The Lies of the Land Read online

  She kept it together. Although she couldn’t spot Churchill’s wife, Clementine, in the melee, his daughter Mary was still in her seat at the opposite end of the long table, and Elizabeth dispatched her husband – the eminent art historian Sir Kenneth – to quietly attract her attention. Mary sent her own husband, Christopher Soames, to retrieve his mother-in-law from the crowd next door. Not wanting to cause a diplomatic incident in front of the Italian prime minister, he told her, slightly pointedly, that Winston was ‘very tired’. Perhaps thinking her husband had had too much to drink, Clementine nodded and said, ‘we must get him to bed then.’ She soon realized it was something more serious when Soames whispered: ‘we must get the waiters away first. He can’t walk.’4

  He couldn’t walk properly the next morning either, when his personal physician, Lord Moran, came to his bedroom for a checkup. Wanting a second opinion – his own – Churchill insisted that the doctor open the door of his wardrobe so he could see his own unsteady efforts in its mirror. ‘What has happened, Charles?’ he asked sadly. ‘Is it a stroke?’5

  It was. And Moran told him that walking might be the least of his problems: ‘I could not guarantee that he would not get up in the House and use the wrong word; he might rise in his place and no words might come.’ The doctor might also have been tempted to say ‘I told you so’: just one day previously he had warned Churchill that he was ‘unhappy about the strain’ upon him, that ‘it was an impossible existence.’6 As well as his own duties, the prime minister had insisted on shouldering those of the foreign secretary too: Anthony Eden was off sick after an operation to remove gallstones went disastrously wrong. Churchill, whose main medical complaint was a deafness that became particularly acute when colleagues mentioned the word ‘retirement’, was rather chuffed about this fact: Eden was twenty-three years his junior and his chosen successor, although his boss was determined to make him wait for his promotion as long as possible.

  Thankfully the cabinet were an unobservant lot, because none of them noticed the state the prime minister was in when he insisted on chairing a meeting that morning. Despite the fact he was slurring his speech and unable to move his left arm, the chancellor only noticed that he was ‘very white’ and didn’t speak much.7

  By lunchtime Churchill had difficulty getting out of his chair. The following morning Moran found him, ‘if anything, more unsteady in his gait’ and ‘becoming more blurred and difficult to follow’ when he talked. But Moran’s main concern does not seem to have been medical: ‘I did not want him to go among people until he was better. They would notice things, and there would be talk.’8

  So a plan was hatched – or rather a plot hardened around Soames’s first instinct for discretion over resuscitation. The prime minister’s illness must be covered up at all costs. That afternoon he was driven down to his private residence, Chartwell, in Kent, accompanied by Clementine and Colville, who noticed sadly that his boss was now having difficulty finding his mouth with his trademark cigar. By that evening the paralysis had spread over most of Churchill’s left side; by the next day, he could barely move. Moran gave his professional opinion that he didn’t expect the PM to live through the weekend. But they had their orders, slurred to them by Churchill himself: they were under no circumstances to let it be known that he was incapable of running the country. Government was to continue as if he were in full control.

  Certain people did have to be told. Colville telephoned the Queen’s private secretary to pass on a message that the monarch – herself in the job for just eighteen months at this point – might find herself having to appoint a new prime minister at very short notice. The US president had to be told too. Churchill was due to hold a summit in Bermuda with Eisenhower on 9 July, the first face-to-face manifestation of the ‘special relationship’ since the death of its wartime third wheel, Joseph Stalin, in March. In January Churchill had travelled by boat to meet the newly elected president after Moran warned him that air travel posed a danger to his circulation; now that the risk had become a reality, there could be no question of him going at all. ‘You will see from the attached medical report the reasons why I cannot come to Bermuda,’ the prime minister – or rather Colville on his behalf – telegrammed the White House.9 The US administration could at least be trusted to keep the secret. After all, they had helped disguise the extent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s paralysis, brought on by polio, from voters for years.

  But it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing the whole government needed to be told about. Instead, only two men were told. Chancellor Rab Butler and Lord President of the Council Lord Salisbury were summoned to Chartwell that Saturday, where Colville solemnly handed them a formal letter:

  I write, very sorrowfully, to let you know quite privately that the PM is seriously ill and that unless some miracle occurs in the next 24 hours there can be… little [question] of him remaining in office. It was a sudden arterial spasm, or perhaps a clot in the artery, and he has been left with great difficulty of articulation although his brain is still absolutely clear. His left side is partly paralysed and he has lost the use of his left arm. He himself has little hope of recovery.10

  With Buckingham Palace at the other end of the telephone line, the trio neatly sorted things out. If Churchill died, or had to resign, then Salisbury – who owed his place in Parliament to the favours his ancestors had performed for James I and George III – would take over running the country; not as prime minister – everyone agreed Eden was the best fellow for that job – but as ‘chairman’ of a caretaker government that might hold the fort until the foreign secretary had made a full recovery and himself moved into Number 10. There was no question of involving the electorate – or even the Conservative Party – in the matter. That was not how things were done.

