June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 116, Autumn 2002

Page 33

By MICHAEL DOBBS

A Churchillan novel to be published by HarperCollins in November

Let me take you back to Saturday, 1st October, 1938. Mr. Neville Chamberlain has just returned from Munich promising “peace for our time.” He is universally acclaimed as a saviour.

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Meanwhile, Winston Churchill is alone at Charrwell. Abandoned. An outcast.

It’s not difficult to imagine how Churchill must have felt. He had been lost in the wilderness for a decade and his political career was all but over. He was an old man who had outlived both his usefulness and his welcome. And everything he had ever held dear in politics had just been betrayed, handed over to the dictators.

What would have added to his sense of humiliation was that Chamberlain had flown back from Munich to a hero’s welcome. His rival had become the Messiah, while Churchill was a pariah.

Alone in Chartwell, the Black Dog would have been howling at him with extraordinary ferocity. Saturday, 1st October, 1938, was arguably the worst day of Churchill’s life.

The old man was joined on that day by a young BBC radio producer. Churchill was laying bricks and not in the mood for visitors but, as usual, couldn’t resist an audience. So they discussed and disputed, and the young man’s obvious defiance and resolution helped revive Churchill’s spirits. When some time later the visitor left, Churchill presented him with an inscribed copy of his latest book, Arms and the Covenant, with the words: “Young man, if ever you should need me in the future, send me this book, and I shall remember our conversation.”

Not so remarkable, no more than a passing pleasantry, perhaps. Except that young BBC producer was the 27year-old Guy Burgess, later to be one of Stalin’s most notorious spies.

It was an extraordinary encounter, set down in some detail in a slim volume written in 1956 by a Labour MP, Tom Driberg. Twenty months after the meeting and against ferocious odds, Churchill was asked to become Prime Minister during Britain’s bleakest hour. The entire British Establishment was set against him, yet it was to prove one of the most crucial turning points in our world. History books tell us how it came to pass: Edward Halifax got a stomach ache and decided not to take on the job. Yet, for me, that somehow wasn’t explanation enough.

I set out to try to understand the events of those twenty months. And at this point I must beg your indulgence, for I am not an historian but a novelist and I set about my task by extrapolating, embellishing, taking all the necessary license required by fiction while trying to stick as closely as possible to most of the facts. Such an approach might cause offence to those who believe that the facts are too fragile to play with, but sometimes by turning history around, looking at it from fresh angles, it’s possible to see even more. Churchill himself was never averse to toying with the facts, even in his own histories.

I was fascinated by this meeting at Chartwell. I wanted to know what Burgess did with this offer of help from the statesman. The man from the BBC was undeniably brilliant and supremely well-connected in an era when Westminster was a small village and the country was run by a relative handful of decision makers. Burgess was in the thick of it. He knew them all. And his views after Munich would have been remarkably close to Churchill’s—appeasement was bound to fail, war was inevitable, and one of the keys to the outcome of that war would be Soviet Russia.

It’s all too easy to dismiss Burgess as an outrageous homosexual adventurer who thought nothing about betraying his country. My own conclusion was that he was as patriotic as most, but found a different and more difficult route to pursue his love of country and deal with the fears he held for it. Burgess died in Moscow wearing his MCC tie and with the wish that his remains be buried back in England. Patriotism, as Churchill would well have understood, isn’t always best served by doing what is expected of you.

Whatever the truth of Driberg’s account of that meeting between Churchill and Burgess, I strongly suspect the pair would have got on outrageously well. They would have argued, drunk, then argued and drunk some more before finally agreeing about the challenges of October 1938 and what was required to resolve them.

When, after the war, Churchill returned to power and had to deal with the fall-out of Burgess’s spectacular defection to Moscow, he displayed remarkably little interest in the whole affair. Jock Colville commented as much in his diary. Yet should we be surprised? Everyone in the British Establishment had reason to forget his personal links with a traitor—and Churchill’s own discomfort could only have been increased by the fact that Burgess, in order to establish his cover, had once tried to woo and wed Churchill’s own niece, Clarissa.

History can be as extraordinary as any novel, yet this is not an exercise in unraveling history. The challenges faced by Churchill in 1938 continue to echo through our own age. Most pressing of these challenges, perhaps, is whether we confront or try to appease the forces of terror.

But there is so much more. Is the press a defender of our freedoms, or an institution that is more typically corrupt and self-serving? Do politicians owe their prime loyalty to the party, or to their consciences? What attitude should Britain take to “Johnny Foreigner” and the rest of Europe? Open a newspaper and it becomes clear that Churchill’s views would have illuminated our debates today almost as vividly as they did sixty years ago.

Winston’s War is not a history. It is unashamedly a work of fiction. Yet my hope is that it will inspire its readers to dig ever more deeply and to decide for themselves not only what happened but why things happened. If I succeed in that, then both the truth and Mr. Churchill will have been well served.