The Tory Party At War

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Achtung, Achtung, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray, but no James Holland.

Yes, we have a very special guest today, and I've been wanting to talk to for ages since I first came across his book, and to talk about an aspect of the war as well that we tend not to touch on on the podcast that much, which is British politics with a view to what the Conservative Party's up to.

Because after all, the received version of events is there's a national government and and Labour win in 1945.

So let's not worry.

Let's just not worry about what happened within that national government and certainly within the Conservative part of the national government in the five years preceding the general election in 1945.

The khaki election, of course, which leads to the post-war consensus and the Attlee government and the NHS, the welfare state, and all those sort of touchstones of the way people look at the war through the prism of post-war politics.

And last year, I was recommended an absolutely amazing, eye-opening, and sort of game-changing book to read by the historian Kit Covell called Blue Jerusalem, which is about exactly what I've just sort of outlined.

And I'm so delighted to be joined by Kit all the way from Brisbane.

Kit, welcome to Weird Ways to Make You Talk.

Oh yeah, good evening.

Lovely to be here.

There you go.

Well, yeah, it's evening for you, morning for me.

You're in Brisbane and where's your office?

You said you're just up the road from...

Yeah, so I'm actually just up the road from MacArthur's office.

He was based in the fanciest, brand-spanking new office building in Queensland.

One considerably nicer than the government one that I work in to this day.

Right, okay.

Well, I suppose, you know, that befits the man, doesn't it?

Well, now,

you took on perhaps the, I mean, undiscovered area in a way of Conservative Party politics during the Second World War.

And I think for most people, you know, obviously Churchill's a Tory, but he's not an obvious Tory, is he?

And he's, in a way, atypical of the Conservative Party by 1940, isn't he?

So, I mean, we should start really with Churchill because so much happens in his wake and despite him and with and without his involvement within the Conservative Party and then within the national government.

Where does Churchill fit into the Tory Party picture when he comes to office in May 1940?

Well, I think the first thing you have to say is that Churchill is a man who is very much not loved by the Tory grassroots or by the Tory hierarchy.

Yeah.

Reading correspondence from

Tory members to each other, they talk about this kind of violent, dangerous alcoholic who shouldn't be let anywhere near the levers of power.

And of course,

sometime later, he's a great national hero.

So he's distrusted because he's a man who's not just ratted.

He famously left the Conservative Party from the Liberals, but does something even worse, which is re-ratted by

coming back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he's not, you know, his support is not within the Conservative Party.

Yet, today he's thought of as, you know, the greatest Conservative leader there's ever been.

Yeah, which suggests that there has to have been a schism within the Conservative Party in order to make that flip.

People have to have been left behind by the process of the war and during the war.

Because after all, appeasement, you know, we're using that word advisedly.

Appeasement is the mainstream Conservative Party politics in the 30s, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely.

For the very good reason that most Conservatives, you know, want to conserve things and they recognise that a huge global war could potentially massively disrupt, perhaps even end the empire and also completely change the social constitution of Britain and the place of the wealthy and the upper class and put labour on top.

So they want to keep as far away from it from possible and they don't like Churchill banging the drum.

Yeah, because I think one of the things to remember about, one of the things to bear in mind, there has been no revolution in the United Kingdom, in Britain.

There has everywhere else, pretty much.

France is post-First World War.

You know, Germany, there's been a revolution, or there's been two.

There's obviously been the revolution in Russia, the Soviet Union.

If you are the Tory state and you've managed to, I mean, you can pin the First World War on the Liberals, which is the other thing you can do politically, can't you?

You can say, that wasn't us.

You know, the thing to bear in mind is that they've got through that episode by the skin of their teeth, the Conservatives, haven't they?

They're the political party that survived and they've seen off threats from the left, haven't they?

And so they want to hang on to where they are.

They want to hang on to it.

They want to hang on to it politically.

They also want to hang on to it personally because it is the sons of conservative politicians who are likely going to be the officers who get cut down in what they imagine to be a repeat of the First World War.

Like a whole generation.

Because in some ways, there has been a revolution in Britain.

It hasn't been a political revolution, but it's been a social revolution.

A whole generation of young men have been wiped out, particularly amongst the officer class.

Gender relations are fundamentally changed.

And they see all of that and worry well god what happened last time can you imagine what it's like again yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and with the specter of the soviet union in the distance because after all that's the thing that colors so much politics in the 30s isn't it is the soviet union rather than nazi germany as people are thinking well that that's what's on offer isn't it and it's the bleakest view of a social upheaval that you that's what they're worried about yeah yeah absolutely yeah literally you have conservatives who you know skip ahead of it when after the fall of france they're off famously Chicks Channon, great, wealthy American socialite and conservative MP.

He's burying his Faberge eggs down at the bottom of the garden.

Actually, he asked his manservant to do it for him, his most trusty gardener, because he's worried not just about the Germans turning up and taking it, but the social revolution that might accompany some kind of invasion and the whole world and his financial position being turned upside down.

Yeah, because after all, I mean, so much the worry about bombing is about social upheaval, isn't it?

You know, Duet's theories about a strategic bombing are that the population rise up and say to a government, enough's enough.

We're not prepared to put up with this.

