The vote of no confidence in Churchill

On the evening of 2 July 1942 the House of Commons concluded a two-day debate on a motion which read: “That this House, while paying tribute to the heroism and endurance of the Armed Forces of the Crown in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, has no confidence in the central direction of the war.” Twenty-five members voted for the motion and 475 against. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, emerged from the greatest political crisis of his government strengthened, though the criticism that had led to it did not die down until the first victories came in the autumn.

Formally it was not a classic motion of no confidence in the government but a vote of censure aimed at the way the war was being directed. Everyone understood, however, that its target was Churchill, who since May 1940 had combined the office of Prime Minister with that of Minister of Defence.

The crisis after Tobruk

The spring of 1942 was a succession of defeats for Britain. In February German battleships passed through the English Channel under the nose of the Royal Navy (Operation Cerberus), and a few days later came the surrender of Singapore. Then followed the loss of Burma. Churchill answered the wave of criticism in February with a Cabinet reshuffle: Clement Attlee formally became Deputy Prime Minister, and Sir Stafford Cripps, freshly returned from the embassy in Moscow and at that time the most popular politician in the country after Churchill, entered the War Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons. Some of the press and some members saw him as the Prime Minister’s natural successor.

The real shock came in June. On 21 June, while Churchill was in Washington, Tobruk fell and some 33,000 soldiers went into captivity. A week later the Eighth Army lost the Battle of Mersa Matruh and fell back to El Alamein, less than 110 km from Alexandria. On 25 June the by-election in the Maldon division of Essex, regarded as a safe Conservative seat, was won by an independent left-wing journalist, Tom Driberg. Wartime by-elections were not contests between the parties – an electoral truce was in force between the coalition partners – so the government candidate’s defeat was a pure test of public mood. Churchill himself attributed it to the impression made by Tobruk.

In those same days the Conservative member for Kidderminster, Sir John Wardlaw-Milne, chairman of the Select Committee on National Expenditure, tabled the censure motion. It was signed by members of various parties. The government made no attempt to block it and itself set the debate for 1 July, after the Prime Minister’s return.

The first day: the mover and the Duke of Gloucester

The debate began while the battle at El Alamein was being fought in Egypt and no one knew whether Rommel might not enter Alexandria. At the start of the sitting on 1 July Commander Stephen King-Hall asked Wardlaw-Milne whether he would postpone the motion until the fighting had been decided. He replied that only the government could judge whether the debate was harmful to the national interest, and the government had made no such request.

Wardlaw-Milne spoke seriously and to the point. He insisted that he was attacking not the commanders in the field but the leadership in London, and identified the combination of the offices of Prime Minister and Minister of Defence as the first fundamental mistake of the war. No one man, he argued, could carry politics, diplomacy, production and strategy all at once. He called for “a strong, independent man” at the head of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, with full authority over the conduct of the war, answerable only to the War Cabinet. Then, however, he added a proposal that weighed on the whole debate: it would be highly desirable, with the consent of King George VI, for the monarch’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, to become Commander-in-Chief of the British Army – without administrative duties, of course. The Duke was a professional officer, but no one regarded him as a commander. According to eyewitnesses, laughter broke out in the chamber, and the seriousness of the motion collapsed. Later in the debate several members openly ridiculed the idea.

The motion was seconded by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, the hero of the Zeebrugge raid of 1918, one of the principal speakers in the Norway Debate of 1940, and in October 1941 dismissed from his post as Director of Combined Operations. His charges, however, pointed in the opposite direction from those of the mover. Keyes lamented that three times – at Gallipoli, in Norway and in the Mediterranean – Churchill had been unable to carry out bold strokes because his naval advisers would not take the risk upon themselves. So Wardlaw-Milne wanted to take control of the war away from the Prime Minister, while Keyes wanted to give him more of it and free him from the Chiefs of Staff. The contradiction was glaring, and the government’s defenders were quick to point it out.

