Would Churchill vote Conservative? Britain's most famous Tory would probably have deserted his party over Europe, writes Vernon Bogdanor Published: May 23 2001 19:21GMT | Last Updated: May 23 2001 19:26GMT Sixty-one years ago, in May 1940, while German tanks were rolling into Belgium and Holland, Winston Churchill became prime minister. Five months later, he became leader of the Conservative party. Would Churchill be a Conservative today? Or would his commitment to European union prevent him from continuing to support the party? Churchill, first elected to parliament as a Conservative in 1900, had never enjoyed an easy relationship with the party. Switching to the Liberals in 1904 to defend free trade, he switched back in 1924 so as to oppose socialism. Anyone can rat, he said, but it takes a genius to re-rat. Churchill was loyal to causes rather than to party. His most fundamental cause was, as he put it on accepting the Conservative leadership, "the enduring greatness of Britain and her Empire". Often caricatured as a reactionary imperialist, a John Bull figure from the past, Churchill was in fact the first to see that Britain was no longer a great power. "There I sat," he said of the Teheran Conference of 1943, the first three-power summit, "with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one who knew the right way home." After the war, Churchill launched the European Movement, calling for "the unity of all nations of all Europe". He was, however, ambivalent as to whether Britain should be part of this united Europe. Sometimes he said that Britain should act as sponsor from outside; and he was definitely sceptical of a European army that would, he believed, prove no more than a "sludgy amalgam" of nationalities. Churchill's reluctance to envisage full British participation in Europe was, however, as Edward Heath has noticed, "based on circumstance; it was not opposition based on principle". With the dissolution of Empire and the end of the special relationship, Churchill, the supreme realist, would have appreciated that Britain's future lay with Europe. For he certainly did not fear the pooling of sovereignty. How could he when, in the darkest days of the war, in June 1940, seeking to avert a French surrender, he had proposed a Declaration of Anglo-French Union, which provided "that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union". Similarly, in 1947 he insisted that "if Europe united is to be a living force, Britain will have to play her full part as a member of the European family". In June 1950, in a Commons debate on the European coal and steel community, he said: "The Conservative and Liberal parties declare that national sovereignty is not inviolable and that it may be resolutely diminished for the sake of all the men in all the lands finding their way home together." Nor was Churchill frightened of federalism. "In our European movement," he went on, "we have worked with federalists and we have always made it clear that, although they are moving along the same road, we are not committed to their conclusions." Sadly, when returned to power in 1951, Churchill lacked both the energy and the willpower to move Britain further along the federalist road. Throughout his life, the crucial leitmotif of Churchill's thought was that Britain was a European as well as an imperial power. That perception indeed lay at the heart of his opposition to appeasement in the 1930s. The appeasers believed that, so long as Hitler did not directly threaten Britain, what happened on the Continent was none of our concern. Churchill, by contrast, had insisted that liberal civilisation could not survive in a Nazified Europe. "The real demarcation between Europe and Asia," he said in 1947, was "no chain of mountains, no natural frontier, but a system of beliefs and ideas which we call western civilisation." It was to defend this system of beliefs and ideas that Churchill resisted Hitler's attempt to dominate the Continent. The ideas of the 1930s and 1940s appear at first sight irrelevant to the problems of the modern world. Yet all around us the echoes of the past can be heard. Once again, the Conservatives seek, just as Baldwin and Chamberlain did, to isolate Britain from the Continent, preferring to anchor her in a North Atlantic Free Trade Area. To this idea, Churchill gave his answer as long ago as 1947. "Do we imagine that we can be carried forward indefinitely upon the shoulders - broad though they be - of the United States of America?" It is not difficult to guess what he would have thought of a policy that would make Britain in effect the 51st state but without the benefit of representation in Congress. For Churchill, as for those today who seek to link Britain more closely with the Continent, the European commitment was an extension of a belief that Britain should remain a great influence in the world, not a denial of it. Were he still alive, Churchill, one suspects, would once again feel the urge to re-rat. The writer is professor of government at the University of Oxford FT.com