That's the idea of the leverage of bombing the civilian population.

And everyone thinks that's what's going to happen in the British political classes across the board.

So you can, I mean, had I Faberge eggs at the time, I don't know, would you pawn?

I probably pawned them rather than buried at the bottom of the gun.

There we are.

So Churchill is this, one of the things you've got to do with Churchill is turn him into a live politician.

What are politicians like?

Particularly when they've fallen out with their party, they look for positions, don't they?

Around which to build momentum and power and to mark themselves out.

So he's anti-Indian independence, which must be to reassure Imperial Tories that he's one of them, really.

Yeah, plus he believes in it.

He believes in it, but that kind of helps as well.

Well, yeah, but this is the fascinating thing with Churchill, isn't it?

Because he does pick positions and you think he probably believes this as well as it being bonkers and doesn't do him any favours, but he probably does believe it but he backs Edward VIII which is absolutely crazy given the the direction of travel you know in public opinion in political opinion definitely believes it I mean I mean there is a wonderful there's a wonderful book out there with a perfect title much better than mine which is about Churchill up till 1939 which is called Churchill a career and failure

because particularly over the 1930s he keeps on picking issue after issue and it just going completely the wrong way yeah in many ways he's rescued by the second world war by the fact that his prophecy has come true.

Yes.

And one of the interesting things, this is, of course, you know, people forget he was in Neville Chamberlain's cabinet as well.

Yeah.

The two of them actually got on quite well, except for the fact that Churchill kept on writing minutes to Chamberlain with the view that he would have some records later to write about his

post-war book, which drove Chamberlain up the wall.

Yeah, when Chamberlain says that, Winston's preparing his memoirs, it's quite extraordinary, isn't it?

But the point is, as you say, the war rescues him, but he has chosen Nazism as the great threat, rearmament as the sort of one of his causes.

And as you say, it just so happens he turns out to be right.

Yeah, parts of it turn out to be right.

Yeah.

One of the things that he suggests as a recipe to prevent war is the creation of an enormous bomber fleet, which, yeah, works in 1944, 45, but in 1938, as we find out in 1940, is a bit of a disaster.

And if Chamberlain and the government had gone along Churchill's way and spent all of the money on not great two-engine bombers rather than Spitfires and aerial defense, we could have...

Yeah, we could have been in real trouble.

So he's someone with a bit of a kind of a mixed record.

But the important thing, he gets the overall thing right.

He knows where the threat is coming from.

And you can and people do say many things against him, but he's right.

He's just right.

And he's good at transmitting that too.

It's the other thing is

his sort of interface with the press.

He's good at that, isn't he?

Because he's a journalist, right?

So he's able to handle people like Beaverbrook, or at least have a fruitful relationship with them.

And because they fall in and out with each other, because they're both mercurial, he's still able to cultivate those relationships and maintain them and therefore run a way of transmitting how he feels about stuff fairly effectively, even though he's been cast out from the party.

Yeah, and I mean, the party really do go after him.

There are people within the higher echelons of the party that are working to actively undermine Churchill.

And that's one of the reasons why he is,

very careful when he gets into office that he does actually take up eventually the mantle of the Conservative Party leadership after Chamberlain resigns and then dies.

Because he's also looking...

So often the case in British politics, particularly during the Second World War, is that everyone is in some ways fighting the last war.

They're looking back to what happened in World War I.

And Churchill is deeply paranoid that he's going to end up stranded like Lloyd George,

the head of a coalition, the head of a government, but without a party behind him.

So with a degree of reluctance, but also a lot of realism, he says, yes, I will be the leader of the Conservative Party.

I mean, it helps.

They don't really have any other options either.

And that is, you know, that's a relationship that works in the long term, but it's an uneasy one for quite quite a long period.

Yeah.

I mean, how long would you say?

How long is he really having a hard time with them?

Well, I mean, this is the question.

There are no parties is universally united.

There's always factions.

There's always groups that are opposed.

I think he manages to get the bulk of the party membership on side quite quickly.

It might seem remarkable to us these days.

I mean, you used to always say that, oh, a Conservative Party is an incredible organization because it gets rid of its leaders very quickly, but then it rallies around them, which, you know, if recent years has proved to be anything but the case.

But it was happening in the,

you know, in in the second world war and you have the amazing things like the fact that conservative party clubs quickly change their name from you know chamberlain house to churchill house right okay and so he gets the membership on side it takes a little bit longer with the the mps famously when churchill makes his first appearance in the house of commons after becoming prime minister there's relative silence when he walks in but when chamberlain turns up there's this great explosion of applause and actually chamberlain and churchill who continue to get on quite well after Churchill takes over, Churchill has to ask Chamberlain to kind of, can you get the lads on side?

Really?

And then eventually, yeah, and then Churchill pays him back because after Guilty Men comes out, the kind of tirade against the pre-war Conservative governments, there's an awful lot of knives out for Chamberlain.

And Churchill, there's basically to his Labour colleagues, stop it, leave him alone.

So they end up having a pretty kind of good working relationship for that part of the war in which they're together.

Yeah, Guilty Men is, I think, that's well worth talking about because its influence, I think, is we're still in the wake of Guilty Men in terms of the historiography of the Second World War, particularly

appeasement.

