Churchill becomes leader of the Conservative Party

On the afternoon of 9 October 1940 Conservative MPs, members of the House of Lords and parliamentary candidates gathered at Caxton Hall, a meeting hall in the London district of Westminster, to choose a new leader of the Conservative Party. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was elected unanimously. He succeeded Neville Chamberlain, who had led the party since 1937 and who now, mortally ill with cancer, had to withdraw from public life. Five months after taking office as Prime Minister as a politician without a power base in his own camp, Churchill also became the formal leader of the party that held a huge majority in the House of Commons.

Some chronologies state that on this day Chamberlain “resigned his seat in the House of Commons”. That is inaccurate: Chamberlain left the government and the party leadership, as was announced on 3 October, but he did not give up his seat and remained MP for the Birmingham constituency of Edgbaston until his death. 9 October itself, on the other hand, was the day of the second part of this change: the choice of his successor at the head of the party.

Chamberlain’s illness

After his resignation as Prime Minister on 10 May, Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservatives and joined the five-man War Cabinet as Lord President of the Council. He headed the committee that coordinated economic and domestic affairs, chaired the Cabinet in Churchill’s absence and, during the War Cabinet crisis at the end of May, backed the Prime Minister against Lord Halifax, who wanted to explore the possibility of negotiations through Italy. The former Prime Minister’s loyalty was invaluable to Churchill, because many Conservative MPs still trusted Chamberlain more than him. When the two men entered the House of Commons on 13 May, the Conservative benches gave Chamberlain an ovation and received the new Prime Minister coolly.

In the summer of 1940 Chamberlain began to suffer almost continuously. At the end of July he underwent abdominal surgery. The surgeons found incurable bowel cancer, but according to his biographers they did not tell him the whole truth straight away, assuring him that no further operation would be needed. In mid-August he returned to work, and on 9 September to his office in London. The pain returned, however, and the night raids on London that began on 7 September forced him to spend his nights in a shelter and robbed him of sleep. On 19 September he left the capital for the last time and went to Highfield Park at Heckfield in Hampshire.

On 22 September Chamberlain tendered his resignation to Churchill. At first the Prime Minister did not want to accept it, but both understood that the sick man would not return to work. Churchill offered him Britain’s highest order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter, which his half-brother Austen had worn. Chamberlain declined, writing that he preferred to die plain “Mr Chamberlain”, like his father, without any title.

The reshuffle of 3 October

Chamberlain’s departure was announced on 3 October together with the most extensive government reshuffle since May. It was forced not only by the Lord President’s illness but also by the Blitz. The Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security, Sir John Anderson, who before the war had been responsible for civil defence and whose name was given to the corrugated-steel garden shelters distributed to the public, was sharply criticised in the press and in Parliament because the government was not building deep shelters. People took over Underground stations on their own initiative, and at first the authorities tried to stop them.

Anderson therefore swapped posts with the Labour politician Herbert Morrison, until then Minister of Supply. Morrison, who in the 1930s had led the London County Council, became Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security, while Anderson succeeded Chamberlain as Lord President of the Council and took his place in the War Cabinet. Also joining the War Cabinet were the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, and the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, for many years leader of the transport workers’ union, who since May had been directing the mobilisation of manpower. Lord Halifax additionally became Leader of the House of Lords.

The War Cabinet now had eight members: Churchill, Clement Attlee, Halifax, Arthur Greenwood, Lord Beaverbrook (Minister of Aircraft Production, who had sat in it since 2 August), Anderson, Wood and Bevin. Labour had three representatives in it. Other departments changed hands too: the industrialist Sir Andrew Duncan became Minister of Supply, Oliver Lyttelton took over the Board of Trade, John Moore-Brabazon the Ministry of Transport, the former head of the BBC Sir John Reith moved to the Ministry of Works, and the Dominions Office was taken over by Viscount Cranborne, who replaced Viscount Caldecote, appointed Lord Chief Justice.

The press greeted Chamberlain’s departure coolly. He himself complained in a letter that the comments had been “brief, cold and for the most part disparaging”, written without any sign of understanding that a human tragedy might be unfolding in the background. Parliament, which had not sat since 19 September, reassembled on 8 October. In a long speech on the war situation Churchill defended Anderson: he said there was no better “old war-horse” in the government, and that he was ashamed of the attacks made on him in “ignorant and spiteful quarters”. The criticism did not abate, however. The Labour MP Aneurin Bevan reproached Anderson for the internment of aliens and for his shelter policy; the Welsh MP Clement Davies pointed out that an eight-member War Cabinet in which five ministers ran major departments contradicted what Churchill himself had taught about the conduct of war; and the Liberals regretted that they had no representative in the War Cabinet.

