Breakfast With Winston
By Quentin Letts
12 June 2003
The Wall Street Journal
A16
(Copyright (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
LONDON -- Harold Macmillan cultivated a reputation for creaky-voiced unflappability as a senior British politician half a century ago. He certainly needed all the imperturbability at his command on Jan. 26, 1952, when he visited Sir Winston Churchill. Macmillan's newly published diaries record that he reached 10 Downing Street at 9.30 a.m., an hour when most modern premiers would be launched into perhaps their fifth meeting of the day with strategy aides. Macmillan, who at that stage was defense secretary, found Churchill still in his pajamas.
"He was in bed with a little green budgerigar sitting on his head. He had the cage on his bed and a cigar in his hand. A whisky and soda was by his side -- of this the little bird took sips later on. Miss Portal [a secretary] sat by the bed -- he was dictating. He had just got a letter from the [U.S.] president, about the atomic and hydrogen bombs.
The bird flew about the room; perched on my shoulder and pecked (or kissed) my neck; flew to Miss Portal's arm; back to the PM's head, while all the time sonorous `Gibbonesque' sentences were rolling out of the maestro's mouth on the most terrible and destructive engine of mass warfare yet known to mankind. The bird says a few words, in a husky voice like an American actress."
The one depressing thing about this wonderful scene is that it would not happen today. In part this is because Tony Blair, the current "PM," is a punctilious man little given to sloth, whisky or, for that matter, budgerigars (his wife dislikes domestic pets). Is it perhaps also because modern politicians work too hard?
There was much to be done in 1950s Britain. The country needed to be rebuilt after World War II. The postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee had increased the apparatus of the state enormously. Churchill and his cabinet ministers also had an empire to dismantle, as well as facing the threat from communism, nuclear armament and bewildering social change.
While the elderly Churchill was not trifling with his budgie he found time to paint, write books and have a stroke. Macmillan, meanwhile, spent hours reading novels, shooting game, walking in the grounds of his Sussex house and helping to run his family's publishing firm. Some days he spent all morning at the firm before tootling off to do some politics after a goodish lunch. All this was done, remember, at a time of national reconstruction.
Few days passed without Macmillan also gorging himself on books. In his diary he admits "addiction" to the fat novels of Trollope and works his way through C.P. Snow, Disraeli and Bagehot, among others. He liked to read medieval French literature in its original language, and soon after himself becoming prime minister (succeeding poor Anthony Eden in 1957) tells his diary: "I have read a good deal in recent weeks -- some Trollope, some Henry James, three volumes of Cobbett's Rural Rides. I have now embarked on R.L. Stevenson, which I have not read for very many years."
Modern statesmen would snort at such amateurism. Where are the dawn starts, the focus-group analysis meetings, the speech-writing sessions, the telephone hotline discussions, and the interminable fund-raising dinners? Where, indeed, are the regular exercise workouts? The jogs? The prayer meetings? Macmillan and his generation simply did not bother.
Or was Churchill's little green budgie evidence of despair at postwar Britain's impotence? Were the cabinets of 1950s London languid and genteel because they realized that the U.S. was now running the show?
Macmillan's diary for Sept. 27, 1952, has this to say about the U.S.: "We are treated by the Americans with a mixture of patronizing pity and contempt. They treat us worse than they do any other country in Europe. They undermine our political and commercial influence all over the world . . . . They really are a strange people. Perhaps the mistake we make is to continue to regard them as an Anglo-Saxon people. That blood is very much watered down now; they are a Latin-Slav mixture, with a fair amount of German and Irish. They are impatient, mercurial, panicky." </p?
It was enough to drive a man to breakfast whisky -- and small birds with accents like Joan Crawford's.
Churchill must have had more than one pet bird then. A budgerigar is what we call a "parakeet" here in the states, not the same critter as the parrot in this story.