When you hear a modern politician saying we can't appease the way Chamberlain did, Guilty Men is at the core of that argument, isn't it?

And that tradition.

Yeah, I mean, and for those who don't know, Guilty Men is a book.

It's written by Cato, which is the anonymous name for a group of three authors, one liberal, one conservative, also former captain of the England rugby team, and most famously, Michael Foote, the future Labour leader.

And it's an incredible plumbing.

It's a wonderful piece of journalism.

And it's all about the idea that the British Army in France and at Dunkirk is damned before they take the field.

That's the big place.

They have been let down by the government, by the conservative government of the 30s, and they're to blame, not the soldiers.

Yeah.

What's interesting about this, for instance, in Montgomery's memoirs, he says that completely.

He says, we were down from the outset.

We never had any chance.

Politicians had let us down.

It's very interesting that he completely, whether he thinks that or not, you know, or whether he's running with opinion in his memoir, he says the same thing.

It's a very, it's an argument with tremendous traction, isn't it?

And it definitely is one of the problems that the Conservative Party has to deal with over the next five years, isn't it?

In the end, the public in general think, well, this is your war and the mess at the start that made it last so long is your fault.

Yeah.

And who's the person who saves, you know, saves, quote-unquote, the country?

Is Churchill, who you didn't like, was actually brought into office as a result of a backbolt revolt in the Conservative Party against Chamberlain, but who only got there because he had the support of the Labour Party.

And, you know, who is it that's actually doing the fighting or, you know, putting the government together?

Well, there are Labour people there.

So that old argument, the one that worked so well for the Tories in the 1920s and 30s, and frankly worked brilliantly for the Tories for much of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, that Labour was the unpatriotic party and that Tories, the party of the flag, just doesn't work as a result.

Yeah, they can't make it fly at all, can they?

No.

And they tried desperately.

They tried desperately.

And there's some wonderful stuff in the 1945 general election, some almost black propaganda that they put out there.

The Conservatives push a book that pretends to be a set set of correspondence between a German spy and his masters in Berlin that are saying, oh, how wonderful it's going to be that we'll have Labour in charge because, you know, they'll never,

you know, they'll never stand up for Britain.

So they do everything they can to try and make the argument, but it just won't fly for very good reason.

Because part of the issue with guilty men is it's sort of right.

And, you know, a polemic with enough truth in it will lay waste to all other argument, won't it?

It's the truth.

It's certainly in politics.

And

that's what happens with it.

I read it ages ago.

It was an absolutely remarkable piece of journalism.

It's sort of, you can't argue with it.

You can see why it was so powerful at the time.

Yeah, and it also comes at a time when there are a lot of other really important arguments being made that kind of reinforce some of the cases of being made in Guilty Men.

So, and it very much links to this idea of the people's war.

Yes.

So the Conservatives have let down the army.

They've let down the country.

See what happens in Dunkirk.

Who rescues the country?

It's the people.

It's the classic J.B.

Priestley George Orwell story about the little boats turning up and rescuing the men from the beaches.

While we all know, certainly listening to this pod, that it's not...

And actually, a cigar I hand off as a Pole.

There's Polish destroyers there as well,

as well as other

allied boats.

But it's a military effort, not really your man in his dinghy or your paddle steamer.

But it's an incredibly powerful story.

I mean, even though I know it's wrong, when I hear people talking about it, I get that little chill up the spine.

It's just so beautiful, this sense of, you know, people coming to rescue.

It really, I mean, it tapped into some very deep, deep stories that the heart of British historical life.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it is still, you know, it's the one where you're best off, I I always think it's you're best off not intervening in a pub argument saying, actually, it's a Royal Navy.

Just let that one, or at a dinner party, just let, I just let that one run.

There's no point going, well, I think you'll find actually they're off the mold.

They're just, you know, they're destroyers.

There's no point.

I mean, it is interesting, isn't it?

Because there are lots of arguments about the idea of a people's war.

And there is this distinction, isn't there?

Between a Conservative war is a country's war, a patriotic war, isn't it?

On the left, it's a people's war.

Because those are the two different worldviews, essentially, aren't they?

And they overlay one another to an extent, but then do come away.

The left is a class analysis of that, isn't it, rather than a national, as it were, patriotic interpretation.

Yeah, and absolutely.

And these two interpretations were running together at the time.

Yeah.

There were people who were making the argument that you've just made.

The first broadcast after the BEF is rescued is not from J.B.

Priestley.

It's actually from the director of military intelligence for the BEF, who makes a broadcast, broadcast, you know, praising the forces.

Sometimes I think the thing that I find most interesting is that in the conservative press and in the conservative world, what's celebrated is not Dunkirk, but Calais.

And that's seen as the kind of the great mark of British military heroism.

So there's a counter-narrative to this sense that there is the people rescue the army.

It's A, the services coming together to rescue themselves.

And B, actually, Arthur Bryant, the very popular historian of his day, kind of talks about, well, who were the bravest people who fought in the rear guard?

It was the guards.

Oh God.

The men with the blue and burgundy striped ties who are the real heroes of this.

And this is an argument that continues on throughout the war between left and right.

Who are the real victors?

