In January 1911 Churchill provoked further controversy as a result of his decision to personally oversee the police’s attempts to capture a group of Latvian anarchists, led by ‘Peter the Painter’,...

Introduced by Richard M Langworth...

When Churchill returned to the Conservative party in 1924, Stanley Baldwin, keen to be associated with moderate social reform, promoted him to Chancellor of the Exchequer. Churchill’s period as Chancellor was one of the happiest and most settled phases of his career. He was almost at the top.

The Earl of Halifax, Foreign Secretary since 1938, turned the job of Prime Minister down. As Simon Schama says in his History of Britain BBC series, ‘Churchill had seen the face of battle; Halifax had only hunted foxes’. Churchill’s appointment was inevitable – and his time in the wilderness at an end. Just after six o’clock in the evening of 10 May, Churchill went to see King George VI at Buckingham Palace and became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. ‘Winston’ was indeed ‘back’. Churchill owed his rehabilitation to no-one but himself – he had stood alone for years – and this made him seem all the more powerful and the man to lead Britain in ‘this hour’. It was to be his ‘finest hour’.

Churchill’s political isolation in these ‘wilderness’ years was largely self-inflicted. Churchill’s warnings about the dangers posed by the rise of Nazi Germany went largely ignored, principally because he’d unwisely backed causes – India, in the early 1930s and, later, supporting Edward VIII during the Abdication crisis in 1936 – that set him against his peers and public opinion and made him seem reactionary, unrealistic and out-of-touch. Later events would lead to him being seen in these ‘wilderness years’ in a different light. Read the full article, which appeared in . Churchill sent out very clear messages, as early as 1932, about the menace and deadly threat of Nazi Germany and the need to rearm. He gave his first speech warning of Germany’s rearmament on 13 May 1932 and he published an article in the , ‘Can we Defend ourselves?’ on 17 November of the same year. His warnings might have commanded more support had he not eroded his reputation with his interventions on India.

It was in his role as a senior statesman with considerable international prestige that Churchill felt he could influence global relations. He wanted, above all, to establish constructive relations with Moscow through ‘summit’ conferences of world leaders. He felt that face-to-face meetings – at the ‘summit’ – would be the best way to try to secure world peace, and so coined the term and set out his agenda. However, the ‘three’ with whom he had built rapport during the Second World War were no longer alongside him; Roosevelt had died in 1945 and Stalin, in 1953. Churchill was the sole remaining leader of the ‘grand alliance’. But, feeling strongly that it was only by negotiation that the nuclear arms race could be halted and détente established, he tried to re-establish that ’special relationship’ with the US and encouraged Eisenhower, who’d been elected President in 1952, to consider meeting up with the new Soviet leader, Khrushchev.

In October 1911, Churchill – still an ambitious relatively young minister – was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty with full charge of the Navy. Deteriorating relations between France and Germany and the rapid expansion of the German Navy had prompted great anxiety in Britain and Churchill was determined to ensure Britain’s maintenance of its naval supremacy over Germany. He felt that Britain should be in ‘constant and instant readiness for war’. Thanks to Churchill’s energy and persistence, the fleet was indeed ready when war came. In a peculiar twist of fate, when Churchill the anti-appeaser returned to office following his famous ‘wilderness years’ in September 1939, it was to be as First Lord of the Admiralty again (and he would be Prime Minister within eight months, fighting another war).

Returning to Britain from the US, Churchill found Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government had issued a declaration, in October 1929, that British rule in India should aim to allow India ‘Dominion Status’. A firm believer that British rule was a guarantee of good government, Churchill’s found himself arguing against colleagues in his own party. Baldwin had endorsed the declaration and nearly everyone else within the party felt that India should be granted limited self-government and dominion status. Only a few ‘diehard’ Conservatives supported Churchill. He fought vehemently. Churchill argued strongly that only British rule could prevent racial and religious divisions within India resulting in bloodshed. But Churchill’s fighting talk didn’t win anyone over. When Gandhi and other Congress politicians were released from prison to attend discussions on constitutional reform, Churchill resigned in protest from the shadow cabinet in January 1931. Click to see some Punch cartoons of the time. 

Churchill was not, however, entirely alone in his ‘wilderness’. As a privy councillor and an elder statesman, even without power, he wasn’t without some influence and retained contacts within the political arena, keeping his ‘finger on the pulse’. In 1934 he was drawn into deliberations about defence matters (principally about the problems of defending Britain from attack by air) and, from June 1935 until the outbreak of war in 1939, served on the Air Defence Committee, so was well informed about Britain’s ability to combat the German Luftwaffe. He was also kept informed by disaffected colleagues in the intelligence service, RAF and Foreign Office. Churchill held court at Chartwell, ‘a sort of alternative Cliveden; a regular meeting place for Churchill’s extensive circle of political associates and admirers, with an inner circle of particular friends at its core’ (Best, ). Guest included the three ‘Bs’ – Beaverbrook, Birkenhead (F. E. Smith) and Brendan Bracken – young conservative MPs who kept him in touch with what was going on within parliament. And of course the ‘Prof’ was also frequently at Chartwell. Professor Lindemann, the leading Oxford University scientist advised Churchill on aspects of air warfare in the 1930s and was a trusted source of information on technical matters. To learn more about Churchill’s political allies and advisers, read the (made publicly available to mark the anniversary of Churchill’s death).