Overview
From 25 May - 28 May 1940, Churchill and Halifax fought the Battle for Britain in the five-member British War Cabinet. By 28 May 1940 it seemed as if Halifax had the upper hand and Churchill might be forced from office. However Churchill outmanoeuvred Halifax and called a meeting of his 25-member Outer Cabinet. He then delivered the greatest speech of his life in which he convinced every member present that Britain must fight on against Hitler no matter what the costs. At that meeting on 28 May 1940, British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill had saved Britain and perhaps Western Civilization from threat of Nazi domination.
On the 9 May 1940, one of the most important meetings in British political history took place. The major participants at the meeting were Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston S. Churchill, and the co-leaders of the Labour Party Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood.
On the previous day Chamberlain government had survived a vote of no confidence but only just. The deteriorating military situation in Norway had precipitated the vote. The Government’s majority fell from 213 to just 81. A total of 33 Conservatives and 8 of their supporters voted with the opposition Labour and Liberal parties while a further 60 abstained. Winston S. Churchill, who had never been on good relations with Chamberlain and had only grudgingly been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty by the Prime Minister, nevertheless mounted a strong and passionate defence of Chamberlain and his Government in the debate preceding the vote.
"At no time in the last war were we in greater peril than we are now, and I urge the House strongly to deal with these matters not in a precipitate vote, ill debated and on a widely discursive field, but in grave time and due time in accordance with the dignity of Parliament."
After the vote Chamberlain asked to see Churchill. He told his First Lord of the Admiralty that he felt dejected and did not think he could go on. Chamberlain stated that he would attempt to form a coalition government with the Labour and Liberal Parties. Churchill was opposed to this action. He later wrote:
Aroused by the antagonisms of the debate, and being sure of my own past record on the issues at stake, I was strongly disposed to fight on. ‘This has been a damaging debate, but you have a good majority. Do not take the matter grievously to heart. We have a better case about Norway than it has been possible to convey to the House. Strengthen your Government from every quarter, and let us go until our majority deserts us.’ To this effect I spoke. But Chamberlain was neither convinced nor comforted, and I left him about midnight with the feeling that he would persist in his resolve to sacrifice himself, if there was no other way, rather than attempt to carry the war further with a one-party Government.
At the 9 May meeting, Chamberlain turned to Attlee and Greenwood. He asked the Labour leaders if they would agree to serve in coalition government under either himself or another unspecified Conservative MP. They told Chamberlain that before they could officially answer they would need to check with the rank and file members of the Labour Party presently at their annual conference at Bournemouth. “The conversation was most polite,” recalled Churchill, “but it was clear that the Labour leaders would not commit themselves without consulting their people, and they hinted, not obscurely, that they thought the response would be unfavourable.”
After Attlee and Greenwood left, Chamberlain turned to Churchill and asked: “Can you see any reason, Winston, why in these days a Peer should not be Prime Minister?” Churchill recognized this as a trap.
It would be difficult to say yes without saying frankly that he thought he himself should be the choice. If he said no, or hedged, he felt sure that Mr. Chamberlain would turn to Lord Halifax and say, “Well since Winston agrees I am sure that if the King asks me I should suggest his sending for you.
Earlier that day Churchill had lunched with Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, and Kingsley Wood, the Lord Privy Seal. Wood had been a friend and colleague of Chamberlain for nearly twenty years. However, perhaps sensing his master’s demise, he threw his full support behind Churchill. Wood warned Churchill that Chamberlain wanted Halifax to succeed him. He then gave the following advice should Churchill be asked for his opinion of Halifax becoming Prime Minister. “Don’t agree, and don’t say anything,” advised Wood. Eden later commented on this conversation: “I was shocked that Wood should talk in this way, for he had been so much Chamberlain’s man, but it was good counsel and I seconded it.”
Churchill would take Wood’s advice and did not respond to Chamberlain’s question. Usually I talk a great deal, but on this occasion I was silent…As I remained silent, a very long pause ensued. It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemorations of Armistice Day.
At this point Halifax broke the silence. He said that his peerage would prevent him from attending the House of Commons. He said he would not have “the power to guide the assembly upon whose confidence the life of every Government depended…I should be a cipher…Winston would be the better choice.”
As a peer and a member of the House of Lords, Halifax could not sit in the House of Commons. Until the 1960s, it was not possible to resign or suspend a peerage. Had this been the case at the time, the Conservative Party could have found him a so-called “safe seat” somewhere and he would have been elected to the House of Commons.
In his memoirs, Halifax offers a different explanation for his refusal of the Premiership. I had no doubt at all in my own mind that for me to succeed him would create a quite impossible situation. Apart altogether from Churchill’s qualities as compared with my own at this particular juncture, what would in fact be my position? Churchill would be running Defence, and in this connexion one could not but remember the relationship between Asquith and Lloyd George had broken down in the first war...I should speedily become a more or less honorary Prime Minister, living in a kind of twilight just outside the things that really mattered.
Churchill’s position in the Conservative Party was tenuous at best. He was poplar with the Labour and Liberal Parties for stance against appeasement in the 1930s, but the Conservative Party still held a huge majority in House of Commons and thus had the power to choose who among its members would be Prime Minister.
Churchill’s problems with the Conservative Party dated back to the turn of the century. Both his father and grandfather had been prominent in its ranks. So 1900, using their old contacts within the Party, Churchill was elected to the House of Commons as a Conservative. However almost from the beginning the relationship between the two was hostile. In his first years in Parliament Churchill would often criticize the Conservative Party’s policies and its leadership. Eventually by 1904, Churchill realized that he would have no future with the Conservatives, so he accepted an invitation from the Liberal Party and joined its ranks.
When the Liberals took control of the House of Commons in 1905, Churchill was awarded for his defection with a series of Cabinet posts culminating in 1911 with his first of two career appointments as First Lord of the Admiralty. However 1915, after the failed British Naval assault in the Dardanelles during the First World War, Churchill was fired from his Cabinet post and sent into political exile when the Conservatives joined a coalition government with the Liberals. However a year later when Churchill’s friend and political mentor Lloyd George became Prime Minister, he brought Churchill back into the cabinet.
After the war ended in 1918, George decided to maintain the coalition with the Conservatives. This action would cause a split in the Liberal Party leading to their eventual collapse at the polls and their demotion to that of third party status, a status that they still maintain to this day.
In 1924, Churchill realized that the Liberals would no longer be an influential force in British politics. So he reluctantly re-joined the Conservative Party. The new Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin rewarded Churchill with the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post that was expected to go to Neville Chamberlain. For the next five years Churchill had a stable working relationship with the Conservatives. However in the 1929 elections the Conservatives were eclipsed in the polls by the socialist Labour party and fell from power.
Now in opposition, Churchill again began to criticize the Conservatives for their support of self-government for India and for their appeasement to Hitler and Nazis. In 1935 the Conservatives, who formed a coalition government with the Labour and Liberal in 1931 to combat the depression, were elected in their own right. They refused give Churchill even an honorary Cabinet position. It was not until September 1939, when Britain and France were forced to declare war, that Churchill was again made First Lord of the Admiralty. Then on 10 May 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister. On that same day Germany invaded Belgium, Holland, and France.
Read more about this topic: May 1940 War Cabinet Crisis