Dominion

Empire alone in return for a free hand in Europe. Halifax wanted these overtures to be followed up; it seemed the war in the West was lost and perhaps now was the time to try to settle and avoid further bloodshed. Churchill argued, though, that a peace treaty would inevitably lead to German domination of Britain and that with her navy and air force, supported (though in some cases not wholeheartedly) by the Empire and with the protection of the Channel, she should fight on and face invasion if need be. Churchill won the day and obtained support of the full Cabinet. The rest is history.

Had Halifax become Prime Minister, the outcome would likely have been very different. He would have appointed a different War Cabinet, with a different balance. It might well have negotiated peace when France surrendered. If that had happened I think both the Labour and Conservative parties would have split, a Labour minority following most Conservatives into a pro-Treaty coalition. I believe King George VI would have stayed – constitutionally he would have had to support the decision of his government – and carried on as King, however reluctantly as the regime hardened. I have never bought the idea that the Germans, had Britain surrendered or been defeated, would have restored King Edward VIII, though certainly the Nazis played with that idea. True, Edward was pro-Nazi, but many in Britain loathed him for abdicating and he was such an irresponsible and foolish man that, as King, he would have been a headache to any government.

Deciding who Britain’s political leaders might have been in the years that followed is difficult. Even if people are long dead one is reluctant to label them unfairly. Faced with the realities of what the Treaty brought about in the circumstances of this book, I think Halifax would have resigned in guilt and despair. Chamberlain died late in 1940 and as for the other leading candidate to succeed Halifax, Sir Samuel Hoare, I am conscious that his first-hand experience of fascism in Spain turned him into an anti-Fascist. I have portrayed Herbert Morrison, who was anti- Fascist but saw himself as a realist and was always consumed by the lust for power, as leading the Labour pro- Treaty minority but, like Halifax, later resigning in despair. Lloyd George, however, I am sure would have loved a late return to power and there is no question of his sympathies with Hitler.

As for the man who succeeds Lloyd George in Dominion, if one is looking for an appeaser in love with power, fanatical about a united British Empire setting up tariffs against the rest of the world, and a man who was irredeemably corrupt and unscrupulous (he left his native Canada under a cloud over the circumstances in which he had made a business fortune), the obvious candidate has to be Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. Clement Attlee, who did not say such things lightly, described him as the only evil person he had ever met, a judgement shared by others,⁶ although Churchill was, from time to time, friendly with him. To be fair, Beaverbrook was never an active anti-Semite, but nor did he like Jews and nor was the issue particularly important to him. From the Great War until the early 1930s he was the epitome of the newspaper magnate who successfully interfered in politics, until Stanley Baldwin courageously squashed him when he described newspaper proprietors as having ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. No single newspaper proprietor had such power again until the years following Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 when she, followed by Tony Blair (and Alex Salmond of the SNP), handed ever-increasing amounts of influence to Rupert Murdoch.

Enoch Powell was always the most fanatic of British nationalists, and though in the 1960s he became the ultimate British isolationist, while at the Conservative Research Department in the late 1940s he was a passionate imperialist. He sent a paper to Churchill, then the Leader of the Opposition, in 1946 advising the military reconquest of India, which made Churchill worry about his sanity, though Rab Butler managed to reassure him.⁷ Powell seems to me an obvious candidate for India Secretary. Rab Butler later became a leading Conservative moderate, but he was the most passionate of appeasers before 1939, a fact which earned him the lasting enmity of Harold Macmillan, who hated fascism.

The Scottish Nationalist Party was formed in 1934 through the merger of two small parties, the right-wing Scottish Party and the leftish National Party of Scotland. The new party, which remained very small, included elements sympathetic to fascism, but had no common policies on the serious issues of the day – mass unemployment, the continuing Depression and the darkening international scene – beyond the dream, common to all nationalist and Fascist parties throughout Europe, that the expression of nationhood would release some sort of a mystical ‘national spirit’ that would somehow resolve all problems. The struggle against fascism was no priority for them; in 1939 the Party Conference voted to oppose conscription. Their leader, Douglas Young, was imprisoned for his refusal to be conscripted on the grounds that there existed no Scottish government to decide on it. The SNP’s 1939 resolution and subsequent behaviour show the unimportance fighting fascism had for them, while the rest of the British people, like my Scottish mother and English father, were either working their fingers to the bone on the home front or serving in the forces to fight the greatest threat civilization has ever faced.

