historical controversy

The topic is "How did Winston Churchill become Prime Minister in 1940?" and I'm going to be assuming some background knowledge on your part here.

Churchill once said that he would be treated well by history because he intended to write that history himself, and the received account of the decision to make him PM is in the first volume of his WW2 memoirs (published in 1948, so he wasn't long about it). When Neville Chamberlain decided, after the Norway debate, that a National Government was necessary, and it became clear that the Labour Party would not accept one with him at the head of it, he called in his two principal ministers and likely successors - Churchill and Lord Halifax, who was Foreign Secretary - to decide whom he should recommend as his successor. This is what Churchill writes:

I have had many important interviews in my public life and this was certainly the most impotant. Usually I talk a great deal, but on this occasion I was silent. ... As I remained silent, a very long pause ensued. It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemmorations of Armistice Day. Then at length Halifax spoke. He said that he felt that his position as a peer, out of the House of Commons, would make it very difficult for him to discharge the duties of Prime Minister in a war like this. He would be held responsible for everything, but would not have the power to guide the assembly upon whose confidence the life of every Government depended. He spoke for some minutes in this sense, and by the time he had finished, it was clear that the duty would fall upon me - had in fact fallen upon me. Then, for the first time, I spoke. I said I would have no communication with either of the Opposition Parties until I had the King's commission to form a Government. On this the momentous conversation came to an end.

That's what Churchill wrote, and some version of it has become the accepted and usually-repeated story. That being the case, I was quite surprised to be browsing Andrew Roberts' The Storm of War (2011), his history of WW2, to find this:

Churchill was impatient for the premiership, and he took it, bluntly telling his rival for the post, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, that he could not be prime minister from the House of Lords. (He later invented a story in which Halifax almost offered him the premiership out of embarrassment after a long period of silence.)

Invented? This was the first I'd heard of anything of the sort. Roberts gives a source note. I turned to these only to find I'd alreadly marked it in my copy on a previous reading of the book. This time I got around to borrowing a copy of the cited book. It's Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy, edited by Amanda Smith (published 2001). Kennedy was US Ambassador to the UK at the time of these events, but why would he have definitive knowledge of what happened at a private meeting of the principals of the government? The source turned out to be a memorandum Kennedy took of an interview he had with Chamberlain five months later. (By the time Kennedy met with him, Chamberlain had already resigned from the government due to ill health, and he was to die less than a month later.) Here is what Kennedy recounts of what Chamberlain told him, errors copied from the transcription (Edward was Halifax's given name):

He then wanted to make Halifax P.M. and said he would serve under him. Edward, as [is] his way, started saying, "Perhaps I can't handle it being in H of Lords and Finally Winston said, "I don't think you could." And he wouldn't come and that settled it.

What Kennedy, or Chamberlain, meant by "Finally" (with a capital F), is not clear, whether that meant Churchill waited for Halifax to finish before speaking, but the only thing it adds to Churchill's account is having him agreeing with Halifax's point. It matches with Churchill's statement that Halifax spoke first, and while not outright declining the office, doubting that he could operate as prime minister. It doesn't include the long pause, but it's hardly a full and detailed recounting of the meeting. This doesn't make Churchill's account "invented," by any stretch. Roberts has something of a reputation for being a little loose with facts, and this could be an example.

I turned to a definitive biography of Churchill, Roy Jenkins' tome of 2001. Jenkins finished writing the book in February of that year, the Kennedy letters were published in January (and this bit is a very small note in a very large book), so Jenkins is unlikely to have seen it before finishing the book. But he might as well have. He quotes from and paraphrases Churchill's account, and then writes: "This account is not without a certain central truth, but is wholly inaccurate as to times and participants." Jenkins then corrects Churchill's statement of when the meeting took place, and informs us of something Churchill omits, that the Chief Whip was also present (his job here would have been to pass along the views of the party's backbench MPs). Now we get to the central question of, did Halifax jump or did Churchill push him? This time it's Halifax's account that we get:

