September 6, 2015

Finest Hour 168, Spring 2015

Page 38

Jonathan Schneer, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet, Basic Books,  320 pages, $29.99/$34.50 (Can).

Review by Mark Klobas


MinistersThough Winston Churchill stands today as the man who led Britain to victory in the Second World War, the nature of the British political system meant that he did not do so alone. Running the nation during wartime was a team effort requiring the assistance of some of the most able figures from across the political spectrum. One of Churchill’s responsibilities as prime minister was ensuring that this group of talented individuals worked in relative harmony towards their common goal.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
More

Jonathan Schneer seeks to explain how Churchill accomplished this task. Borrowing openly from the approach adopted by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her study of Abraham Lincoln’s administration, Team of Rivals, Schneer describes Churchill’s ongoing efforts to keep his Cabinet members in harness throughout the war, something we see was no easy task.

From the start of the coalition formed in May 1940, Churchill faced a cabinet composed of many men hostile to his presence. Party loyalty was of little help to him, as many of the men most skeptical of his ascension were members of his own party. Most of these men were ardent supporters of Neville Chamberlain, and they felt that Churchill lacked steadiness for the top job. The preferred successor for these men was the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, whom Schneer argues was waiting in the wings to replace Churchill should the new Prime Minister falter. Rivals indeed.

Ironically, Churchill’s staunchest support during his first months as premier came from the Labour party, whose members would serve under no other Conservative. With their support (and with that of Chamberlain), Churchill was able to weather the threat from the right before nullifying it by easing out the leading Chamberlain men in his government. This gradual reshaping of the Cabinet, Schneer demonstrates, Churchill accomplished with considerable sensitivity to the need for political balance. Within the smaller War Cabinet there was always a scrupulous balance preserved between Conservative and Labour members. The challenge for Churchill was to maintain this balance as individual members came and went.

One of the points Schneer stresses is that, while Churchill is viewed today as “a giant to whom we all owe an unpayable debt” (xix), such a view was not commonplace throughout the war. For many of Churchill’s contemporaries the prime minister was replaceable, and throughout much of 1942 he seemed vulnerable to a challenge.

Stafford Cripps, whose advocacy for the Soviet war effort made him unexpectedly popular at a time when Churchill’s popularity wavered, appeared to represent a challenge. Schneer gives Churchill considerable credit for adroitly defusing the problem. The Prime Minister outmaneuvered Cripps politically by giving the austere Socialist enough exposure to allow his appeal to sour and thus allowing him to be easily shuffled into a second-tier office in the Cabinet. Schneer sees a similar, though less threatening test posed by Lord Beaverbrook, whose political adventurism created trouble for Churchill but never cohered into an overt challenge to his position.

1945Grumpy1As adroit as Churchill was in handling the personalities within his Cabinet, however, he proved largely tone-deaf to the growing leftward shift in domestic politics as the war went on. Schneer sees this as a product of his focus on waging the war and maintaining Britain’s status as a world power. Less interested in domestic policy, he shunted such matters off to others, primarily the Labour members of his coalition. Yet the release of the enormously popular Beveridge Report, in December 1942, with its call for a comprehensive social welfare system, proved impossible to ignore as it exposed the widening ideological divide between the Conservative and Labour members of his own government.

Resolution of the parliamentary debate on the Beveridge Report was left to Herbert Morrison, the Labour Home Secretary, whose able speech stilled dissent on the left. This preserved Churchill’s standing, though it did nothing to arrest the leftward drift in the public mood. It was a testament to Churchill’s popularity that, despite this visible change from the public, Labour leaders preferred not to have a general election so soon after the end of the war with Germany. The broader party, though, voted otherwise at their conference in Blackpool, forcing a general election the results of which surprised everyone involved.

Schneer recounts all of this in a readable narrative that reflects a confidence in his command of the material. Drawing upon a mixture of archival and published materials, he provides an enjoyable description of Churchill’s interactions with many of the leading ministers of his wartime government. Yet as an account of the War Cabinet as a whole the book falls short. By zeroing in on the more visible and challenging personalities, other vital figures, such as Anthony Eden and Clement Attlee, often recede into the background or are seen to play only supporting roles. Consequently, the reader gets a distorted picture of Churchill as a political crisis manager rather than as a wartime leader. It is a role that has been already examined elsewhere, such as in Paul Addison’s The Road to 1945 and Kevin Jefferys’ The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics. While Schneer’s account is more colorful and provocative, ultimately it adds little to what we already know about Churchill and the war.

This is unfortunate, for Schneer has identified a potentially fresh new approach to studying this heavily plowed field. Coordinating the diverse array of talents that his cabinet comprised is surely one of the less-appreciated aspects of Churchill’s time as premier, and one that Schneer demonstrates as deserving more attention that it has received. Until then, we have this engaging and oftentimes provocative study, one that highlights how much Churchill’s success in the Second World War was tied to his mastery of the men who served with him.


Professor Mark Klobas teaches history at Scottsdale College in Arizona.

A tribute, join us

#thinkchurchill

Subscribe

WANT MORE?

Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.