In my alternative universe I see the SNP splitting, with right-wing elements supporting the Beaverbrook government in return for national symbols like the return of the Stone of Scone and vague promises of autonomy or independence. As Gunther says in the book, the co-option of local nationalists from Brittany to Croatia was an important element in Nazi policy throughout Europe.

During the 1980s, a new school of thought appeared, criticizing Churchill’s decision to fight the war at all costs. This time it came from the political right. In 1993 the academic John Charmley wrote a book, Churchill: the End of Glory,⁸ which stimulated Alan Clark, the ever- controversial Conservative MP, to write a Times article questioning whether Britain might have been better to make peace with Hitler in 1940. This exaggerated Charmley’s position, but nonetheless his book questions Churchill’s policy of fighting the war at all costs: ‘In international affairs it was the Soviets and the Americans who divided the world between them; in domestic politics it was the Socialists who reaped the benefits of the efforts of the Great (1940–5) Coalition.’⁹

To take the last point first, the Attlee government of 1945–51 was put in office not by Churchill, but the electorate. Whether the creation of the welfare state, full employment and the nationalization of part of the economy was a good or a bad thing is a matter of judgement. (I have portrayed in my book what I think conditions for ordinary people under a government that opposed these things would have looked like.) But peace with Hitler – which would certainly have involved Britain aligning itself with German foreign policy in Europe – was likely, I think, to lead to the end of democracy, let alone glory, in Britain. What, for example, would have happened (as in my book appears likely in a 1950 election) if a party or group opposed to the Treaty looked like being elected?

Charmley accepts that the Empire by 1939, particularly India, was going to be difficult to hold on to for long, and blames Churchill for his failure to see the facts. This is fair enough. However, a government which accepted the peace terms available in 1940 would inevitably have had to rely more, economically, on the Empire; unrest in India could only have got worse with Britain tied to the Nazis; the breakup of the ‘old’ Commonwealth would have been a distinct possibility. The New Zealanders, in particular, would have loathed links with the Nazis.

It is true (and the strongest argument used by those who disagree that the Second World War was ‘the good war’), that Stalin’s victory made the Soviet Union the second power in the world, and gave it control over Eastern Europe, which suffered murderous oppression and economic exploitation from his regime in the post-war years. Even so, had Hitler been allowed a free hand in Eastern Europe and Russia, the fate of those countries would have been even worse. It took the efforts of Britain, Russia and the USA to end the war in Europe in 1945. By then, the Holocaust had taken place and twenty million Soviet citizens, many of them civilians, as well as two million Poles and many other people from Eastern Europe, were dead. If the struggle in the East had continued with Russia fighting Hitler alone, the war would have gone on for years and the slaughter would have been infinitely greater yet. Hitler planned to kill the populations of Leningrad and Moscow, perhaps seven million people, and either enslave or murder all Russians and Poles who could not show Aryan ancestry.

The war in Russia was, I think, always militarily unwinnable; the country was just too vast, and the population totally hostile. This was not because the Russians loved Stalin but because Hitler planned to kill or enslave all of them, so they fought, quite simply, for their lives, as did the Poles, who fought back vigorously against attempts to settle part of their country with Germans. I think the result would have been as I have portrayed it in my book: Europe east of Germany as a vast slaughterhouse, conventional warfare combined with an endless guerilla conflict; Vietnam on an almost unimaginable scale. If people think that the preservation of some hypothetical British glory would have been worth that, it is not a notion I can share.

There is also the question of the effect of a British surrender on America. America would then have had no potential military toehold in Europe and might well have turned its back on the continent and done a deal with the Japanese. This in turn would have made the Japanese war against China, which reproduced many of the features of the German–Soviet war in its scale and murderousness, all the more protracted.