October 14, 2008

Reviewed by Tll Kinzel
Mr. Kinzel teaches classes in English and American literature at the Technische Universität Berlin.

Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party,
by Graham Stewart. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 533 pages. Regular price $45, member price $34.

“How do politicians attain what they most desire–power?,” asks Graham Stewart at the outset of his thorough study (which is really, the author admits, two books bound in one: the first a thesis, the second a deft piece of historical reporting) on the inner party struggle between Chamberlain and Churchill in the Thirties. Stewart, manifestly drawing on his 1995 PhD thesis, wants to provide a better understanding not only of Chamberlain and Churchill but also of the drift to war in the Thirties. Reviewing briefly the Chamberlain and Churchill families’ contributions to 19th century Conservative politics, he poses the question: which son learned or ignored which lessons from their fathers’ careers? The answers to this question, Stewart says, influenced the course of 20th century politics.

Churchill’s career might seem to be hampered by his image as “the charismatic overhasty son of the charismatic overhasty father” (31). Though at first rather slow-moving, the narrative gathers momentum as it reaches the diehard rebellion over Britain’s India policy. Stewart ably presents the various policy issues such as free trade vs. protectionism and how they affected Churchill’s and Chamberlain’s fortunes within the Conservative Party.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

He goes on to make some historically revisionist claims concerning the India rebellion which he believes unwittingly encouraged later efforts at British rearmament. Churchill’s opposition to his party over India and (pre-1933) rearmament, Stewart maintains, was not the reason for his exclusion from office, as some historians believe who confuse cause with effect. Rather, Churchill’s antagonistic attitude towards the Labour Party made him unfit for holding office in a National government in any case, “even if he had waxed lyrical about Indian constitutional reform” (97).

The remarkable decision of Churchill and his fellow diehards to confront the government head-on over India is read by Stewart as a virtual declaration of a Tory civil war, in which the “Winstonians” relentlessly attacked. Stewart rejects other historians’ casual treatment of the Indian diehard campaign, claiming that far from being a strategic blunder, as is often maintained, Churchill’s association with the diehards resurrected his case for inclusion in the Cabinet and “aided his crusade to rearm Britain against Hitler.” (197)

Stewart’s choice of the book’s title, as well as of some of the chapter headings, clearly indicates that he wants us to read the struggle he depicts in some sense in the light of Shakespeare’s Rome. Hence his characterization of the Tory Party struggle as a “civil war”; hence the analogies implied in depicting Churchill, his friends and other anti-appeasers, as well as Lloyd George as “assassins in the senate” who then bury the “last Caesar” of inter-war politics, Chamberlain. At other times the French Revolution provides the similes to which we are treated.

Although this kind of framework is not necessarily convincing, Stewart manages very well to bring out the case for both Churchill’s and Chamberlain’s position. We are treated to a sympathetic and fair discussion of the personal tragedy of Chamberlain’s political misjudgments and his fall into disfavour, as well as of Churchill’s both noble and self-interested attitude towards the ousted Chamberlain in May 1940. It is a tribute to both politicians that–despite the obvious potential for developing personal animosity–they finally reached an appreciative understanding of each other. Chamberlain gradually came to see his own inferiority to Churchill when it came to waging war; Churchill’s magnanimity let him see that Chamberlain’s wrong approach to Hitler was inspired not by wickedness but by a noble, if misguided, sincerity of purpose.