Who are the people who have won the war?

Is it the quote-unquote people which are reimagined mainly as the working class with a really important role for the trade unions and that understanding of the people?

Or is it the military and the military viewed as being particularly an aristocratic upper-class-led force?

And there are people on the left who want a sort of people's army in the Soviet style without any ranks and all that sort of thing, aren't they?

They think that there needs to be that kind of shake-up.

You need to, it didn't work, BF didn't work, so abandon that way of doing things in the army, start again and have a literary people's army, aren't there?

I mean, there are people actually making this argument.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, George Orwell is one, the author, he fought in the Spanish Civil War along with another chap called Tom Winteringham, who's very important, another Spanish Civil War veteran.

Tom Winteringham is talking about.

So imagine this, you're reading your daily newspaper and you've got an article in there from Tom Winteringham talking about how you can make your own grenade to disrupt a German tank.

And this is the sense.

We don't, the argument is we don't need these hide-bound brass hat red tab generals.

Look where they got us in the First World War.

Look where they got us in the um just now yeah what we need is the organized working class the man with the shotgun popped up against the firestead ready to go out fight with his mates god blimey oh thank god it didn't happen well yeah

basically that's exactly you you read my mind from thousands of miles away i mean the thing is you know we because we talk on the podcast an awful lot about steel not flesh you know in fact i think it's one of the in the five six years we've done this one of the things the arguments we've really sort of leant into and looked at and talked about and sort of the eminent sense of it.

Because lately, James and I have been talking about how when you look at the Soviet way of doing war, it's the opposite.

And they're so profligate with life that they actually cause themselves, their later demographic problems are far, far like in excess of anything the British state had to deal with.

You know, the 200,000 casualties in the battle for Berlin in a fortnight.

It makes the British Army, which is accused of timidity and caution, look eminently sensible, I think.

But still not flesh.

Yeah, it's a cons it's a consistent

way of fighting the war because you know the revolution that would come from that many people dying for a country Britain, they're very aware that Britain, of all of the big competent nations, has the smallest population.

So, what could happen?

Well, you could run down your own population, which would have enormous consequences if you win to balance the power of the world.

Or you could do the other thing, which is to enlist the forces of the Empire.

There's a wonderful book by Tyler Tom Ritchringham called One Million Allies If We Choose, which says, Look, give every peasant in India a rifle,

every person in the British Empire a gun.

And there are people who argue it, and Tories know if you do that, well, they're going to want their countries.

So, for British Conservatives, steel not flesh is not just a military strategy, it's a political strategy to maintain the kind of world that they want to see after war, which is a world in which there hasn't been a social revolution at home and the British Empire Empire very much remains intact.

Yeah.

I'll tell you what we'll do.

We'll take a very quick break and then we'll come back.

I'm absolutely loving every morsel of this conversation.

It's brilliant.

We'll see you next, everybody.

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Welcome back to Way of Ways to Make You Talk.

I'm talking to Kit Covell about, well, what's under the bonnet in British politics, Conservative politics particularly, because after all, they've been setting the tone through government, really.

And the thing I really want to talk about as well, Kit, the no-confidence debate that Churchill has to face

in 1942, where he, of course, he doesn't lose, because that's, although that's not impossible, is it?

Because Asquith Falls Chamberlain, after all, has been evicted for far, you know, Norway's small beer disaster-wise, compared to Singapore, Gazalines, Tobruk, you know, Greece, relentless sort of 18 months of calamity the British Army endures in, you know, on foreign shores.

How does this debate come about?

Take us through the story of that.

Yeah, Yeah, so the debate comes about in July 1942.

It's after the fall of Tobruk.

It's at absolutely the nadir of the British Army's fortune.

There are debates about what's called the strategic direction of the war.

And there are essentially people who are upset with how things are going, Tories

largely, who are saying,

Churchill's not doing a great job.

in all of this.

We need a complete reorganization of the way in which the war is being organised at a top level.

There's that element, and they are really gunning for Churchill, but you can't say that.

He's still incredibly popular.

So they have to find ways to argue about Churchill and strategy without really arguing about it.

So the debate really turns on the question of arms and armaments.

And there's a group of kind of recalcitrant Tory MPs led by a chap called John Ward Sir John Wardlaw Milne, who, fantastic character.

My goodness, you could go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole there for hours, I promise you.

And he argues that

one of the big problems are British tanks in the desert, that British tanks are undergunned, under armoured, and not reliable compared to the German ones.

And this is a critique more broadly of the production strategy that's saying, look, you guys, it's 1942.

You guys have been in office two years now, pretty much.

And what have you got to show for it?

All of the weapons, you know, you've lost every battle you fought except for the Battle of Britain.

And what was that fought with?

That was fought with weapons that were designed and built in the 1930s.

So they go after the weapons question, A, because there's quite a lot of people in that kind of grouping who actually do know a little bit about weapons, but also because it's a way of getting at Churchill.

And finally, because weapons are really important to this kind of steel-knot-flesh thing.

You've got to have the right, you know, if you're going to fight a war of machines, you've got to have the right ones.

Yeah.

So they take on this argument.

They prosecute it pretty well.

There are, you know, Churchill relents and he's going to say that he's going to set up a new ministry with a new minister to really look at these problems, et cetera.

