CHURCHILL AND THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY
Lord Blake, F.B.A., J.P. , April 5, 1987
Lord Blake, F.B.A., J.P. , April 5, 1987
President Saunders, Mr. Kemper, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a very great honour to be asked to give the Sixth Crosby Kemper Churchill Memorial Lecture in this splendid building which recreates the golden age of English architecture. It is also a very great privilege to receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Westminster College. It is something in which I shall take a great pride for the rest of my life.
I have chosen for my theme an aspect of Winston Churchill’s extraordinary career, which tends to be forgotten both in Britain and America. We are inclined to think that it began in 1940. But he was 65 by then – an age at which most people have reached retirement. My theme is his relations with the Conservative party. After 1940 they were relatively uncomplicated. Before 1940 it was a different story.
Churchill’s relations with the party he came to lead were always ambivalent – more so than is usually appreciated. He was much influenced by his father’s political career. Lord Randolph Churchill was a brilliant but flawed Conservative politician who died young – probably from tertiary syphilis or possibly from a tumor on the brain. At the end of his life he became sadly, and obviously, incapable of thought or speech. But he continued to perform on the parliamentary stage to the embarrassment of all who heard him. Many walked out. Only Gladstone, magnanimous always, treated him with unfailing courtesy. Lord Randolph, in the famous words of Lord Rosebery, a fleeting Liberal Prime Minister, ‘was the chief mourner at his own protracted funeral’ but, long before this sad deterioration, he was very bitter about the Conservatives. He wrote in 1891: