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‘Strange that we do not fully realise men’s characters while they are alive.’

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 27 February 1918

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

8. Fleming and Lindsay landing in Namsos, 14 April 1940 – Municipal Museum, Namsos

9. Sir Martin Alexander Lindsay of Dowhill, 7 September 1936 – Bassano Ltd © National Portrait Gallery, London

14. Halifax haymaking at Garrowby – Alexandra Metcalfe’s photograph album, private collection

17. Halifax composing speech for Norway Debate at Little Compton, 5 May 1940 – AM’s photograph album

29. Halifax & WSC at the British Embassy in Washington, 1941 – AM’s photograph album

DRAMATIS PERSONAE ON 7 MAY 1940

War Cabinet

Chiefs of Staff

Ministers

Geoffrey Shakespeare (National Liberal) – Parliamentary Secretary, Dominions (since 2 April)

House of Commons

No. 10

Alec Douglas-Home, Lord Dunglass – Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chamberlain

Foreign Office

Charles Peake – Head of News Department (and Private Secretary to Halifax from 1941)

Buckingham Palace

Rebel Conservative MPs

Other rebel MPs

Labour Opposition MPs

Liberal Opposition MPs

Norway Campaign: Namsos

Norway Campaign: Narvik

Admiral of the Fleet William Boyle, Earl of Cork and Orrery – Naval commander, ‘Rupert Force’

Miscellaneous

Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford – widow of Herbert Asquith; stepmother of Violet

PROLOGUE

On the one and only occasion that he visited Norway, Winston Churchill was received like a great hero. In May 1948, a fortnight before publication of The Gathering Storm, his first volume of memoirs of the Second World War, he flew with his wife Clementine to Oslo to receive an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy. While accepting the award in the University Aula, Churchill spoke with emotion about Hitler’s invasion of neutral Norway eight years earlier, that ‘foul and treacherous outrage’ which ranked with the Sicilian Vespers and the massacre of Glencoe ‘as one of the black deeds of history’.^{1, 2} He told the hall into which more than 1,500 students had once been packed for transportation to concentration camps in Germany: ‘We have emerged from the most terrible of wars which has yet been fought in the world.’

Yet many in his audience felt that Churchill – ‘known all over the globe as “the Architect of Victory”’ – had omitted something of immense significance.³ It fell to the governor of the Bank of Norway, Gunnar Jahn, to point this out. At a banquet in Churchill’s honour, after tens of thousands of Norwegians had waved him through the streets as he passed in an open motor-car, Jahn spoke of an argument he had had in 1942 with a depressed countryman who believed that the Germans would win the war. Jahn had said to him: ‘Oh no, the Germans lost the war when they invaded Norway.’

He then explained. ‘It had this effect, that Winston Churchill took over the leadership of Great Britain.’⁴

PERFECT BLACKOUT

‘Is there any MP who doesn’t want to be Prime Minister?’¹

LESLIE HORE-BELISHA MP, 4 January 1940

A year to the day after Churchill became Prime Minister, the House of Commons was ‘blown to pieces’ by a Luftwaffe bomb.² On 10 May 1941, the Speaker’s Chair and the front and opposition benches were crushed beneath a steep hill of smoking rubble. The MP Vernon Bartlett met Churchill clambering over it, ‘his face covered with dust, through which the tears that ran down his cheeks had made two miniature river beds’.³ All that remained of Churchill’s cherished Chamber – which, he was to tell the Norwegian Storting, ‘we pride ourselves is the cradle and also the citadel of parliamentary government throughout the nations’ – was a mass of broken masonry, ashes, and the tangled remains of metal railings.⁴ An historic stage stood obliterated. Reliable records of the dramas and rituals enacted upon it seemed, at that moment, irretrievable.

Then, in the 1960s, a tin of photographic negatives was discovered which were to give a tantalising glimpse into a vanished past. The twenty-nine images are the only known record of the old House of Commons during a sitting.⁵ More than that, they captured a seismic moment: what A. J. P. Taylor called the ‘splendid upheaval’ of the Chamberlain government.⁶

These unique photographs were taken illegally on two of the hottest afternoons of the unbelievably warm spring of 1940, during the Norway Debate of 7 and 8 May. It was a breach of privilege to take pictures inside Parliament. If discovered by the Serjeant at Arms or one of his Doorkeepers, Conservative backbencher John Moore-Brabazon risked confiscation of his negatives, and suspension. Not in the eighty-eight years of Sir Charles Barry’s Chamber had a Member violated this rule.

Moore-Brabazon had pioneered the art of snapping photographs from behind enemy lines. He was the first Englishman to fly. In 1914, he established a photographic unit for the Royal Flying Corps, and following the first gas attack at Ypres made a map of the German trenches, diving low enough to identify the uniforms. At that time, he knew more about aerial photography than anyone in the world. Twenty-five years on, startling developments in a new world war compelled him to pick up his camera again. He used a special Minox as issued to Intelligence staffs. Purchased from Latvia and nicknamed ‘the spy camera’, this was small, light, easy to hide.

What became known as the Norway Debate, and was to be so significant to the fortunes of the British government and the Second World War, began with a routine adjournment motion on Tuesday 7 May. The Prime Minister appeared in the Commons to defend the conduct of Britain’s armed forces in Narvik, Namsos and Åndalsnes, and to answer some far-reaching questions about a calamitous military campaign that had been obscured by rumour, secrecy and hopelessly optimistic press reports.

After an ominous respite lasting seven months, following Germany’s annexation of Poland, the British army in its first land battle of the war had engaged the Nazi enemy – and been routed. The navy, which had been fighting unrelentingly at sea from September 1939, had had to evacuate 11,300 troops from central Norway, with the eventual loss of 4,396 men.

This stunning news had been delivered to Parliament by Chamberlain on 2 May. In the fearful words of Vernon Bartlett, the German invasion of Britain seemed at this point ‘almost inevitable’, with foreign troops predicted to land in large numbers on British soil for the first time since the Norman Conquest.⁷

It is important to emphasise that there was no expectation of a vote. The Conservative leader enjoyed a huge majority of 213 for his National government, and the opposition Labour Party under Clement Attlee was reluctant to divide the House at this precarious moment. Even though less popular with an increasingly anxious public, Chamberlain still appeared unassailable within Parliament. On 7 May, the reality for the majority of Conservative MPs was that there was no clear alternative to Chamberlain as Prime Minister; neither was there any formal procedure whereby the party could dispense with its leader.

The House was packed. A Conservative backbencher conveyed the mood. ‘We are meeting to-day at a time of danger, the gravest danger that our nation has ever faced, danger not only to our material prosperity, but to the spiritual things which we value even more highly.’⁸ The former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, judged the debate that followed to be ‘the most momentous in the history of Parliament’, and he would make a devastating contribution on the second afternoon.⁹ A future Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, also present, believed that the two-day debate ‘altered the history of Britain and the Empire, and perhaps of the world’.¹⁰

Moore-Brabazon caught the debate at several key moments, in rapid, surreptitious shots – standing behind the Serjeant at Arms’s chair; at the Bar of the House; resting his camera on a rail.

One close-up shows uniformed Members who had been summoned back from their regiments. Wedged in the half-gloom on dark green leather seats, they listen, arms folded, to a short, squat figure who addresses the House from the government benches.

Moore-Brabazon stopped snapping only when one of the Doorkeepers seemed to get ‘a little suspicious’ of the movement of his left hand.¹¹ Observing him approach, Moore-Brabazon pocketed the Minox, and produced a silver cigarette-lighter that resembled it. Casually, he rubbed the lighter down the side of his nose. The Doorkeeper withdrew.

The negatives lay in their original Riga tin until 1992 when the Clerk of the Records had the prints made up. Blurred, underexposed, snatched in poor lighting, the images might have been photographed ‘sitting on a jelly in a strong draught’, as Moore-Brabazon described his first experience of flying.¹²

‘In vain we look for a glimmer of light.¹³ It is a perfect blackout.’ A private memorandum circulated a month earlier to opposition and rebel Conservative MPs reflected a growing despondency at the record of the Chamberlain administration.

A comparable darkness prevails in Moore-Brabazon’s photographs. We see Barry’s gloomy, badly ventilated Chamber – the sandbagged windows and doors, the blacked-out rooms and corridors, giving the neo-Gothic hall, according to Chamberlain, who hated it, the appearance of the aquarium at London Zoo. It was in underwater terms that the National Labour MP Harold Nicolson described the Commons to one of the shapes craning forward on the upper level, the diminutive but politically agile Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky. Nicolson reminded Maisky how he used to look down from the Diplomatic Gallery with benevolent interest, ‘rather like a biologist examines the habits of newts in a tank’.¹⁴

Packed in alongside Maisky, in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery, the Peers’ Gallery, the Press Gallery and the Speaker’s personal Gallery, were diplomats, journalists, civil servants, plus friends and relatives of the MPs below. These included the Prime Minister’s wife, Anne, dressed in black and with a buttonhole of violets gathered that morning from the garden at No. 10. Also seated on the padded benches were Winston Churchill’s seventeen-year-old daughter Mary; and thirty-six-year-old Lady Alexandra ‘Baba’ Metcalfe, whose father was Lord Curzon, a former Foreign Secretary.

The dark-haired and sternly attractive Baba, separated from her husband, was acting as the eyes and ears of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, whose peerage barred him from sitting in the Commons. Were the Prime Minister to step down as the rebel faction demanded, Halifax, universally respected, would have been their outstanding favourite to succeed.

But resignation was not on Chamberlain’s mind when he stood up at 3.48 p.m. to present the government’s case for what, in private, his War Cabinet considered to be a spectacular disaster largely of Churchill’s making.

In an essay on Curzon, Churchill made this aside about the Commons: ‘It was then, as now, the most complete and comprehending judge of a man’ – a sentiment with which Halifax concurred, reflecting in the diary that he dictated to his secretary every morning: ‘Curious what a good judge of character the House of Commons generally is.’^{15, 16}

A fugitive from the same regime that three weeks earlier had occupied Norway, the future Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti had the Norway Debate in mind when he wrote in his notebook: ‘Whenever the English go through bad times, I am wonder-struck by their Parliament … There is a possibility here of attacking the rulers, a possibility that has no equal anywhere in the world.¹⁷ And they are no less rulers for it … Six hundred ambitious men watch one another with hawks’ eyes; weaknesses cannot remain concealed, strengths make a difference as long as they are strengths. Everything takes place out in the open.’ Canetti concluded: ‘There is nothing more remarkable than this nation doing its most important business in a ritual, sporting way, and not deviating even when the water is up to its neck.’

A surprised Rab Butler, shown Moore-Brabazon’s pictures three decades on, recognised himself in the second row, where he sat as Halifax’s spokesman in the Commons. After hesitating, Butler picked out other members of the War Cabinet:

Even though blurred from camera shake, Neville Chamberlain can be seen standing at the Despatch Box. And seated to the Prime Minister’s right, the First Lord of the Admiralty – in one of the only images that survive of Winston Churchill in this House of Commons. As the Minister most closely involved in the military expedition to Norway, Churchill had consented to wind up for the government.

These figures, how familiar they are. Looking at them seated in the hot, dark Chamber, dressed in their formal clothes and uniforms, it all seems inevitable. We know what will happen, even if they do not. We know that Chamberlain is delivering his last statement as Prime Minister. We know that in three days’ time Germany will pounce again, in France. We know that Churchill will take over.

The broad story still holds. Churchill is safe on his ‘pinnacle of deathless glory’, as he wrote of Alfred the Great round about this time.¹⁸ In proposing a toast to Churchill’s health in Moscow four years later, Joseph Stalin was unable to cite any other instance in history where the future of the world had depended on the courage of one person. The historian Philip Ziegler says: ‘If ever there was a man who happened to be in the right place at the right time, it was Churchill.’¹⁹ Without Churchill in control, the future of our country would have taken a radically different path, believed Lord Halifax’s biographer Alan Campbell-Johnson, another watcher in the Chamber. ‘Six more weeks of the tentative technique of the Chamberlain Administration and the Allied cause might have been engulfed in total defeat.’²⁰ Here, in Churchill’s phrase, lay the ‘hinge of fate’.

But the weight of the Churchill legend has suppressed knowledge of other possibilities that were available and seemed more probable at the time. In the extremely unlikely event that Chamberlain were to step aside, Churchill was merely one among several contenders, on both sides of the House, who had spent their political careers jostling for such an opening.

The Lord Privy Seal, Kingsley Wood, admitted that ‘the number of people who think they are the future Prime Minister of this country is quite amazing’.²¹ Wood was a long-standing confidant of Chamberlain, and a demon for preferment. From his position on the front bench, Wood had reason to believe that his moment was approaching – something confirmed by Rab Butler’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, the Conservative MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, who wrote in his diary: ‘I think that Kingsley Wood might easily become our next P.M., and that is now the P.M.’s intention … Halifax would only be a stop-gap.’²²

Even if this view of his prospects came from the realms of fantasy, Wood was not alone in considering himself stuffed with the material of leadership. Ranged behind the favourite, Lord Halifax, sat a pack of politicians straining to become premier should the office all of a sudden fall vacant, plus one candidate who had held the title. Four days earlier, Harold Nicolson had written in his diary: ‘People are saying that Lloyd George should come in.’²³ Memories of his victory in 1918 suddenly made the Father of the House an attractive proposition once more.

Also in the frame at various moments during the months and weeks leading up to the debate, and in the febrile days following it, either touted by others or considering themselves ripe for the premiership: Samuel Hoare, John Simon, Anthony Eden, Max Beaverbrook, Roger Keyes, John Reith, Duff Cooper, Oliver Stanley, Walter Elliot, John Anderson, Stafford Cripps, Lord Woolton, Clement Attlee, Nancy Astor, Lady Rhondda and even Marie Stopes, who told Halifax that ‘in the light of her special knowledge of Germany, Japan, Norway, birth control and science, she ought to be in the Cabinet’.²⁴ This was a time when, as one Labour frontbencher observed in his diary, ‘History goes past at the gallop.’

There was also, fleetingly, the vision of Chamberlain’s fellow Member from Birmingham, Leo Amery, taking over as Prime Minister. It is likely that Amery is the squat figure, reduced by Moore-Brabazon’s distorting lens to a spiky circle of light, who speaks to a riveted House from the government benches. If correct, the image catches Amery in the act of delivering his tirade against Chamberlain, triggering the sequence of events that within seventy-two hours were to sweep him away.

Corresponding with Amery after the war, another recent contender for the premiership was reminded of how unlikely a prospect Churchill’s accession appeared at this moment. Leslie Hore-Belisha was the former Minister unexpectedly moved from the War Office back in January. In October 1954, Hore-Belisha wrote to Amery: ‘What you tell me of your opinion that if it had come to a vote in the House of Commons it would have been Halifax is most interesting, and likewise what you tell me of Max [Beaverbrook]’s opinion that no debate in Parliament could possibly overthrow Neville.²⁵ These statements show how difficult it is to predict the fate of men and how uncertain the outcome was at the time.’

Observers do not share the same perspective as participants. There is a natural impatience, in reading about the momentous events of May 1940, to press forward to the evening of 10 May when Churchill was invited by a reluctant George VI to form an administration. In this dominant narrative, the Norway Debate marks but one step in an orderly, inevitable and unavoidable transfer, before the real fight.

The overwhelming cataclysm of the next six weeks, which saw the fall of the Netherlands, Belgium and France, has tended to submerge the dramatic processes which brought Churchill into Downing Street. How Churchill landed there at the last moment, with much greater odds stacked against him than is commonly supposed, is every bit as interesting a story.

In May 2015, Britain celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the evacuation from Dunkirk. Lost in all the attention paid to Churchill’s speeches about fighting Germans on the beaches was his assumption of the premiership only a few days earlier – a handover which passed virtually unnoticed. Yet what we take for granted so nearly did not happen.

Baba Metcalfe’s father knew from humiliating experience ‘upon what small vicissitudes great events may turn’.²⁶ In May 1923, Lord Curzon had been prevented from becoming Prime Minister when an outsider (Stanley Baldwin) shot past. When the Norway Debate began on 7 May 1940, there was no realistic expectation that Churchill would step into Chamberlain’s shoes, and potent reasons why he should not. Speaking at Martin Gilbert’s memorial service in 2015, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown recalled asking Gilbert to sum up what he had learned after writing his thirty-eight volumes on Churchill.

Of course, to many afterwards it did seem like divine intervention. Interviewed on Desert Island Discs, Lord Hailsham (who participated in the Norway Debate as Quintin Hogg) spoke of his belief that ‘the one time in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history is Churchill’s arrival at the precise moment of 1940’.²⁷ Churchill famously convinced himself that he was walking with destiny. Dining with him a few months later, Lady Halifax confessed that she ‘got slightly confused as to his meaning when he said with some emotion: “That old man up there intended me to be where I am at this time.”’²⁸ Was he alluding to her husband? Not so. Pointing a finger at the ceiling, he went on: ‘It’s all destiny.’²⁹

However, Neville Chamberlain was an obdurate believer in his own star no less than Churchill. Ambassador Maisky gained the impression after speaking with Chamberlain that ‘the P.M. considers himself a “man of destiny”.³⁰ He was born into this world to perform a “sacred mission”.’

If, when reading about the Norway Debate and its tumultuous aftermath, one gains an overriding sense that ‘things were “written”’ – as Churchill told the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, with whom he been a subaltern in the Boer War – then this may be because Churchill wrote them.³¹ Viscount Stuart’s version is as reliable as any. ‘I heard Churchill say in the House once, in reply to a questioner who was pressing for further details on some awkward point, “Only history can relate the full story”; and then he added, after exactly the right pause, “And I shall write the history.”’³²

Chamberlain’s biographer, David Dilks, believes that of all the books written in the twentieth century the one that has exercised most influence on the general view is The Gathering Storm, the opening volume of Churchill’s war memoirs, which was published in June 1948, selling an astronomical 530,000 hardback copies. ‘Churchill wrote of his experience with a persuasive power which no other leader of the twentieth century has matched.’³³

So persuasive was Churchill’s narrative that a more recent authority, David Reynolds, considers that this ‘extended essay in retrospective wisdom’ has guided the writing of history ever since. Yet as Reynolds, Dilks, Ziegler and others have shown, The Gathering Storm is a highly selective interpretation, and ‘something of a distortion’.³⁴

Leo Amery had known Churchill since school. A censor of Churchill’s earliest articles for the Harrovian, Amery detected the continuation of a boyhood tic after reading Churchill’s account of the First World War, The World Crisis. ‘It is a pity he should think it necessary to spoil so much good history in order to have the satisfaction of writing it up and vindicating himself afterwards.’³⁵

Few possessed sharper insights into Churchill’s vindications and distortions than Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, who sat long hours with him at the Admiralty Operational Intelligence Centre throughout the Norway Campaign. In an unpublished memoir, Godfrey wrote that ‘the public of our generation will never know the malignant influence he exerted on the early strategy of the war because he will probably be the first person to write a popular history which, like The World Crisis, will show that everything that went well was due to his inspiration and that when things went badly it was someone else’s fault.’³⁶

Supported by Churchill, a lot of legends risk passing out of history and memoir into unbudgeable myth. That is why it is worth pausing to re-examine the highly personal nature of Churchill’s relationship to the historic events of April and May 1940.

Churchill was once walking through the Commons Lobby when he halted, ‘raising his hand rather like a policeman on night duty’, and declaimed to a fellow MP about Napoleon. ‘The great night of time descends, but the glow of the emperor’s personality remains. And those who were his friends are gilded by it and those who were his foes are clouded.’³⁷

Little in Churchill’s account of the war proves more clouded than his portrait of Chamberlain, whose death inspired one of Churchill’s most eloquent tributes, to a man whose conduct ‘ought to be a model for us all’ – though he told his secretary after he dictated it: ‘Of course, I could have done it the other way round.’^{38, 39} In The Gathering Storm he did exactly that. Having clashed with Chamberlain during eleven wilderness years when he was excluded from office, Churchill would freeze him out in posterity as ‘this narrow, obstinate man’.⁴⁰

It was an unfair contest. ‘I myself can claim no literary gifts,’ Chamberlain admitted, in the only book he ever wrote – about his cousin Norman, machine-gunned to death on a French battlefield – and he died before he was able to provide an alternative version.⁴¹ It fell to Halifax to defend him, and to insist that Chamberlain, a reserved, complex man, had been ‘consistently misjudged’, and that Churchill did Chamberlain ‘less than justice in his War history’.^{42, 43}

David Dilks was the last person to interview Halifax, in December 1959. Dilks says: ‘For a long time, Halifax knew that a great deal written and said about Chamberlain was nonsense, and he took great pains to tell me.’⁴⁴ Halifax’s discreet autobiography Fulness of Days, published two years earlier, had corrected a few of Churchill’s ‘unwittingly inaccurate’ perceptions and errors, but, says Ziegler: ‘Halifax felt it rather undignified to fight his own corner, argue his case’ – with the consequence that Halifax’s reputation has likewise suffered.^{45, 46} Fulness of Days, says Dilks, did little to overturn ‘the still-prevailing fashionable notions of Halifax as somebody who wished to sell out to the Nazis or grovel to everybody, which is how Churchill was sometimes inclined to regard him’.

What this boils down to is that our picture of the disastrous Norway Campaign which led to the debate, and of Chamberlain and Halifax as well, is mainly thanks to Churchill, who wrote the history and who had all the best lines. For most readers, his is the received version, the last word on the subject; a closed book in which Chamberlain’s name has been passed down in ignominy, and the Norway Campaign dismissed as a pathetic prelude to what Churchill’s friend, Conservative MP Major General Sir Edward Louis Spears, called ‘the real thing’.⁴⁷

At his fine valediction to Chamberlain, made in this Chamber, Churchill had likened history to a flickering lamp that stumbles along the trail of the past, ‘trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days’.⁴⁸ In point of fact, Ziegler says: ‘Churchill’s writing of history was totally dishonest.⁴⁹ He would admit as much. It was a propaganda exercise.’ Although aided by a team of extremely able and experienced researchers, he was putting his own case, as only he knew how to do.

The relationship between history and propaganda was whisky and soda to Churchill. He immersed himself in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples right up to the Norwegian expedition. Before that, he had published four volumes on his seventeenth-century military ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough – the Churchill equivalent, as it were, of Norman Chamberlain.

The horrible circumstances of Norman’s death had moved Chamberlain with every particle of his being to prevent another war. The reverse was true of Churchill. Having spent four years and 2,128 pages on vindicating Marlborough’s reputation, he strove when at the Admiralty to emulate his military victories. As someone remarked who worked with him during this period: ‘He sees himself as another Marlborough.’⁵⁰

Churchill staked out his partisan purpose in a letter to Professor Lewis Namier: ‘to defend effectively Marlborough’s early career … by contrasting the true facts with the odious accusations which have so long reigned’. In the same letter, Churchill described his method:

‘One of the misleading factors in history is the practice of historians to build a story exclusively out of the records which have come down to them. These records in many cases are a very small part of what took place, and to fill in the picture one has to visualise the daily life – the constant discussions between Ministers, the friendly dinners, the many days when nothing happened worthy of record, but during which events were nevertheless proceeding.’⁵¹

Applied to his own biography, Churchill’s call ‘to visualise the daily life’ is not always easy to achieve, especially when examining the days leading up to his accession. Anyone wanting to build a story that deviates from Churchill’s own will discover that important records are missing, like the memorandum which tilted Attlee into calling for a division; or consumed by the incendiary bomb that hit the House of Commons on 10 May 1941; or deliberately destroyed, as were the papers of Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s main promoter in the leadership stakes, which Bracken instructed his chauffeur to burn; or simply not written. Churchill never kept a daily diary, fearing, in Dilks’s words, that ‘it would reveal his frequent changes of opinion and, when published, make him look foolish’.⁵² Many conversations have escaped the record, particularly on topics which Ministers felt unable to discuss in public, and where these exchanges are reported it is often hard to judge their context. Compiled in secret and afterwards adjusted, Ivan Maisky’s London journals catch familiar faces at bracing, fresh angles, yet it must be remembered that the Soviet Ambassador, a clever and charming but sometimes unreliable witness, penned each entry in fear that it might be discovered by the NKVD, who had already rooted out two of Maisky’s staff for execution.

Even when something is written down uncensored, the essential point can be overlooked. Diaries are not infallible. A frustrated Leo Amery admitted: ‘They often get written up in a hurry a day or two later, and what turns out of the first importance twenty or thirty years afterwards gets left out.’⁵³

Nor is being present at an occasion any guarantee that it will be remembered with fidelity. In Churchill’s own description of the meeting at No. 10 Downing Street on 9 May 1940 at which Providence stretched out its hand to offer him the premiership, written eight years after the event, he mistakes the date, the time of day, even the identities of those in the room.

Halifax was in the room. Yet his account, probably dictated the following morning, differs from the one that he gave at the time to his Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, and also from the version which he offered up a year later to his Private Secretary, Charles Peake.

As for Halifax’s relationship with Baba Metcalfe, this is scarcely mentioned in contemporary narratives, any more than is the extent to which Chamberlain used the Intelligence Services to monitor the telephone conversations of his political adversaries.

There are other significant absences. Supremely hard to judge, and therefore to use judiciously in an historical account, is the emotional frame of mind of political figures like Churchill. ‘He is a very emotional man,’ Lloyd George told Maisky.⁵⁴ Fatigue, infatuation, grief, hurt – these are some of the feelings that governed not only Churchill’s behaviour but the actions of his closest Cabinet colleagues during this all-important span of days. Even so, emotion is a factor that too often is left out of the picture, by historians as well as by diarists, so that Chamberlain, Halifax and Churchill can appear to operate as if they reached important decisions inside an isolated bubble in which the circumstances of their personal lives were irrelevant to a degree that is unrealistic.

For example, the puzzle over why Churchill continued to be obsessed with Narvik only begins to make sense when one takes into account that his nephew Giles Romilly was captured there. Yet the impact of Romilly’s arrest on Churchill, and on Clementine and her family, is rarely given attention by historians, any more than is the absence from Churchill’s side of his chief adviser and confidante – that is to say, Clementine – during the three critical days of 8, 9 and 10 May.

Last but not least is the danger to anyone contemplating a rival narrative. Three months after Churchill took over as Prime Minister, Leo Amery wrote to a friend in a state of anxiety about the plight of Stuart Hodgson, a former editor of the Liberal campaigning newspaper the Daily News, and author of The Man Who Made the Peace: Neville Chamberlain (1938). The sixty-three-year-old Hodgson was well known to Amery: a ‘good anti-Nazi who after writing a sympathetic life of Chamberlain has suddenly found himself interned while completing a life of Halifax, on which he cannot continue while in prison, incidentally, too, leaving newly married wife expecting child and completely stranded’.⁵⁵ Not much else has come to light about this dramatic and intriguing incarceration of a good-tempered, trenchant biographer who liked chess and cricket and was famous for never having lost his temper. Still, it is tempting to draw the inference: when dealing with Churchill, ‘who wrote history, lived history, and made history’, then woe betide any competitor – even one blessed with Hodgson’s ‘keen sense of justice, tolerance and humanity’.^{56, 57}