  The two cabinet ministers cast an eye over the bulletin that Moran and a specialist neurological surgeon, the aptly named Sir Russell Brain, proposed to issue to the press. ‘For a long time the Prime Minister has had no respite from his arduous duties,’ it read. ‘A disturbance of the cerebral circulation has developed, resulting in attacks of giddiness. We have therefore advised him to abandon his journey to Bermuda and to take at least a month’s rest.’11 The statesmen agreed that this would not do at all: great war heroes didn’t get giddy, and the medical terminology might make people think Churchill was at death’s door. He was, of course, but there was no need to say so. The middle sentence was excised completely and replaced with the bland phrase ‘and is in need of a complete rest’. Moran himself was dubious – he wrote in his diary, ‘if he dies in the next few days will Lord Salisbury think his change in the bulletin was wise?’ – but he was just a doctor, and was easily overruled.12

  Now all they needed to do was ensure that no journalists asked any awkward questions. Thankfully, that was a simple task: Colville had already gone over their heads. Twenty-four hours before Butler and Salisbury arrived at Chartwell, Colville had hosted the men with the real power in the country: Lord Camrose, owner of the Daily Telegraph, Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express and Evening Standard, and Lord Bracken, who chaired the company which owned the Financial Times. All three were ‘particular friends’ of Churchill. Camrose had bought the very house they were meeting in and presented it to the prime minister when he found himself suffering from financial embarrassment, and Bracken and Beaverbrook had been co-opted into the cabinet during the war. As well as pledging to keep all news of the seriousness of the prime minister’s illness out of their papers, they also promised to persuade their fellow proprietors to do the same. And they were as good as their word. ‘His trouble is simply tiredness from overwork’, the Sunday People assured its readers on 28 June.13 ‘They achieved the all but incredible, and in peace-time possibly unique, success of gagging Fleet Street, something they would have done for nobody but Churchill,’ wrote Colville many years later, after the truth had come out.14

  When Tony Blair suffered a considerably less serious health scare exactly fifty years later,
his official spokesman was briefing journalists on how to spell ‘supra ventricular tachycardia’ the next day. But in 1953 the country was just eight short years on from the days of loose lips sinking ships and keeping calm and carrying on. When it came to the wartime leader, journalists were content to slip back into discreet and deferential mode.

  At that point everyone imagined they were involved in a very short-lived deception. No one expected the prime minister to make it through the weekend. But much to everyone’s surprise, he did. ‘By Monday morning, the Prime Minister, instead of being dead, was feeling very much better,’ wrote Colville years later. ‘He told me that he thought probably that this must mean his retirement, but that he would see how he went on.’15 He certainly had no intention of going anywhere before the Conservative Party Conference that October. And so there was no choice but to continue the prevarication.

  The cabinet were informed in the afternoon that the prime minister’s condition was more serious than originally thought, but the revelation was carefully not minuted. ‘It was a terrible shock to us all,’ wrote future prime minister Harold Macmillan. ‘Many of us were in tears or found it difficult to restrain them.’16 But they were also informed that despite his debility, Churchill remained very much in charge. Red boxes full of official papers continued to be sent down to Chartwell over the next month, and then to the PM’s official country residence, Chequers, for three weeks after that, as Churchill recuperated. He never saw much of their contents. Instead Colville – a civil servant – and Soames, a mere backbench MP, dealt with the prime ministerial paperwork. ‘The 33-yearold Soames… quite unobtrusively, took a hundred decisions in Churchill’s name without once breaching the trust which such a heavy responsibility involved,’ writes the PM’s admiring biographer Martin Gilbert.17 ‘There is some ambiguity about whether Colville and Soames faked his initials on papers,’ notes Gilbert’s more sceptical counterpart Roy Jenkins.18

  Churchill did not return to Downing Street until 18 August, the day after the Daily Mirror – implacably opposed to the Tory prime minister – finally broke ranks and demanded to know: ‘WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT CHURCHILL’S ILLNESS?’ The impudent query had been prompted after an American newspaper dared to use the word ‘stroke’ in a report on rumours about the PM’s health. Why, the Mirror demanded, should the British ‘always be the last to learn what is going on in their country? Must they always be driven to pick up their information at second hand from tittle-tattle abroad?’19

  Apparently so. For while Churchill raged that the Mirror’s report was ‘rubbish, of course’, he had already ensured that the White House was fully acquainted with facts that would not emerge on his own side of the Atlantic for years to come. ‘I had a sudden stroke which as it developed completely paralysed my left side and affected my speech,’ he had written to Eisenhower way back on 1 July. ‘Four years ago, in 1949, I had another similar attack and was for a good many days unable to sign my name. As I was out of office I kept this secret’.20

  ‘His case has been the subject of close investigation. No evidence has been found to show that he was responsible for warning Burgess or Maclean. While in Government service he carried out his duties ably and conscientiously. I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called “third man”, if, indeed, there was one.’

  Harold Macmillan, House of Commons, 7 November 1955

  Russian spy Donald Maclean had more than one lucky escape. Both the British and American secret services knew from a series of intercepted and decoded messages that the Soviets had an agent going by the code name ‘Homer’ working in the British embassy in Washington in the late forties. Maclean, who had been recruited to the Foreign Office straight out of Cambridge, was first secretary there. But it was taken as read that no high-ranking diplomat would betray his country. Only the lower classes did that sort of thing. Far better to look into the typists and clerks, the janitors and chauffeurs. One of them had to be Homer.