Replying for the government that day was the Minister of Production, Oliver Lyttelton. His long disquisition on arms production was, according to contemporary accounts, coolly received. There was no shortage of substantive criticism: members pointed to delays in the production of six-pounder guns, the lack of modern tanks and ground-attack aircraft, and shortcomings in the training of senior commanders.

The second day: Bevan and Churchill

On 2 July the sharpest speech was made by the Labour member for Ebbw Vale, Aneurin Bevan, who paid no heed to the fact that his party sat in the coalition. He accused the Prime Minister of failing to understand German methods of waging war, and argued that since the strategy was wrong, the wrong weapons had been produced too. He spoke of dive-bombers, of transport aircraft, of the defenders of Bir Hakeim, who according to his information had not even had two-pounder guns. He quoted the jibe going round the Army that if Rommel had served in the British Army he would still be a sergeant. The most famous line of the debate was his: “The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle.” The country, he added, was beginning to say that he fought debates like a war and the war like a debate. The former Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, also attacked the government sharply, arguing that the Prime Minister had misled the House by claiming that in Libya British soldiers were for the first time fighting the Germans with modern weapons on equal terms.

Churchill closed the debate. He began by remarking that it was hard for him to concentrate his thoughts on a dispute in the House while a “terrible and most critical battle” was being fought in Egypt. He did not hide the scale of the defeat: more than 50,000 men had been lost in Cyrenaica and Egypt, most of them taken prisoner; Rommel had advanced almost 400 miles and was approaching the Nile Delta; and hopes in the Middle East had receded further than at any time since the fall of France. At the same time he defended the winter’s Operation Crusader as a success and explained why the Tobruk garrison had been considered sufficient.

He struck hardest at the mover’s proposal. He sketched the picture of an all-powerful “potentate” who would command the armed forces, appoint and dismiss generals, have a royal duke under him as Commander-in-Chief, and leave the Prime Minister the role of explaining himself to Parliament whenever something went wrong. Such a system, he said, would be something quite different from parliamentary government and could easily turn into a dictatorship; he himself would take no part in it. “I am your servant, and you have the right to dismiss me when you please.” What they had no right to do, he went on, was to ask him to bear responsibility without the power of effective action. He ended by appealing for every vote: if the authors of the motion were “reduced to contemptible proportions” and their censure of the government was turned into a censure of themselves, a cheer would go up from every friend of Britain, and “a peal of misgiving” would ring in the ears of the tyrants.

The vote

The motion was defeated by 475 votes to 25. Among those voting for it were Wardlaw-Milne, Keyes, Bevan, Hore-Belisha, the leader of the Independent Labour Party James Maxton, and the Liberal Clement Davies. More than a hundred members did not vote – some were serving in the forces or were abroad, others deliberately abstained. The result was crushing, but it did not mean that the House was satisfied with the way the war was being run. Many members voted with the government because they believed that bringing down the Prime Minister at a moment when the fate of Egypt hung in the balance would be madness, and that the only real alternative to Churchill was Churchill himself.

Place in the war

The debate of 1–2 July 1942 was the last serious attempt to undermine Churchill’s position during the war. Its significance also reached beyond London: the vote was reported by the press all over the world, and the Prime Minister could show his allies in Washington and Moscow that Parliament stood behind him. The crisis did not pass at once, however. In the autumn Cripps, disappointed with his role, threatened to resign, and in November 1942 he left the War Cabinet to become Minister of Aircraft Production.

Churchill also drew military conclusions. At the beginning of August he flew to Cairo, relieved General Claude Auchinleck and entrusted the Middle East Command to General Harold Alexander and the Eighth Army to Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery. Victory in the Second Battle of El Alamein and the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942 closed the period in which the Prime Minister’s position was under threat. Bevan’s line about debates and battles, however, has remained in memory as one of the most telling criticisms of Churchill as a war leader.