The election at Caxton Hall

Until 1965 the Conservatives had no contested ballots between several candidates. A successor emerged from informal consultations among leading politicians, and from 1922 he was formally elected by a party meeting of MPs, peers, parliamentary candidates and representatives of the party organisation’s governing bodies, which in practice endorsed a single candidate by acclamation. So it was this time too. Churchill’s succession had been settled in the second half of September, when Chamberlain announced that he would step down: no other Conservative could seriously compete with a Prime Minister who during the Battle of Britain had won authority in the country and in his own party.

The meeting at Caxton Hall began, according to Andrew Roberts, at 4.30 p.m. The motion to confer the leadership on Churchill was moved by Lord Halifax, who as recently as May had been Chamberlain’s natural choice as Prime Minister. It was carried unanimously. Churchill began his reply with Chamberlain. He said that the loss the party and he himself had suffered was “heavy and painful”, and that all bade farewell to the departing leader with respect and admiration for the courage and integrity that had guided every act of his life. He recalled that three years earlier, in the same hall, he had seconded the motion electing Chamberlain leader, and that for the past thirteen months he had first been his subordinate and then head of a government in which Chamberlain had served “loyally and selflessly”. Their friendship, he said, had been “forged in the fire of war” into a comradeship in arms founded on mutual trust.

Churchill then explained why he was accepting the leadership even though he headed a government of all parties. He had, he said, asked himself two questions. The first was whether leading one party could be reconciled with the position of Prime Minister of a coalition. He concluded that since he had to settle domestic affairs every day with the Labour and Liberal leaders in the government, and since as Leader of the House of Commons he worked in a chamber in which the Conservatives had a huge majority and in which no election could be held in wartime, it would be easier for him if he could speak for that majority with its authority. The second question was personal: whether he, a politician who had twice changed party, could sincerely identify himself with the Tory tradition. He answered that throughout forty years of public life he had always served two causes which he regarded as supreme: “the enduring greatness of Britain and her Empire and the historical continuity of our island life”. He insisted that this was no time for partisanship and that the Conservative Party would let no one outdo it in sacrificing party interests to the common victory.

Why Churchill agreed

The decision was not self-evident. According to Churchill’s daughter, Mary Soames, his wife Clementine advised him against accepting the leadership. She believed that the Prime Minister of a national government ought to stand above party, and that tying himself to the Conservatives would alienate Labour and the working class, whose support was essential to the war effort. Churchill, however, chose otherwise. His biographers point out that he remembered the fate of David Lloyd George, who during the First World War had been Prime Minister of a coalition without a strong party of his own, and who in 1922 had been brought down by the Conservatives once they no longer needed him. The party leadership gave Churchill a secure footing in Parliament in case of the defeats, of which there would be no shortage in the years to come, and barred the way to rivals around whom Tories hostile to him might have rallied.

The election also symbolically closed the quarrel of the 1930s. The party that for a decade had kept Churchill away from power and rejected his warnings about Hitler, and that in 1938 had supported the Munich Agreement, now handed him its leadership. Many former Chamberlain supporters remained distrustful of him, but in October 1940 nobody any longer questioned that it was he who was leading the country.

Place in the war

Chamberlain survived his departure by barely five weeks. On 14 October King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited him at Highfield Park. In a letter to Sir John Simon he wrote that he had been drawn into politics by the hope of improving the lot of the poorest, that he regretted nothing he had done, and that he was reconciled to the fate that had befallen him so suddenly. He died on 9 November 1940. Three days later Churchill paid tribute to him in the House of Commons, saying that whatever history might say about those terrible years, Chamberlain had acted “with perfect sincerity according to his lights” and had striven with all his might to save the world from war. On 14 November Churchill and Halifax were among the pall-bearers at the service in Westminster Abbey, where Chamberlain’s ashes were laid beside those of Andrew Bonar Law. In private the Prime Minister is said to have remarked: “What shall I do without poor Neville? I was relying on him to look after the Home Front for me.”

The October changes shaped the government that, with minor adjustments, ran Britain until 1945. Anderson as Lord President became the de facto coordinator of the war economy and later had responsibility for the British atomic bomb programme. Morrison directed civil defence throughout the Blitz and the subsequent years of air raids, and Bevin, now a member of the War Cabinet, built the system of manpower mobilisation thanks to which Britain committed a larger share of its population to the war than any other country. In December 1940 Halifax went to Washington as ambassador, and his place at the Foreign Office was taken by Anthony Eden.

Churchill led the Conservative Party for fourteen and a half years, until April 1955. During the war the party leadership gave him a secure base, but in July 1945, in the first general election for ten years, the Conservatives under his leadership suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of Attlee’s Labour Party. It turned out then that voters could separate the victorious war leader from the party that before the war had pursued the policy of appeasement. For Poland, which in 1939 had received a guarantee from Chamberlain’s government, the former Prime Minister’s departure had no direct consequences: Władysław Sikorski’s government in London had been working with Churchill since June 1940, and the change of 9 October merely strengthened his position as the sole master of British war policy.