The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [9]
More and more, Churchill was attracted by what he called “the Government of the Middle.” He was writing his father’s biography and felt strongly that such a government was one his father would have liked to have led: a party of the middle that could appeal to those who found nothing helpful or edifying in the harsh antics of Conservative-Liberal confrontation. In the biography, Churchill wrote of an England “of wise men who gaze without self-deception at the failures and follies of both political parties; of brave and earnest men who find in neither faction fair scope for the effort that is in them; of ‘poor men’ who increasingly doubt the sincerity of party philosophy.”
In a letter to a senior member of the Conservative Party organization at Oldham, Churchill explained his hopes for “the gradual creation by an evolutionary process of a Democratic or Progressive wing to the Conservative Party, which could either join a central coalition or infuse vitality into the parent body.”
To the former Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, Churchill set out his thoughts on the Government of the Middle in a letter on 10 October 1902. Such a government, he wrote, “shall be free at once from the sordid selfishness & callousness of Toryism on the one hand & the blind appetites of the radical masses on the other.” The “one difficulty” he had in putting this idea forward, Churchill conceded, “is the suspicion that I am moved by mere restless ambition.” If some “definite issue—such as tariff—were to arise—that difficulty would disappear.” Churchill was a convinced Free Trader, opposed to all forms of protective tariffs.
Churchill’s first vote against his own party came on 1 February 1903, when he spoke against the Government’s continuing search for increased military expenditure. He was one of eighteen Conservatives to defy the party Whip and vote with the Liberal Opposition. “I think it is the most successful speech I have yet made,” he wrote to Rosebery, “and the House of Commons purred like an amiable cat.” That purring came primarily from the Liberal Opposition benches.
Reflecting on the considerable frustrations of wanting to pursue policies that were rejected by the parliamentary majority, Churchill wrote to the Leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in a letter that expressed his anxieties about the party system: “It is of course utterly impossible for any private member acting alone to influence in the slightest degree the policy of a powerful government. He may make speeches; but that is all. Hardly any question is ever decided on its merits. Divisions are taken on strict Party lines and Ministers have at their disposal a monopoly of expert opinion for and against every conceivable course, a battalion of drilled supporters, and the last word in all debates.” Twenty-five years later the tyranny of the party machine was to be Churchill’s charge against Neville Chamberlain (Joseph Chamberlain’s son) and his ministerial colleagues in the appeasement debates, as it had been against Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin throughout the 1930s.
On 24 May 1903 Churchill wrote to a constituent that what he had in mind was “that grand ideal of a National party of which Lord Randolph dreamed and for which he toiled.” Three weeks later, on 15 May 1903, a fateful day for British politics and a decisive day in Churchill’s career, the Unionist leader Joseph Chamberlain—the twin pillar with Balfour of Conservative political power—raised the banner of Tariff Reform. Speaking in Birmingham, Chamberlain called for an end to Free Trade and the creation of protective tariffs for British and Colonial industry. Colonial goods would be allowed into Britain without a tax. European goods would be taxed, to protect the British producers.
Churchill had found the issue on which he would challenge the whole Conservative Party machine. It was