The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (37 page)

You might find Marilyn Monroe on board; or Frank Sinatra or Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton—all toasting each other at the taffrail and draping themselves over the deckchairs before going off for whispering marital fisticuffs in the staterooms. Of all the global superstars that Ari assembled, there was one who outshone the rest; and on the morning of 11 April 1961, he had the proof of his renown.

The white-hulled, yellow-funnelled
Christina
—in fact a converted Canadian naval vessel that had been present at the Normandy
landings—had nosed up the Hudson River, towards her mooring point on 79th Street. There was an aquatic festival of welcome. There were blasts from liners and toots from tugs, and a New York fireboat joyfully ejaculated a jet of water to mark the arrival of the most popular Briton in America (the Beatles being still a couple of years away).

Now it was getting on for dinner time on the same day. With the help of two strong maids the eighty-six-year-old Winston Churchill was making his way down the deck. He had sustained another small stroke; his dentition was wonky. But his face was as cherubic as ever. His rheumy eyes were bright, his spotty bow tie was around his neck. He tapped over the polished boards with the same gold-topped cane that Edward VII had given him for his wedding in 1908, and there flickered within him the same old enthusiasm at the prospect of a meal and a spot of alcoholic refreshment.

It was true that he did not always find it easy to make conversation with Onassis, the Smyrna-born shipping tycoon, with his tales of the ‘sons of bitches’ who were interfering with his casinos. But then Churchill didn’t mind much about that. In 1911 he had endured a six-week cruise with H. H. Asquith to the Mediterranean, during which he was heard to grunt that he had been asked to inspect too many ancient ruins. At least Onassis didn’t make him feel bad about his relative lack of a classical education.

No, he liked the sensations of the cruise: the cosseting, the travel, the endless diversions—the landscapes and seascapes; and now he looked out at a scene he had first clapped eyes on in 1895—a lifetime away—when he had come as a twenty-year-old to stay with his mother’s friend, Bourke Cockran, and learn his secrets of oratory.

When he had first seen New York it was physically a humbler place. There were some largish and handsome brick buildings, and there was all kinds of bustle, and smoke billowing from a thousand chimneys—and yet there were children in rags, and immigrant slums
where the bodies of horses might lie in the streets for days. It was a city of energy and ambition, yes, but built on much the same sort of scale as late nineteenth-century Manchester or Liverpool or Glasgow. When Churchill first saw it, the skyline wasn’t a patch on London.

Now, though, as he stood in the darkness in 1961, looking out at Manhattan, the transformation was enough to make him blink. The buildings had sprouted to undreamt-of heights, spindles and spires of glass and steel, and their reflections twinkled towards him on the water with the light of a million windows. It was London that now looked dowdy, and dingy, and a shade undernourished.

This New York skyline was the embodiment of the change he had seen in his lifetime, and over which he had very largely officiated. These skyscrapers were not just a new template for urban life: they represented the twentieth-century story of America’s rise to greatness, and her eclipse of Britain. In his famous Mansion House speech of 1942, Churchill said he had not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. And yet that, pretty much, was how things had panned out.

He felt it keenly. There is a sense in which Churchill’s obsessive references to the triumph of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ were not just about ensuring a vital military and political Anglo-American alliance, though that was one of his purposes. They were also a psychological trick, a self-defence mechanism. The phrase was a way of masking and rationalising the humiliation of Britain’s position. Britain had declined in relative importance; but that decline was salved by the rise of those close cousins, those fellow-English-speakers who shared, as he constantly pointed out, the same values: the language, democracy, free speech, independent judiciary and so on.

It was as though Churchill was trying to persuade himself (and the world) that the American triumph was somehow also a British triumph, and that the glory of these former colonies reflected on the
mother country. It is valiant stuff, and of course not everyone sees it that way.

Many people might say that the story of Churchill’s life was in part the
translatio imperii
—the passing of one global empire to another. As the Persians gave way to the Greeks, and the Greeks to the Romans, so the British had handed the imperial torch on to the Americans. It was A. J. P. Taylor who once said that the Second World War was ‘
the war of the British succession’—and if you accept that analysis it is obvious who won; and seventy years later it is astonishing to see that America, militarily, politically, economically, is still the most powerful nation on earth.

During the meal that night on the
Christina
, a mysterious phone call came through for Sir Winston. His Private Secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, was asked to dial ‘Operator 17’ at the White House. It was the new President, John F. Kennedy, wondering whether Churchill would like to get in the presidential plane and come down to Washington—‘to spend a couple of days’ with JFK. Browne had to think quickly, and he decided to thank the President very much for his kind offer, but to say no. Churchill just wasn’t mobile enough, and he was increasingly deaf.

It was perhaps a shame that they didn’t meet, because Churchill still had passages of vigour and lucidity. They had met already, but before Kennedy was elected—once aboard the
Christina
when eyewitnesses said he seemed to mistake the clean-cut Kennedy for a waiter, and once when they had a very friendly conversation about the young senator’s presidential ambitions (Kennedy said he was worried about being a Catholic; Churchill said he could always sort that out and remain a good Christian). This was Churchill’s last chance to sit in the Oval Office and meet a serving US President—and he had met most of them from William McKinley in 1900 onwards.

Here was Kennedy, the leader of the ‘Free World’; here was
Churchill, physically bowed but with the vital spark still occasionally gleaming. Perhaps there was some hint that the old empire might have been able to pass to the new—because the problems confronting John F. Kennedy were certainly familiar to Churchill.

It was Churchill who pioneered the architecture of the Cold War, and the policy of standing up to Soviet communism. Now that policy was to be aggressively taken up by the young President: in Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere. Churchill had been in the vanguard of the movement for a united Europe—a cause still supported by the USA and by Kennedy. Then there was a whole arena of geopolitics where the Americans were obliged to take up the imperial purple, after Britain had faltered after the war, and then collapsed at Suez. It is an arena where Churchill’s role is now only hazily remembered; and yet it was critical.