  Even when Maclean underwent a spectacular breakdown after being relocated to Cairo in 1948, no one thought any the worse of him. All right, so he went on day-long drinking benders where he ranted about the awfulness of Americans, attacked his wife in public and broke into a stranger’s flat and trashed it…. Nothing that a recall to London and a spell under the care of a top Harley Street psychiatrist couldn’t sort out.

  In early 1951, however, the evidence became undeniable when a US cryptographer managed to decode a Russian message dating back to 1944. It revealed that Homer’s wife was pregnant at the time and had gone to stay with her mother in New York. Only one man fitted the bill: Maclean, now working on the American desk at the Foreign Office in London. The CIA relayed the information to their British counterparts, with whom they enjoyed a good relationship – a relationship overseen at the Washington end by top MI6 man Harold Philby, known to his many friends as Kim.

  The news came as a particular blow to Philby, because Maclean was an old friend; although they hadn’t seen each other in years, they had been students together in the early thirties. Philby was so shaken by the revelation of his pal’s treachery that he had to share the news with another mutual friend from Cambridge who, as it happened, was living in the basement of his home having recently completed a stint at the British embassy. The friend’s name was Guy Burgess. Neither man could bear to think of Maclean back in Britain, his home and office bugged, and officers from MI5, who dealt with enemy agents, following him everywhere to gather evidence for when he inevitably went on trial for treachery.

  It wasn’t the only bad news Burgess had received in recent days. He had just lost his job, after a litany of bad behaviour and drunkenness culminated in him being caught speeding three times in a single day and rowing with the traffic cops when he tried to claim diplomatic immunity. The night before he went back to London in disgrace, he and Philby dined together at a Chinese restaurant, rather a tacky place where the piped music was so loud it was impossible to hear what other people were saying. Afterwards Philby drove him to the station and dropped him off with a somewhat unusual farewell: ‘Don’t you go too!’21

  But Burgess did. On the night of Friday 25 May 1951, the very day the foreign secretary gave formal approval for MI5 to bring Maclean in for interrogation, Burgess turned up at Maclean’s home in Kent with a rented car. Astonishingly, the surveillance on Maclean was a nine-to-five job: his MI5 tail saw him from his office and onto his train at Victoria station, and then knocked off for the night. Thus no one saw the two men driving off into the darkness, headed for Southampton and a cruise ship sailing for France at midnight. The luggage that Burgess had carefully packed made the return trip to Britain, but he and Maclean did not. Instead, they took various trains to Switzerland where, with the help of false passports they picked up at the Russian embassy, they boarded a plane for Prague, where the Iron Curtain closed behind them. The first clue anyone at MI5 had about it was when Maclean failed to get off his commuter train on Monday morning. They had been planning to seize him that morning: his first interrogation was scheduled for 11 a.m.

  Both Burgess and Maclean had been spying for the Russians since 1935. Recently, however, their controller, Yuri Modin, had concluded that they were both ‘burnt-out’.22 Even before Maclean’s cover was blown, both men had been making a spectacle of themselves with their drunken antics. Burgess was particularly unsuited to being a spy: permanently sozzled, he drew attention to himself everywhere he went; when he wasn’t picking fights, he was seducing anything in trousers. Since neither man could be trusted to keep shtum under questioning – quite the opposite, in fact – Modin felt he had no choice but to pull them out. But if their disappearance was bad news for Britain, it was terrible news for Kim Philby, who knew suspicion would inevitably fall on their old friend. He expressed his horror in a phone call to an MI5 contact, Guy Lidell, who dutifully reported back to his superiors: ‘There is no doubt that Kim Philby is thoroughly disguste
d with Burgess’s behaviour.’23 Privately, Philby reassured himself that ‘there must be many people in high positions… who would wish very much to see my innocence established. They would be inclined to give me the benefit of any doubt’.24

  And they were. Philby was recalled to London to discuss his friends’ exploits, but he was given the news in a friendly note from his boss ahead of the official telegram. The same boss accompanied him to his MI5 interview, where he was offered tea and allowed to smoke his pipe. A couple of days later they had him back for a slightly more frosty chat: the CIA were kicking up a fuss and saying they didn’t want him back in Washington. He had been helped by his long-running friendship with one of the top men in the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, who had assured his superiors that there was no way Philby could possibly have known about Burgess’s treachery. Yet the Americans were still insisting that the British ‘clean house regardless of whom may be hurt’.25 As for his MI6 colleagues, they were standing 100 per cent behind him. ‘Philby had not run away, he was happy to help, and he was, importantly, a gentleman, a clubman and a high-flier, which meant he must be innocent,’ writes Ben Macintyre in A Spy Among Friends, his superb account of Philby’s career. ‘Many of Philby’s colleagues in MI6 would cling to that presumption of innocence as an article of faith. To accept otherwise would be to admit that they had all been fooled; it would make the intelligence and diplomatic services look entirely idiotic.’26