But the end result is that, as so often is the case with Maverick right-wing Tory backbenchers,

they don't just shoot themselves in the foot and bazooka themselves in the foot.

And John wardlaw milne says you know what we need is a grand war supremo and the person he proposes is a the duke of gloucester oh god

who everyone's like who what why

um

and what had until that point been quite a measured restrained thoughtful informed intelligent debate collapses right done that's the end of that and churchill sallies forth right it's that stuff about weapons though is that

that's become the story, hasn't it?

People do, you know, British tank procurement's hopeless.

And very often, you'll read stuff about tank procurement, and it'll always be, you know, this even came up in Parliament.

Well, yeah, but lots of things come up in Parliament.

And very often they come up for other reasons.

As you've outlined there, that the reason they're asking about weapons, and in a way, it sort of reminds you of, we can't criticise the king, so we'll criticise his advisors.

It's got that sort of feeling, hasn't it?

Or if only Chairman Mao knew about this, he'd be terribly upset.

It's got that texture to it, hasn't hasn't it?

Because if a leader is popular, you've got to come at him, as you say, you've got to come at him somehow.

And weapons are obviously important.

But this has also become the sort of received view of British weapon procurement in the Second World War, isn't it?

That for two years it's hopeless and then they finally figure it out.

Yeah, it is.

And I mean, the other, you know, talking about kind of these subterranean political issues is

there is this debate about strategy going on.

Again, it's related to weapons and it's a question about kind of what weapons Britain should be producing.

So there are people who are, you know, we need to fight a land war.

So, emphasis very much on tanks.

Then, there are people who are saying, oh, it's a terrible idea.

Let's just build a massive, massive bomber force.

There's a wonderful chap who actually puts Sir John Lord Will in the shade for his maverick nature, not Senor Pemberton Billing.

Oh, yes,

involved in the creation of the Spitfire.

So, he's got a bit of kudos.

He's involved in the creation of the RAF as well.

You know, he argues for gigantic fleets fleets of bombers that would stream over Germany every night and

destroy the enemy.

And then actually, the most interesting lot who you hear least about are the people who say you should actually spend all the money on the navy.

And that really this continental way of fighting is

frankly not British.

It's not the British way of war.

What we should do is protect the home island,

protect the roots of empire.

Frankly, let the Germans and the Russians ding-dong it out between them and while keeping the the British Empire kind of safe and wealthy.

But yeah, you can't say that.

You can't in the middle of 1942 say, I don't actually really care too much who would win between the Germans and the Russians.

So you have to find other ways to talk about it.

And talking about armaments is how you do that.

I mean, there are people, I mean, Alan Clark, who was the Tory politician in the 90s diarist, that was his view.

You know, he stuck to that.

He said, we never should have got involved.

Let the Bolsheviks and the Nazis annihilate one another and just let him get on with it.

And he's representative of what was left of that view.

Because, after all, once the war's started and appeasement's over, as a Tory, you've got to kind of pick your path, haven't you, within the party?

And there are all sorts of people in the Conservative Party because you've got industrialists, haven't you?

So people who represent high business.

You've got the sort of small business people, so the Margaret Thatcher's dad, as it were.

You've got back-to-the-land Tories who care about nature.

So obviously

don't like the industrialists much.

You've got out and out imperialists.

You've got people who are pretty keen on the Nazis as well in the in the in the you know.

Yeah, yes, there's a fair number of those.

And there's a fair number of those.

All of these people are having to find their place in the different currents that the war's offering them, right?

And at the same time, as we've already talked, as we've already said, the Tory Party is very much not anyone's flavour within the population.

I mean, the opinion polling in 1942 is firmly pro-labour, isn't it?

It's high 40s in favour of Labour, isn't it?

From the, really, from the middle of the war up to the election, it doesn't really change much, does it?

Yeah, I mean, it's safe to say that the opinion polling that's being done in the Second World War is nothing like as good as the opinion polls that we have.

But you're absolutely right.

And you can tell from also from things like by-elections and now we have kind of going over mass observation.

I know you've talked about on the pod these kind of social surveys that are being done.

It's the case.

Once mid-war, Churchill remains popular, but the Tories aren't.

As soon as, you know, post-Alamein, post-Beveridge Report, which I'm sure we'll get to,

the sense we're talking about Britain's not going to lose the war at this point.

The question is, how is it going to win and what kind of world is it going to win?

And from that point onwards, when you're asking those questions, it's Labour who seem like the party with the best answers rather than the Tories.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And after all, the Tories are also, they're tied up with the Great Depression, aren't they?

And, you know, Labour took public action.

You know, the Great Strike is an attempt to change that order.

Because there's that famous post, isn't there, which is with a slum, child in a slum behind, you know, your future is the sort of gleaming thing that looks like the National Theatre.

Churchill very much objected to.

He didn't like that kind of, here's your future coming.

One of the core things in all of this, beverage is what this is all about, isn't it?

Is what is the deal?

What's the deal between the citizen, his family and the state?

Once you've started conscripting people, there has to be a deal, doesn't it?

Not just we're going to win the war.

There has to be a future.

And this is where labor are so closely, intimately tied to that possibility.