Winston Churchill was one of the fathers of the modern Middle East. There is therefore at least a case for thinking that he helped create the world’s number-one political disaster zone, and then passed that disaster zone on, like a cupful of quivering gelignite, to be the responsibility of America. It was John F. Kennedy who first provided the American security guarantee for Israel. There are many who would blame the British—and Churchill prime among them—for creating the territorial incoherencies that made that guarantee necessary. Was he guilty? If not, whom do we blame?

As I write these words today, Israel is bombing the positions of Arabs in Gaza; Hamas is firing rockets at Israel; the casualties in Syria mount higher and higher; fundamentalist fanatics have captured large parts of northern Iraq. Churchill’s fingerprints are over the entire map.

Have a look at that map of Jordan—what do you see? The most striking feature is that weird triangular kink, a 400-mile salient from Saudi Arabia into modern Jordan. Some say that this fact of
geography can be traced to one of Churchill’s liquid lunches, and to this day it is called ‘
Winston’s hiccup’. That story may or may not be true. What no one contests is Churchill’s role in drawing that boundary. Kinky or not, it has lasted from that day to this.

He was integral to the creation of the modern state of Israel; and it fell to him, at the formative moment in the emergence of that nation, to try to make sense of the abjectly inconsistent commitments of the British government. He was the man who decided that there should be such a thing as the state of Iraq; it was he who bundled together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul—Shiite, Sunni and Kurd. If you wanted to put a single man in the frame for the agony of modern Iraq, if you wanted to blame anyone for the current implosion, then of course you might point the finger at George W. Bush and Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein—but if you wanted to grasp the essence of the problem of that wretched state, you would have to look at the role of Winston Churchill.

His epic career intersected with the Middle East at several key points (and remember that he is credited with pioneering the very term Middle East); but the most important was his role as Colonial Secretary. He was a little surprised to be offered the post, at the end of 1920; but it is easy to see why Lloyd George thought he was the right man for the job. He had shown immense energy and dynamism as Minister for Munitions—equipping Britain with the tanks, planes and other technology that helped win the war. As Secretary of State for War he had been masterly in his demobilisation strategy: quelling mutinies by ensuring that those who had served the longest were the first to be reunited with their families. He had shown his gifts of charm and persuasion in the pre-war Ulster talks—and those gifts would be needed in spades. The First World War had left some snortingly difficult problems, and especially in the Middle East.

—

T
HE POST OF
Colonial Secretary might sound less grand than that of Foreign Secretary—a role still occupied by that most superior person, George Nathaniel Curzon. But that is to forget the scale of the British Empire in 1921. The First World War was not meant to be an acquisitive conflict; Britain went in with the explicit aim of
not
expanding her empire. But as Walter Reid has pointed out, between 1914 and 1919 the
surface area of the world ruled by Britain expanded by 9 per cent.

When Churchill took the reins at the Colonial Office, he was at the apex of an empire that comprised fifty-eight countries covering 14 million square miles and he was responsible—one way or another—for the lives and hopes of 458 million people. It was by far the biggest empire the world has ever seen—six times the size of the Roman Empire at its apogee under Trajan. The British flag flew over a quarter of the land surface of the planet, and there was scarcely a sea or ocean that was not patrolled by the might of the British navy—a navy much modernised and improved by Churchill.

When you think about it that way, it is perhaps less surprising that Churchill threw himself into the job. He surrounded himself with the best and most famous experts, notably the Arabists T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell. He boned up on such hitherto abstruse matters (to him) as the difference between Shia and Sunni. His first step was to summon a conference, at Cairo; and here he conducted himself with dazzling skill.

The press was sceptical about this venture. It was said that Churchill wanted a ‘durbar’—a magnificent and ceremonial gathering of the imperial court. He was accused of wanting to govern ‘
on an oriental scale’. The truth was that someone had to take charge, because the situation in the Middle East was a total and utter shambles.

With the best possible intentions and motives, Britain had made a series of promises during the First World War, and those promises were now proving difficult to square with each other and indeed with reality. Perhaps it is a mitigation to say that they were made by a country in desperate straits, and with a population at risk of starvation from the German submarine campaign.

There were three British promises. The first was to the Arabs, in the form of the 1915 McMahon–Hussein correspondence. This was a series of fairly oleaginous letters from Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, to the Hashemite King Hussein—a bearded old worthy whose family claimed to be of the lineage of the prophet Mohammed. The gist of the letters was that the British government was all in favour of a big new Arab state—stretching from Palestine to Iraq and to the borders with Persia, with Hussein and his family on the throne; and the hope was that this promise would encourage the Arabs to revolt against the Turks, who were then allied with the Germans. The letters worked, in the sense that there was indeed such a revolt, a strategically piffling affair immortalised and wildly exaggerated in the film
Lawrence of Arabia
.

The next promise was to the French, who had been suffering appalling casualties on the Western Front. It was thought politic to paint them a picture of future French glory, once the war was over: and under the terms of the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement, France was to have a zone of influence stretching from Syria to northern Iraq and including Baghdad—a strip of land, incidentally, that bears some resemblance to the ‘caliphate’ proclaimed in 2014 by the fanatics of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It was not at all clear how this secret undertaking to the French could be reconciled with the more public undertaking to the Arabs—and nor, frankly, was it capable of being so reconciled.

The third and most tragicomically incoherent promise of all was
the so-called Balfour declaration. This was really
a letter from A. J. Balfour to Lord Rothschild, dated 2 November 1917, and contained this exquisite masterpiece of Foreign Office fudgerama . . .

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.