Cigarface

R.A.C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement, Macmillan, Papermac, £12.99

Alastair Parker died just days before Churchill and Appeasement was published in paperback.  So the book serves as a fitting finale to his career as historian and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford. 

Described as a ‘what might have been’ exercise when it first came out, Churchill and Appeasement is in fact more than that.  Short and to the point at 264 pages, Parker’s study shows the factors that kept Winston Churchill out of the British government from July 1929 to September 1939.

He broke with the Tory front bench over the issue of limited self-government for India in 1931 while the party was (briefly) in opposition.

Churchill, like George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling, was more a child of the British Empire than of Great Britain.  To him the survival of Britain as a great power was as much at stake in resisting Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ campaign as standing up to Hitler in Europe.

His unique cod-Shakespearean invective loses something given the indiscriminate way he vilified his enemies: Hitler, Lenin, Clement Attlee, Mahatma Gandhi – all grew horns and a tail when they fell under Churchill’s disapproval.

Sounding off on a range of subjects, Churchill was as much journalist as politician.  There is little sign of calculation.  His oratory guaranteed him a prominent place in the House of Commons but Neville Chamberlain judged him “impossible” as a Cabinet colleague.

Orwell’s jibe about “Winston Churchill posing as a democrat” had some justice to it.

He was the one man who never stopped believing war was glorious.  Parker shows, Churchill’s enthusiasm for League of Nations ‘collective security’ barely disguised his continued belief in an Anglo-French alliance - the politics of 1914.  Although fairly consistent in thinking Hitler should be resisted, Churchill was hostile to the cause of Abyssinia (attacked by Mussolini’s Italy) and the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

There was just so much going on in the Thirties whether it was Spain or the Abdication crisis.  Again and again Churchill gave in to the temptation to express an opinion: always in the same baroque language.  “There, on the rock of the Covenant of the League of Nations alone can we build high the temple and the towers of Peace,” (p.163) he told an audience in 1938.

As fear of war and particularly air attack grew through the Thirties, Churchill was the obvious choice to become the first Minister of Defence in March 1936.

Parker ignores Churchill’s contacts with German exiles such as Otto Lehmann-Russbuehlt who briefed him on German rearmament - secret before 1935 – or to assess how far Nazi claims that he was a “warmonger” kept him out of government until the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of general hostilities.

After which he went on to win the Second World War pretty well single-handed.