239. Winston back, Winston out

The old man was back. The Conservatives won the 1951 election and Winston Churchill returned to Downing Street. And he really was an old man – nearly 77 when he took office. To many, he it seemed increasingly clear that he was unfit for office, but he wouldn’t leave, clinging on, in the end, for three and a half years.

He did get various things done. He presided over the ending of rationing. He allowed the British secret service to work with the Americans to bring down the democratically elected government in Iran, to protect British oil interests, a move whose consequences we’re still suffering from today. And he also did all he could to lessen the risk of the world wiping itself out in a war using Hydrogen bombs, far more destructive still than the bombs that had actually been used against Japan.

He appointed a Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, who would use the full power of the law against gay sex to make life miserable for a lot of gay men. His most notable victim was Alan Turing, an outstanding scientist of his generation, persecuted, subjected to chemical castration, and driven to an early death, it seems pretty clear, by suicide.

Fyfe also believed strongly in the death penalty, even though this was a time when a couple of particularly striking miscarriages of justice came to light, miscarriages that led to the execution of innocent men. It would take decades to clear their names. But the death penalty would not be abolished at that time.

Churchill’s attempt to do something about the Hydrogen bomb was his last great initiative in office, his last international action, his last pretext for putting off resignation. It, however, failed. Even so, he hung on another eight months, with no obvious excuse for not going.

Still, if he had no excuse, it's clear today that he may well have had an understandable reason, other than the natural instinct of men in power to cling on to it as long as possible.

He may simply have had no confidence that his designated successor, Anthony Eden, was up to the job. Something we’ll be checking up on next week.

Illustration: Winston Churchill seeing Queen Elizabeth II to her car after dinner at Downing Street the day before he left office. Public Domain.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License