Beveridge is sort of catalytic in this, isn't he?

It gets written down finally.

It gets fleshed out in people's imaginations properly.

Yeah.

And what's really interesting about Beveridge is when I was at university, I was forced to, you know, sit down and read this rather

quite a long.

It's got social insurance and allied services.

This was a gig that was given to Beveridge.

So he was given the task of basically trying to reorganise British civil service because Beveridge was a pain to the government.

He was always coming up with ideas.

They wanted to get rid of him.

It's like, let's give him something really boring and time-consuming to do.

Welfare system.

There you go.

And 95% of it is deeply, deeply dull.

But he uses the 5%, the introduction, to really kind of g up the report, you know, talking about

the five giants he's going to slay of idleness, uh, want, disease, ignorance, squalor, goes massively beyond his brief and says, oh, here's this marvelous plan I've created.

By the way, it relies also upon a plan to generate full employment and have a universal healthcare system.

But it does catch the imagination.

And it catches the imagination partly because the government had been queasy about putting out anything beforehand, but also because it's really good at appealing to lots of different types of people.

So what it does is it suggests that, yeah, there'll be some universalism in the project.

So everyone will have access to things like health services, pensions, etc.

So that kind of gets your kind of your labor, socialist, equality vote.

But it also gets your kind of liberal vote because it's very much about personal responsibility.

It's an insurance scheme.

So it's about paying in.

And it even gets quite a bit of conservative support because it supports things like family allowances, which are seen as being a really important way to raise the population and create the great little imperial soldiers of the future.

So, I mean, he plays an absolute blinder in terms of getting different currents of support on board.

And it really does, yeah, captures the imagination in a way that I don't think any report has ever done.

Yeah, before or since.

It is interesting, though, because we are, what's emerging in the way we're talking about this is there are moments which are crystallized.

So guilty men crystallizes a feeling in a moment doesn't it and this is maybe the nature of a society going under such a such stress as a war is that if an argument pushes through it sort of and captures people's imaginations not a lot politicians can do about it no and it comes at the the perfect timing in terms of like it's just after alabam um so there's you know the sense of possibility, a sense of a turning tide that really, you know,

gets caught up with it.

And what do Tories do to sort of try and ride that wave?

Because there's the Education Act in 1944, famously, which is Rad Butler, isn't it?

Who is trying to sort of, they're trying to do something, aren't they?

They're trying to offer something while they're still in office, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, and this is why the book is called, with my desperate desire to ensure that I had something punning and cunning.

It's called Blue Jerusalem, which is a play on the idea that Labour is building a new Jerusalem.

So this is Blue, the Tory version.

And the idea that Conservatives were just sitting in their hands while all of this was going on is for the birds.

They were very much involved in questions about reconstruction right from the word go and had their own bold ideas for the future.

So when it comes to welfare, you have people coming up with

very serious people, very connected people like the Court Olds,

one of the largest chemical manufacturers, Die Stuff, it's called, Pep Lord Perry from Ford, captains of industry coming up with plans for kind of a corporate welfare system, a system where the government basically guarantees the success of British companies.

And it's through British companies that you'll be provided with all of your welfare and health services.

So very, very different.

And you mentioned Rab Butler, who probably comes up with the most radical ideas of the war for the Conservative Party.

It's funny because he's someone who in the post-war period is thought of as something of a moderate, the ultimate consensus politician.

We heard of this idea of

butlerism, but

during the war, he's far from it.

He's partly to try to kind of re resuscitate his reputation after being closely aligned with Chamberlain, is he comes up with ideas for what he calls a new Christian state.

And he's the big pusher of this, this idea that, well, do you want the, you know, those totalitarian regimes might, they might have something going for them, he thinks since 1940.

They appear to be winning.

Maybe we can learn a thing or two from them.

Maybe we can have a population that's all united and G'd up together where people have obligations to work and obligations to international service.

But how do we stop it descending into Hitlerism and totalitarianism?

Well, we'll do it through Christianity.

So his plan is to, yeah, create a new Christian state, which has all the best features, the unity, the purpose, the drive of totalitarianism, while still maintaining the best of British in terms of liberty of the subject, etc.

And you guarantee that by making sure that all of the leaders are Christian and the population is Christian.

And there's lots of, you know, these ideas are very much not just Rab Butler's, they're kind of floating around.

T.S.

Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, there's a group of Christians who have similar ideas.

What's interesting about Rab is he doesn't just talk about this, but he actually gets some of it into practice.

So I don't know about you, Al, but when I was at school, you still had to do the act of kind of Christian worship in primary school.

We all got together and we sang our little hymns and we occasionally have a talk from the vicar, pop down.

And that is a result of the 1944 Education Act.

I went to a Church of England primary school, which is completely in that Butlerian mold, isn't it?

Yeah, it was a Church of England school, but it was financed by the state.

And here is the state actually supporting religion,

predominantly Anglicanism.

And it's also creating the new leaders of the Christian state that Butler wants to see created.

He's still very much an elitist.

He's a Tory.

So we think of grammar schools, which are seriously heavily promoted as a result of the 94 Education Act as a great equalizing measure.

Yeah, social mobility thing, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, it allows the, you know, the bright son of a bricky or the daughter of a school dinner lady to you know to rise up in the ranks.