Brief though Hodgson’s internment seems to have been, since he went on, in 1941, to publish his portrait of Halifax, it is an illustration of why old assumptions, assertions and fashionable opinions need to be constantly tested. David Dilks does well to remind us that we should not accept without deep reflection any version of the past, no matter how secure it appears – and further, that ‘the irrational or the unpredictable elements … are crucial’.⁵⁸

Regarding the Norway Debate, there is a popular narrative about how events unfolded, in large measure established by Churchill, which is unsatisfactory and which, when tested, is clearly found wanting. Hold the picture to the light and another outline emerges.

In this competing tableau, Churchill, an ex-Liberal who had twice crossed the floor, assumes the shape of a divisive outsider, tainted by the Tonypandy riots of 1910 when he sent troops to South Wales to resolve a mining dispute, the Dardanelles, his opposition to the General Strike and the India Bill, his support for Edward VIII, and, more immediately, by the capitulation in Norway, one of the great failures of his career, and a campaign in which he alienated every Cabinet colleague. The likelihood of Churchill’s political advancement from First Lord of the Admiralty was negligible; nor did he appear to do anything to promote it, remaining steadfast in his loyalty to Chamberlain. Indeed, he rounded angrily on supporters like Bracken who plotted without Churchill’s knowledge on his behalf.

Lord Halifax’s contours are no less divergent. Once it had become obvious that Chamberlain would resign, Halifax was the most favoured candidate for the premiership, supported by Chamberlain, the War Cabinet, a majority of Conservative and Labour MPs, the press, and George VI, who had given Halifax the unique privilege of a key to the garden of Buckingham Palace. Even at the eleventh hour, King, Prime Minister and Rab Butler were pressing ‘the Holy Fox’ to accept. Why did he not? Historians and biographers do not tally in their speculations. Then there is his secretive relationship with Baba Metcalfe, referred to in his surprisingly passionate letters as ‘my dearest Baba’ and ‘my darling one’.

History has cast Chamberlain as a feeble and colourless prevaricator with ‘a lust for peace’, yet there are moments when he reveals himself to be a ruthless schemer, determined to use his majority, the Whips’ Office and the Intelligence Services to cling on to power ‘like a limpet’. Tight-furled in public like his umbrella, he expands in private as a cigar-smoker, a wine connoisseur, a brilliant mimic and a generous-hearted family man. On top of everything, he gets on remarkably well with Churchill.

The Norway Debate is an improbable example of the darkest spot being under the lamp. A very interesting transfer of power occurred within a short time, but how this occurred remains unresolved. What happened and what is thought to have happened turn out not to be the same thing.

‘When the clamour of the guns dies away, the clamour of the history writer begins,’ noted the Finnish historian C. L. Lundin. Three quarters of a century has passed, and an untold number of books repeat the story, yet there are wide discrepancies in the memoirs of contemporaries, and in the accounts of historians.⁵⁹ As one historian puts it, no two of them agree ‘on the precise order in which events happened, on the reliability of the sources, or on which were the decisive moments’.⁶⁰ This is a week of incalculable historical significance, but in spite of the vast literature on it, the leading players remain hazy, still tantalisingly out of focus.

Instead of being ejected from the Commons for his illicit snapshots, Moore-Brabazon was made a Minister in the next administration. If anyone might have lent his expertise at interpreting ‘barbed-wire, holes and paths and camouflage’, and used it to decipher the faces that reach us today as small blobs of light, then it would have been this tall and ponderous ex-aviator, who once flew with a pig at his side to illustrate a popular saying.⁶¹

In vain, I scan his inadequate photographs for other players in this compelling drama. Clement Davies, the Independent Liberal MP who, with Amery, galvanised the rebels. Lloyd George, whom Davies had to drag out of his room to make one of his most effective speeches. Nowhere do I find the face of my great-uncle, the National Liberal MP Geoffrey Shakespeare. A friend of the Chamberlains, Uncle Geoffrey had served as Lloyd George’s Private Secretary in the 1920s; and in 1937 was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty where he was the official to greet Churchill on the outbreak of war, ‘so as to introduce to him the members of the Board’.⁶² Churchill was reoccupying the position that he had left in disgrace twenty-four years earlier, following the catastrophe of Gallipoli. It was to Geoffrey, his ‘indefatigable second in command’, that he gave his first order on that Sunday evening in September 1939 – asking for a bottle of whisky.⁶³