It required no determination not to break a long silence on Churchill's part to get Halifax to exclude himself. He had already done so at a 10.15 bilateral meeting with Chamberlain on the Thursday morning. There he stressed the great disadvantage he would suffer as a Prime Minister who was a peer, and for the first time used the phrase that the thought of being so 'left me with a bad stomach-ache'. THis position he maintained at the 4.30 quadripartite meeting. As a Prime Minister in the Lords he would rapidly become a 'cipher' in the position to which Lloyd George had tried to relegate Asquith in 1916. 'I thought Winston was a better choice. Winston did not demur, was very kind and polite but showed that he thought this was the right solution. Chief Whip and others think feeling in the House has been veering towards him.' This somewhat telegraphese account was recorded by the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, Cadogan, who saw Halifax immediately on his return from 10 Downing Street.

So here we have the same thing as with Kennedy reporting on what Chamberlain told him: Halifax demurs, Churchill agrees. This time the reporter is Alexander Cadogan giving what Halifax told him, and on the same day even. And Cadogan's diaries, from which this comes, were published as long ago as 1971! So the alteration of Churchill's version is not news. Roberts has given us a big scare and told us nothing that we didn't already know.

Nor, by the way, was Kennedy's memo the only record of Chamberlain's view of the meeting, as Roberts elsewhere implies. The newspaper proprietor Lord Camrose saw Chamberlain on the same day and made a typically precise note:

He had considered the question as to whom he should ask the King to send for, and had discussed the matter with Halifax and Winston. ... [Halifax] had said he would prefer not to be sent for, as he felt the position would be too difficult and troublesome for him. He (Neville) would therefore advise the King to send for Winston.

That was published in Churchill's War Papers in 1993, and is quoted by Jenkins.

Two more things, one of which Jenkins raises. To what extent was Halifax's membership of the Lords merely a screen? Surely, some have said, in the emergency, some workaround could have been found to enable him to sit in the Commons. Most likely, I'd guess, though I don't know what it would have been. The writers I've seen discussing this point say that it was a screen to an extent. Roberts, in his much earlier (1991) biography of Halifax, puts it the most generously:

In different circumstances he would, especially if it had been presented to him by friends as being his patriotic duty, undoubtably have accepted the Premiership. The supreme prize of British politics was there for the taking and he had merely to nod for it to be his. But he knew in his heart that he was not of the calibre required for a wartime premier, and that Winston Churchill was. Proposing Churchill in his stead was a supreme act of self-abnegation, one for which history has afforded him scant credit. It was perhaps Halifax's greatest service to his country.

By "knew in his heart," Roberts probably means the same thing as what Halifax meant by saying the idea of becoming PM "left me with a bad stomach-ache." But there is also the possibility that he knew that, even in the Commons, he wouldn't have the real power in the government. Not with Churchill in his cabinet. Churchill would have to be Secretary for Defense (a post he did in reality take on in addition to the premiership), the control of the war would be his, and that would be the whole story. That could have been what Halifax meant by "the position would be too difficult and troublesome." Even when Churchill was younger and less senior, Prime Ministers under whom he served found it difficult to keep him from taking over whatever he wanted and saying whatever he cared to say.

The other point: It is often written nowadays that the Labour Party vetoed Halifax. That is not the case. They were formally asked two questions, would they join a national government under Chamberlain, would they join under someone else not specified? The national committee met and considered these questions (in Labour, it wasn't considered something for the leader to decide on his own), and returned the answers of no and yes to the respective questions. I'm not sure if it's recorded whom they actually preferred, but (in passages I didn't quote) we have contradictory information on what Chamberlain thought Labour preferred. Cadogan says that Chamberlain "was informed" that they'd "swung against Halifax." Churchill says that Chamberlain implied in their meeting that he feared Labour would not accept him, Churchill, because of the arguments he'd had with Labour members during the debate. But that was overriden by Halifax's statement.