"Winnie" For Sea Lord?

If the Rt. Hon. Arthur Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister, wants to convince Adolf Hitler that Britain will allow him no further land grabs, one sure way to do it would be to give a Cabinet job to the Rt. Hon. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, M.P. for Epping. For the past decade Mr. Churchill has been to the British man-in-the-street the personification of Empire do-or-die, and more recently as the British statesman most violently opposed to appeasing "the Huns." Accordingly he is one of the Fuehrer's pet aversions. Several times Herr Hitler has gone out of his way to attack the onetime First Lord of the Admiralty. He has charged that he was a leader of the "British war party." Once, in a speech shortly after Munich, the Fuehrer said that should Mr. Churchill (or Anthony Eden) replace Mr. Chamberlain, Germany would undoubtedly be faced with a war.

Extraordinary in international relations is one government's outright censure of another's cabinet prospect. But "Winnie" Churchill is a fairly extraordinary personality in anybody's government. A Boer warrior, a British officer who was a newspaper correspondent in Cuba just before the Spanish-American War, an outstanding member of Herbert Asquith's War Cabinet until he organized the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign, Winston Churchill has remained the brightest, most mercurial and (sometimes) most effective member of Parliament.

Now nominally a Conservative, he has often played for a time on other political sides if he thought the game suited him that way. Most British politicos therefore mistrust him. But he has had an unsettling record of being right a long time before most people realized it. Ever since Adolf Hitler became Fuehrer in 1933 Mr. Churchill has been preaching rearmament. He was one of the first Conservative statesmen to warn that the Empire's great enemy was to be found not in Moscow but in Berlin. He long plugged for a British-French combination to stop the Nazis and last year urged that Britain seek an alliance with Soviet Russia. Most of the dangers he has warned against have come to pass, and he has thus gained the reputation of a correct Cassandra.

An imperialist of the Rudyard Kipling school, Winston Churchill's stands on domestic issues have usually been so reactionary that he has never picked up much of a popular following. Herbert Asquith once said he had "genius without judgment." But on the one subject of German aggression, now uppermost in British minds, he has followed such a straight, consistent line that in an emergency Winston Churchill might well become Britain's "Man of the Hour."

Campaign. With this in mind, the British press plugged hard last week for Mr. Churchill's inclusion in the Cabinet. The London Daily Telegraph & Morning Post, demanding the "best talent available" for a newly constructed Cabinet, wrote: "The plain fact is that when people speak of a reconstruction of the Cabinet, they are thinking first and foremost of the inclusion of Churchill, and it is quite certain that no step would more profoundly impress the Axis powers with the conviction that this country means business."

Every London newspaper except the Times took up the cry, the Daily Mail even predicting Mr. Churchill's early appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty, one of the five major Cabinet posts he held between 1914 and 1920. The liberal Manchester Guardian and the Yorkshire Post, Britain's two most important provincial newspapers, followed suit.

The chubby, 64-year-old centre of this campaign seemed bored with the whole idea. He spent the week quietly at his Westerham home writing the next volume of his History of the English-Speaking People, going up to the House of Commons twice, but making no speeches. Having long pursued a policy of independence, the Tory rebel was represented as even preferring for the present to remain outside the Government, where he can (and does) harass the Cabinet, rather than inside, where he might be forced to keep his mouth shut.

Glamor Boys. As for the Prime Minister, nothing could be calculated to go against the grain more than to have to ask Mr. Churchill to join the Cabinet. He let it be known that on this issue he decidedly would not give in. There is perhaps no man in Parliament whom Mr. Chamberlain likes less than Mr. Churchill. For Mr. Chamberlain has a memory as well as an umbrella.

> When Athony Eden was ousted from Mr. Chamberlain's Cabinet in February 1938, Winston Churchill said that Britain had suffered the "greatest impoverishment both in the eyes of the world and . . . our own eyes."

> Last year Churchill led an anti-Chamberlain Conservative Group in Parliament which became known as "Winston's Glamor Boys"; people like his son-in-law Duncan Sandys, Scottish Conservative Robert Boothby and Financial Editor Brendan Bracken. The Glamor Boys' membership varied from 15 to 50 M.P.s, none very important, most of them young, all diehards. The group might have amounted to something but just as it was gathering strength the Government stole its thunder by adopting most of its policies on preparedness and foreign policy.

> Mr. Churchill was successful as one of the motivators of Lord Swinton's retirement as Secretary for Air in May 1938. He was not much more pleased, however, by Lord Swinton's successor, Sir Kingsley Wood. In appointing Sir Kingsley, said Rebel Churchill, Mr. Chamberlain was "putting a round peg in a square hole."

> On the Berchtesgaden-Godesberg-Munich negotiations M.P. Churchill arose to heights of fury. "The partition of Czechoslovakia under Anglo-French pressure amounts to a complete surrender," he cried. And it was about this time that Mr. Churchill contemptuously referred to the Prime Minister as "that undertaker from Birmingham."*

First Lord? Present First Lord of the Admiralty is the bungling Lord ("Slip of the Tongue") Stanhope, one of the most unpopular members of the British Cabinet. Undoubtedly many Conservatives would like to replace indiscreet "Good Man Jim" with the capable and brilliant Wartime First Lord. But Mr. Churchill is a hard man to get along with. He likes to run the whole show, and there is no assurance that he would be content to sit at the Admiralty desk and let other Ministers alone.

Last week Winston Churchill's Cabinet job depended, as do so many things in Europe these days, on Fuehrer Hitler. Mr. Chamberlain was said to fear that Mr. Churchill in the Cabinet would mean war. The all-powerful Carlton Club, which picks the Conservative Party's leaders and hence virtually names the Prime Minister, was dead set against the move. But should the Fuehrer further enrage the British by trying to grab more territory, Mr. Chamberlain might have to swallow his pride, give way once more to public opinion and invite hated, gifted, bitter Mr. Churchill into the Government.

*He once sized up the late James Ramsay MacDonald thus: "He has more than any other man the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought."

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