: “That does not mean that everyone has to write the same truth; as Mr. Baldwin said, it may be approached from so many angles.” He was, however, concerned, telling the House: “In my lifetime I have seen the reporting of the debates in Parliament shrink a great deal as a factor in our public life. Far less space is now given in the newspaper. I know there is a shortage of newsprint, but apart from that, I do not think people give to Parliament the same attention as they used to do.”

It was the parliamentary system of elections that Churchill prized. As he told Members of Parliament on 3 November 1953: “Elections exist for the sake of the House of Commons, and not the House of Commons for the sake of elections.”

On his eightieth birthday—30 November 1954—while still Prime Minister, Churchill was honoured by both Houses of Parliament. In his speech accepting their congratulations, he declared: “I have lived in the House of Commons, having service there for fifty-two of the fifty-four years of this tumultuous and convulsive century…. I have never ceased to love the Mother of Parliaments, the model to the legislative assemblies of so many lands.” Churchill spoke these words during what his daughter Mary, in her biography of her mother, called “the moving, and in parliamentary history unique, ceremony” when both Houses of Parliament assembled in Westminster Hall to pay their tribute to him.

There was to be one more example of Churchill’s parliamentary skills and his recourse to Parliament for matters that were urgent. On 1 March 1955 he impressed the House of Commons by the vigour of his words and thoughts on the hydrogen bomb, in what his daughter Mary has called a “momentous and magisterial” speech. Churchill’s proposal in that speech was to use the existence of the hydrogen bomb, and its deterrent power, as the basis for world disarmament.

Churchill resigned as Prime Minister in April 1955. He remained a Member of Parliament for another nine years, unable, with increasing age and infirmity, to take part in the debates but attending as much as possible. His last appearance, when he was eighty-nine years old, was on 27 July 1964, sixty-three years after he had first taken his seat. The General Election of October 1964 was the first he had not contested since 1900.

Parliament had been Churchill’s active platform and base for more than half a century. With pride he had called himself “a child of the House of Commons.” Even as a schoolboy, the conflicts and struggles of parliamentary democracy had impinged on his home life. His biography of his father, published after Churchill had been in the House of Commons for only six years, reflected his understanding of the parliamentary battles of the nineteenth century. From the start of the twentieth century, he had made his own strongly individual contribution to the working of Parliament and to its legislation.

Churchill was a great respecter of the rules and conventions of political life. He even observed the formality—twice in his career, in 1904 and 1925—of crossing the floor of the House from one set of party benches to another: “Anyone can rat,” he once said, “but it takes courage to re-rat.” He had a clear conviction that the conflict of party philosophies and actions should be encouraged as an integral part of parliamentary democracy. “Party conflict and Party government should not be disparaged,” he wrote in his war memoirs. “It is in time of peace, and when national safety is not threatened, one of those conditions of a free