‘non-intervention’ by Britain and France, while Germany and Italy poured arms and men into the rebel army, and American ultra-conservatives sold oil and trucks to Franco. If any one British politician bore guilt for the mass murders now being carried out by Franco, it was Neville Chamberlain.
‘And yet,’ said Bernie to Lloyd during a lull, ‘Chamberlain isn’t really to blame for the fiasco in Norway. Winston Churchill is First Lord of the Admiralty, and your mother says he was the one who pushed for this invasion. After all Chamberlain has done – Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia – it will be ironic if he falls from power because of something that isn’t really his fault.’
‘Everything is ultimately the Prime Minister’s fault,’ said Lloyd. ‘That’s what it means to be the leader.’
Bernie smiled wryly, and Lloyd knew he was thinking that young people saw everything too simply; but, to his credit, Bernie did not say it.
It was a noisy debate, but the House went quiet when the former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, stood up. Lloyd had been named after him. Seventy-seven years old now, a white-haired elder statesman, he spoke with the authority of the man who had won the Great War.
He was merciless. ‘It is not a question of who are the Prime Minister’s friends,’ he said, stating the obvious with withering sarcasm. ‘It is a far bigger issue.’
Once again, Lloyd was heartened to see that the chorus of approval came from the Conservative side as well as the opposition.
‘He has appealed for sacrifices,’ Lloyd George said, his nasal North Wales accent seeming to sharpen the edge of his contempt. ‘There is nothing which can contribute more to victory, in this war, than that he should sacrifice the seals of office.’
The opposition shouted their approval, and Lloyd could see his mother cheering.
Churchill closed the debate. As a speaker he was the equal of Lloyd George, and Lloyd feared that his oratory might rescue Chamberlain. But the House was against him, interrupting and jeering, sometimes so loudly that he could not be heard over the clamour.
He sat down at 11 p.m. and the vote was taken.
The voting system was cumbersome. Instead of raising their hands, or ticking slips of paper, MPs had to leave the chamber and be counted as they walked through one of two lobbies, for Ayes or Noes. The process took fifteen or twenty minutes. It could have been devised only by men who did not have enough to do, Ethel said. She felt sure it would be modernized soon.
Lloyd waited on tenterhooks. The fall of Chamberlain would give him profound satisfaction, but it was by no means certain.
To distract himself he thought about Daisy, always a pleasant occupation. How strange his last twenty-four hours at Ty Gwyn had been: first the one-word note ‘Library’; then the rushed conversation, with her tantalizing summons to the Gardenia Suite; then a whole night of waiting, cold and bored and bewildered, for a woman who did not show up. He had stayed there until six o’clock in the morning, miserable but unwilling to give up hope until the moment when he was obliged to wash and shave and change his clothes and pack his suitcase for the trip.
Clearly something had gone wrong, or she had changed her mind; but what had she intended in the first place? She had said she wanted to tell him something. Had she planned to say something earth-shaking, to merit all that drama? Or something so trivial that she had forgotten all about it and the rendezvous? He would have to wait until next Tuesday to ask her.
He had not told his family that Daisy had been at Ty Gwyn. That would have required him to explain to them what his relationship with Daisy was now, and he could not do that, for he did not really understand it himself. Was he in love with a married woman? He did not know. How did she feel about him? He did not know. Most likely, he thought, Daisy and he were two good friends who had missed their chance at love. And somehow he did not want to admit that to anyone, for it seemed unbearably final.
He said to Bernie: ‘Who will take over, if Chamberlain goes?’
‘The betting is on Halifax.’ Lord Halifax was currently the Foreign Secretary.
‘No!’ said Lloyd indignantly. ‘We can’t have an earl for Prime Minister at a time like this. Anyway, he’s an appeaser, just as bad as Chamberlain!’
‘I agree,’ said Bernie. ‘But who else is there?’
‘What about Churchill?’
‘You know what Stanley Baldwin said about Churchill?’ Baldwin, a Conservative, had been Prime Minister before Chamberlain. ‘When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability – and then came a fairy who said: ‘No person has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up, and gave him such a shake and a twist that he was denied judgement and wisdom.’
Lloyd smiled. ‘Very witty, but is it true?’
‘There’s something in it. In the last war he was responsible for the Dardanelles campaign, which was a terrible defeat for us. Now he’s pushed us into the Norwegian adventure, another failure. He’s a fine orator, but the evidence suggests he has a tendency to wishful thinking.’
Lloyd said: ‘He was right about the need to rearm in the thirties – when everyone else was against it, including the Labour Party.’
‘Churchill will be calling for rearmament in Paradise, when the lion lies down with the lamb.’
‘I think we need someone with an aggressive streak. We want a prime minister who will bark, not whimper.’
‘Well, you may get your wish. The tellers are coming back.’
The votes were announced. The Ayes had 280, the Noes 200. Chamberlain had won. There was uproar in the