But for Butler, what was really important was the fact that these bright people would be inculcated in a Christian education.

So you'd get a new generation of Christian leaders ready to lead the nation, lead this new Christian civilization, as he talked about.

Gosh, how extraordinary.

I mean, arguments about education, framed that way, you'd never have, no one would ever think to pitch a thing like that now.

It's extraordinary, isn't it?

I mean, it really, I mean, obviously, pastors a foreign country and all that, that is an idea that is pretty alien to the way we think about education now, isn't it?

I mean, it's extraordinary.

extraordinary.

I mean, and this is the same across the Second World War.

I think so much we live in the shadow of, understandably, about what happened.

And we have a tendency to think that the future was inevitable.

that there was always going to be a labor victory in 1945, that the type of victory was going to be massive, that the type of labor, the country that comes out of it was going to be the same.

But my book is really about saying, look, no, there's various alternative Britons that could have come out of the Second World War.

Okay, you know, they might not, they're probably less likely to happen than

what happened as a result.

But plenty of things happened in the Second World War that no one saw coming.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

But the bulk of the politics is reacting to things that no one saw coming, after all.

Do you know, that's what characterizes it as an event, isn't it?

The

sudden turns of fate that no one is expecting.

And the election, it is a landslide for Labour.

Everyone knows how landslides work in first-past the post-politics.

They can actually be quite close.

The numbers in terms of parliamentary seats are very much tipped to Labour, but it's close enough, like any British general election, isn't it?

There's an 11% swing.

So it is big.

It's a big movement.

And what's interesting is it happens in a lot of places.

So the Tories end up losing Stockton-on-T's, Harold McMillan's,

but they also lose...

So, you know, the Red Bull that was there before.

Yeah, of course.

But they also lose Winchester and they lose so many of the important seats around

London.

The Conservative Party runs as the national.

They make it very clear, but they do suffer a national defeat.

And Labour do very well pretty much everywhere.

Yeah, and it's Mr.

Churchill's proposal to the electorate, isn't it?

Rather than the Conservative.

That's his manifesto, isn't it?

A declaration of policy to the electors.

I mean, it's a peculiar business, isn't it?

The vote national help him finish the job rather than...

Please don't mention the Tory Party.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it's one of those things where if you actually sit down and read these documents, and if you hadn't been inculcated in the way that we think about British politics post-45, you come to some kind of interesting revelations because the conservative, the so-called conservative manifesto doesn't mention the word conservative once.

No.

And the labor manifesto doesn't mention the word equality once.

No.

And socialism says socialism once, doesn't it?

Yeah, very quiet.

It's all about Labour is a patriotic party and state planning is about efficiency.

It's not about levelling everyone.

Fair shares, yes, but equality, we'll just keep that on the QT.

Yeah, and competence, isn't it?

The Labour, it's about competence because the Tories have burned their boats in that regard, haven't they?

They aren't regarded as competent.

One last thing I want to talk about is the death of imperialism as a political force in British politics.

Because I think, you know, David Edgerton writes about this a lot, you know, that in 1939, it's Empire Day.

It's this thing that's celebrated in Britain.

And by 1945, everything, all the politics is framed through a national prism.

There isn't, Empire isn't mentioned.

Time is clearly up.

The men fighting in Burma, for instance, the British men fighting in Burma, it's really what's in it for them is very much the attitude of the soldier in Burma.

You know, you've got to get the job done, but for what?

And the Indian soldier is looking beyond the horizon of the end of that war and to his future in India.

What on earth, how does imperialism get so thoroughly snuffed out?

Again, it's one of those things that's perhaps more subterranean than you think.

We have to be always very careful when we talk about Britain, this and Britain.

People thought about Britain in a way that's slightly different, very different to the way that we thought about Britain.

When people talked about Britain in the 1940s, many of them thought of Britain fundamentally as the British Empire.

It was kind of indistinguishable.

It's one of the same.

And there were plenty of Tories who were deeply, deeply concerned about the future of the British Empire.

But again, it's a thing that you have to be a bit careful talking about.

Because what is from 1941 onwards the big threat to the British Empire?

It's not Germany or Japan.

It's probably America.

And when you're alleys, and you've spent, you know, God knows how many years talking about how terrible Nazi Germany is and Imperial Japan, you can't very well then say, yeah, but really after the war, we're going to have to deal with the Yoms because they're out to, you know, as Leo Amory says, cabinet minister, Secretary of State for India, and Burba, the Americans are trying to build their own economic labens ram during the war.

Yeah, yeah, around the cabinet table.

So

there is strong imperial feeling, particularly within the Conservative Party, but it's hard for them to express it because the danger comes from the Yanks and the Yanks are so important to winning the war.

And Churchill is a great America file.

Yes, I mean, and Alfred Yodel, when he's in Rams, says to Major General Strong, who's the British general, who's part of the Schaefer headquarters, he says to to him, you know,

the Americans are the actual threat to the British.

You know that now, don't you?

It's not us.

It's the Americans of the Soviets, and you're going to get squeezed in the meat in the sandwich between the two.

And, you know, he's kind of, he's got a point, hasn't he?

Yeah.

