Gandhi & Churchill (26 page)

Yet the Conservative Party seemed on the verge of doing just that. Prime Minister Balfour refused to repudiate Imperial Preference, whereupon Churchill intemperately attacked him, outraging the Tory rank and file. Once the mild-mannered Balfour had to rebuke Winston publicly in the House. Churchill’s rebellious speeches, “full of scorn and sneer,” against Balfour and Chamberlain won him the nickname “Blenheim Rat.” Soon voters in Oldham were clamoring for his recall, and the Hurlingham Polo Club blackballed him. His journalist friend J. B. Atkins noted that Churchill was the hardest-working man in the House of Commons; a Liberal member recalled that he was also the most hated.
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The relentless attacks took their toll on the twenty-nine-year-old fledgling politician. Some feared they might lead to a Randolph-style breakdown. At one point he did go blank in the middle of a speech and had to sit down, his face buried in his hands.
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What sustained Winston in this first serious political trial was what had made him the champion of free trade in the first place: his unquenchable optimistic faith both in history and in himself. He really did believe that large views would triumph over small ideas; that modern progress really would dispel prejudice and barbarism; and that human will and purpose such as his own could overcome every challenge. “Science is better than sleight of hand,” he told the Free Trade League, and “truth is stronger than falsehood.”

For the rest of his life Churchill never accepted the lazy notion that politics is the art of the possible. Rather, politics became for Churchill a kind of theater, a medieval morality play in which humanity’s great dilemmas were acted out and resolved. The House of Commons was an arena where truth, integrity, and freedom were constantly put to the test but would ultimately prevail. This exalted view of politics, even more than his grand historical vision or his vaunted eloquence, was what set him apart from other British statesmen—and what drew him closer to Gandhi than to any other English-speaking politician of his generation. The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa. The Winston Churchill who could later endorse Gandhi’s notion that “all activity pursued with a pure heart is bound to bear fruit, whether or not such fruit is visible to us” made his first appearance in 1904.

On the last day of May that year, Churchill quietly crossed the aisle in the House of Commons and took his place on the Liberal Party benches. The act cut loose the moorings that bound him to his father’s memory. On the Liberal benches he found men with whom he had more in common, like Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George (their row over the Boer War having been set aside), and John Morley, the Indian policy expert who gave him a book that opened Churchill’s eyes on social reform.
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Intellectually they seemed head and shoulders above the Tories, whom Churchill accused of a “yearning for mediocrity.” He quit his seat in Oldham and stood for another in northeast Manchester, the original home of laissez-faire economics and the free trade tradition, which he won. Now everything depended on how well the opposition Liberals could exploit their opportunities, and how long the Tories could keep themselves in office.

They could not do so for long. By the end of 1905 Joseph Chamberlain’s crusade for Imperial Preference had fizzled with the British public but managed to split the Tory party. Balfour’s government was finished. So the prime minister tried a desperate poison pill defense: Balfour resigned and called a general election in January 1906, hoping against hope that the opposition would fall out among themselves and that he could return to lead a minority government.

What happened instead was one of the most decisive elections in British history. Liberals patched up their differences over Ireland (which had led to a split between mainstream pro-Irish Home Rule Liberals and Liberal Unionists), struck an alliance with the budding Labour Party, and exploited Tory despondency to achieve a victory so sweeping that even they could not believe their success. They gained control of nearly three-quarters of the seats in the House of Commons, with a government majority of 513.
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The Liberal triumph was also Winston’s. The new prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, first offered his young colleague a treasury undersecretaryship, but Winston turned it down. He had his eye on a different post, that of undersecretary for the colonies. The new head of the Colonial Office, Lord Elgin, was grandson of the man who had brought the Parthenon marbles to England; he had been viceroy of India when Churchill had been in the Fourth Hussars. Elgin had a sick wife at home in Scotland. He was expected to be frequently away from London, which meant that Winston would have more opportunity to make decisions and shape policy—and shine in the House of Commons.
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Within a few months, his characteristic drive and energy made it clear who was really running the Colonial Office. His influence was especially felt on the issue hanging over everyone’s head, South Africa.

There Liberals of Churchill’s generation faced a policy paradox. The problem lay in their own history of trying to meld social progressivism with classical liberalism. On one hand they wanted to promote racial and social justice in South Africa and protect nonwhites from white oppression. On the other they felt a laissez-faire respect for the right of self-determination (at least for whites) and a sense of moral obligation toward the Boers. Liberal radicals like Churchill’s new friend Lloyd George had vigorously opposed the Boer War; their leader Campbell-Bannerman, now prime minister, had denounced its “methods of barbarism,” including the use of severe methods of interrogation and concentration camps to defeat the Boer insurgency. The standard Liberal view of the conflict, promoted in books like J. A. Hobson’s
Imperialism,
was that the war had been in effect about blood for gold and that Britain had committed an unwarranted attack on the rights of a free people (albeit a racist people). Churchill, who had actually fought in the war, as a Tory had defended those “methods of barbarism” in the House of Commons. His experience had taught him that the Boers had not been fighting for freedom but against a British system of color-blind justice they feared would “place the native on a level with the white man.”
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But he now carefully trimmed his earlier views to fit the course set by his new party. No one wanted to provoke the Boers again. And by making them British allies instead of enemies, Liberals hoped they would ease the burdens of empire in South Africa and solve the problem that Joseph Chamberlain had foreseen, that of imperial overstretch.

Photo Insert I

General Wheeler’s battered entrenchment at Cawnpore, after the Great Mutiny of 1857. The massacre of women and children at Cawnpore, and the brutal retribution that followed, permanently scarred relations between Indians and Britons. (Hulton/GettyArchives)

Lord Randolph Churchill (center) visiting India in 1885, shortly before he became secretary of state for India. “Without India,” he argued, “England would cease to be a nation.” His son Winston agreed. (Broadwater/Churchill Archives)

Mohandas Gandhi with members of London’s Vegetarian Society, including his mentor Henry Salt (left, standing), 1890. It was as a law student in London that Gandhi first discovered his Hindu roots. (V. Jhaveri/Peter Rühe)

Winston Churchill in India in 1896, as subaltern with the Fourth Hussars. His experiences there would be the touchstone for his views on the British Empire for the rest of his life. (Broadwater/Churchill Archives)

Gandhi and fellow members of the Indian Ambulance Corps during the Boer War, 1899–1900. “In those days,” he later wrote, “I vied with Englishmen in loyalty to the throne.” (V. Jhaveri/Peter Rühe)