October 14, 2008

Reviewed by Raymond Callahan, PhD.

By Frank A. Mayer

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(Published by Peter Lang Publishing, 1992)

One of the pieces of conventional wisdom about Winston Churchill is that he was not a good party leader. In his introduction, Dr. Mayer recounts a meeting with Sir Robert Rhodes James some years ago in which that distinguished historian, biographer, and Conservative M.P. singled out Churchill’s years as Leader of the Opposition (1945-51) as a period of marked ineffectiveness. Dr. Mayer’s monograph, an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation, is an extended attempt to confute this judgment. He has done his homework very carefully, combing private papers, probing the memories of surviving participants in the great post-1945 restructuring of the Conservative Party and diligently going through mountains of printed evidence — books, articles, Hansard and the contemporary press. If there is a problem with this book it is not with the quantity of research that underpins it but rather with whether Dr. Mayer’s evidence compels us to revise the standard view of Churchill as party leader in 1945-51.

There has been, historically, no single pattern to which a Leader of the Opposition has been supposed to conform. Churchill in 1945 was both tired and initially stunned by his defeat. He soon found ample solace in a wide variety of activities — his memoirs and paintings, the movement for European unity, and the numerous speeches that kept him very much in the public eye. All this left him relatively little time for the routine activities of a party leader. Moreover, it is clear that Churchill lacked the taste as well as the time for such duties. His Toryism had always been of a rather eccentric variety in any case.

What Churchill did that was of enormous importance, however, was to grasp the fact that the party he led, and planned to use as his vehicle for a return to Number Ten, needed both to rebuild its structure and to rethink its positions to cope with the new world inaugurated by the events of 1945. Lord Woolton and R.A. Butler, hand-picked by Churchill, did the basic work on the structure and program of the party respectively and Churchill, having once selected them, let them get on with it. All this is, of course, well known. What has Dr. Mayer added to the picture?

His diligent research has given us considerable detail about Churchill’s conduct, both in the Commons and in his relations with his chosen subordinates in the party organization. He does not, however, seem to this reviewer fundamentally to have changed the picture — as opposed to adding some highlights and shadows. Where Churchill’s interests were engaged, or his emotions stirred, he could intervene powerfully, but much of the time his interest and energy were centered elsewhere (and that energy was in any case no longer what it have once been – in 1948 he had a mild stroke). He approved what Woolton did and what Butler and his team proposed, and on the foundation laid by their efforts built the campaign that led to his return to office in 1951. This, in fact, was a considerable accomplishment for a man in his late seventies. After all how many party leaders have the wit to pick really capable subor­dinates, the self confidence virtually to hand over the party machine to them, and the sheer bravura to sur­mount defeat, age, declining energy and the complex­ities of a new — and often unwelcome — world, as Churchill did in 1945-51? As he himself said in another context “for history it is enough.” Dr. Mayer has helped deepen our understanding of Churchill during these years but to the question of whether Churchill was a more engaged party leader than we have hitherto believed, this reviewer must enter the good Scots verdict, “not proven”.