And that's why, and Chamberlain is super aware of this in 1939.

That's why he doesn't want to go to war, because he knows the Americans will get dragged into it and they'll end up pushing Britain Arad.

Yeah, which is Beaver Brooks, the stuff in Blue Jerusalem about Beaver Brook being completely politically consistent as an imperialist throughout his his career.

It's absolutely fascinating.

That's why he thinks siding with the Soviet Union is a good thing, because it'll save the British Empire from the Americans.

And it's

just extraordinary, isn't it?

Because he's also, he doesn't care what's going on in the Soviet Union.

It's none of his business.

That's their empire.

That's their business.

What matters to him is the British Empire.

And, you know, in the 60s, he's still saying that, isn't he?

Saying we should never have, in the Alan Clark style, we should never have fought the Germans at all.

It was a mistake.

And, you know, you should have listened to me.

We should have had a second front in 1942.

That way, the British Army would have been in charge.

We would have marched to Berlin and we could have divvied up the peace without having to worry about what the Americans thought.

Yeah, extraordinary, isn't it?

I mean, one last thing.

Is a Labour landslide a retreat from empire for the electorate?

And again, this goes to your point.

The end of empire is what follows, but that doesn't necessarily mean people voted for it.

It doesn't necessarily mean that politicians had that in mind.

Attlee is an imperialist, isn't he?

By kind of modern measure, right?

Yeah, it goes to Halbridge.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, well exactly but it's people are voting for partition in 1945 are they for instance and the end of empire no i mean i think in 1945 other than some people on the left and some people who are interested in the center maybe in kind of world federalism yeah the idea that the empire would be over in all but nain within 10 15 years is inconceivable and it could have been different you know just like the war could have been different the post-war period could have been different Britain could have, you know, Enoch Powell had his plan to send British troops to India in 1946.

It doesn't take a lot, particularly in a Cold War context,

with superpowers ranged against one another, for things to have been very, very different.

And I think whenever we are looking at the history of the Second World War, we need to, must, must keep that fact in mind.

And we should approach the war and its politics, especially from the perspective of the people who were there, who didn't know what the future was going to hold.

They were dealing with the questions that were in front of them and they were relying on the information they had from the past.

They were not thinking about all of the things that we know that happened in the 60s and 70s and 80s.

There were no mini Margaret Thatchers stomping around the House of Commons in 1940 because they couldn't possibly imagine a Margaret Thatcher.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, amen to that.

And it's hard to do, isn't it?

It's to shake it off and remember it was a today.

You know, I don't know what's going to happen this afternoon.

Nor did they 80 years ago.

This is exactly the point.

I'm going to have to go and bury my Fabergé eggs after this, just in case.

Oh, brilliant.

Kit, thank you so much for coming on to talk about this.

It was absolutely fascinating.

And as you were just saying, a reminder that contingency, personality, and, you know, the unknown unknowns are actually the...

the core of human decision making in history and the way things pan out.

And that's why we love it.

That's why it's fun.

And that's why it's so interesting.

That's why it's fun.

And there's always more to, there's always more.

We've lifted a rock here.

Look at all the wonderful creatures scurrying around underneath it.

Thank you, Kit.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Blue Jerusalem.

Any other books that you would recommend if people are sort of tickled by this quadrant of history?

I mean, well, I think you've mentioned his name already.

David Edgerton's work, Rise and Fall, absolutely splendid book on British history.

I'd also very much recommend the work of Rob Crowcroft, who's done some fascinating things on Labour during the Second World War, thinking about the Labour Party and thinking about Attlee as well in a particularly different way.

Some of the classics on the war are still brilliant.

Morris Cowling's book for the High Politics is great.

And the classics

that I disagree with,

things like Paul Addison's book

on the road to 1945 or Angus Calder's on the People's War, fascinating works that tell us perhaps more about how people thought about the war in the 1960s

and 70s and the politics of that period than they do about the war itself.

And no doubt, I'm very sure that in 15, 20, 30 years' time, someone's going to say Kit Cole's Blue Jerusalem, wasn't that really all about British politics in the 2020s?

It did cross my mind when I read it.

You know, well, like the simple question of what is the Conservative Party and how do political parties work how do people pick their positions how they jockey per position how they carve out space and allies and do factions exist because they believe in things or because factions exist because they believe believing in something gives them an identity and power and you know the amount of people that essentially crossed the floor on brexit to pick a thing out of the last 10 years

where could that definitely wasn't getting on what i was writing the book

No, well, but you know, people crossing the floor on that, in effect, changing sides, well, because it looked like it was the thing that was going to win or because they believed in it, we'll never know.

You know, politicians don't come with a black box, do they?

Which you can, when they die, you can take out and you could read the data and know exactly what was going on in their heads.

I mean, maybe that would be useful.

Oh, God.

And do you want, could they type it down as well?

Because if I have to try and read Anthony Eden's horrific, horrific handwriting ever again.

Oh,

if you want to be remembered by history, type.

That's my advice to any budding politicians.

There we go.

Thanks so much, kid.

It's been an absolutely fantastic conversation.

Have a pleasant rest of your evening in Brizzy.

See you soon.

Thanks, everyone, for listening, and cheerio.