As a child, I knew that Uncle Geoffrey had mixed with senior politicians. He did not talk about it a lot. I would have asked, and he would have told me, but I was not interested then; not even in how he secretly ‘saved from the waste-paper basket’ pencilled notes which Lloyd George had flung away.⁶⁴ These personalities had little bearing on a boy growing up in the tropics. They were as remote and anonymous-sounding as the voice on the tannoy above a Singapore swimming pool which one humid afternoon announced the death of Sir Winston Churchill. Only later on have I felt the pull to read their memoirs, diaries and letters; to go back through the records, and speak to historians and to descendants of the politicians involved, as well as to combatants who fought in Norway, in an attempt to answer a simple, but still baffling question: how did a Minister who advocated, planned and directed one of the most disastrous campaigns since the Crimean War become Prime Minister?

A glint of light in one of Moore-Brabazon’s photographs is not the face of an MP, but represents the Victorian sandglass on the Table of the House in front of the Speaker’s Chair.⁶⁵ At about 5 p.m. on 8 May, it had become clear that the opposition would, in fact, vote on the motion for the Whitsun adjournment as a means of – as Churchill described it in his winding-up speech – having a vote of censure on the conduct of the government. At 11 p.m., the Speaker, Captain Edward FitzRoy, put the question: ‘That this House do now adjourn’. The division began, the sandglass was flipped over by one of the Clerks at the Table, and the fine grey granules started trickling down through the wasp-waist. Out of a possible total of 615 MPs, more than 550 were present in the Chamber on that Wednesday evening. They had six minutes to file into the Aye or the No Lobbies before the oak doors were locked. The government had begun the debate the previous afternoon in a reasonably confident mood. Now, no one could be certain of the outcome.

‘NAR-VIK’

‘My eye has always been fixed on Narvik.’¹

WINSTON CHURCHILL, 8 May 1940

‘Who will want to know about Giles Romilly?’²

GEORGE WEIDENFELD

The Norway Debate was about a military campaign. For a few intense weeks in the spring of 1940, the attention of everyone in Britain was fixed on a snow-bound coastline 1,300 miles away across the North Sea. After months of aggravating inactivity, during which an assumption formed that some important move to frustrate the enemy was being put into action, British forces were fighting for the first time in a land battle with the Nazis, and winning.

My nine-year-old father was one of millions who listened up to four times a day to a brown Bakelite wireless – ‘the focal point of the room as the TV is now’ – and followed reports of successful landings in Norway to oust the Nazi invaders. ‘It was a ray of hope. We’d had seven months of Phoney War, there’d been nothing. I remember thinking, “Jolly good, first action of the war and it’s been a success.” Most vividly, I recall the names. Narvik, Trondheim, Namsos …’

Between 8 April and 10 May, these names were repeated on the lunchtime and evening bulletins, in newspaper headlines, on people’s lips, in the air they breathed. On the Wiltshire Downs, the writer Frances Partridge thought that even the plovers seemed to be shrieking ‘NAR-vik’ into her ears.³

‘And then,’ my father says, ‘it all went dead for a few days and it never really came back.’ As April wore on, so did the sinister lull in the news. Fewer victories were announced. There were rumours that something had ⁴

Also by Nicholas Shakespeare

SIX MINUTES IN MAY

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

How Churchill Unexpectedly
Became Prime Minister

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE ON 7 MAY 1940

War Cabinet

Chiefs of Staff

Ministers

House of Commons

No. 10

Foreign Office

Buckingham Palace

Rebel Conservative MPs

Other rebel MPs

Labour Opposition MPs

Liberal Opposition MPs

Norway Campaign: Namsos

Norway Campaign: Narvik

Miscellaneous

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

SIX MINUTES IN MAY

1

PERFECT BLACKOUT

PART TWO

THE CAMPAIGN

2

‘NAR-VIK’

Also by Nicholas Shakespeare

SIX MINUTES IN MAY

NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE

How Churchill UnexpectedlyBecame Prime Minister

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE ON 7 MAY 1940

War Cabinet

Chiefs of Staff

Ministers

House of Commons

No. 10

Foreign Office

Buckingham Palace

Rebel Conservative MPs

Other rebel MPs

Labour Opposition MPs

Liberal Opposition MPs

Norway Campaign: Namsos

Norway Campaign: Narvik

Miscellaneous

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

SIX MINUTES IN MAY

1

PERFECT BLACKOUT

PART TWO

THE CAMPAIGN

2

‘NAR-VIK’

How Churchill Unexpectedly
Became Prime Minister