Winston’s War by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online Page A

servants of the people sat in Wilson'soffice, a small room that ran off the Cabinet Room itself. It was already dark, the curtains drawn, the only light provided by two green-hooded lamps placed on desks by the tall windows, lending a conspiratorial atmosphere which both men enjoyed. Ball had just come off the phone from talking with one of the directors of the Yorkshire Post . Not for the first time they were discussing the predilections of the editor, Arthur Mann, a persistent man who seemed determined to be impressed by the resignation speech of Duff Cooper.
    Phrases like “personal grudge” and “loss of grip” had littered Ball's conversation, but he seemed to be making little headway. Mann was a notoriously stubborn anti-appeaser, the director had explained, and he wasn't sure what anyone could do. “For heaven's sake, Jamie, whose bloody newspaper is it? Why do you let him kick you around like that? For God's sake, get a grip. No sane man wants to reconquer Berlin for the Jews.” Ball mouthed the words slowly, hoping they might sink firmly into the other man's mind. “This is a matter of survival. And not just the country's survival, your survival as a newspaper, too. Look what's happened to your damned advertising revenues. A summer of war scares and the bottom's fallen out of your market. Down—what? Thirty percent? Precisely. So long as you encourage cranks like Duff Cooper to go on whipping up war scares you can watch your profits shrivel like a baby in bath water. Nobody's going to buy a bloody thing. Look at the economy in Germany—that's the sort of thing we want here, not blood all over your balance sheet. You want war? 'Course not. But that's exactly what you'll get if you carry on crawling up the arse of Duff Cooper and his crowd.” At last the argument seemed to have struck home, the director promised to see what he could do, and the conversation was resolved with promises of lunch.
    It had been a profitable evening's work. Other newspapers had been leant on, too. Ball scratched his stomach,contented. By morning Duff Cooper's obituary would be suitably disfigured.
    At that moment there came a knock on the door and a head appeared. It belonged to Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times . As always in the dark corners of Chamberlain's Whitehall, he was welcomed like a general returned to his camp. “Thought I might find you two old rogues here,” he said. “Need to take your mind.”
    “And a glass of sherry, too, Geoffrey.”
    The editor made himself comfortable in a cracked leather armchair by the fireplace, wriggling in order to reacquaint himself with an old friend. “Just taken tea with Edward at the Foreign Office.” The “Edward” in question was Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and it was Dawson's custom to meet with him on a frequent basis, particularly when preparing a trenchant editorial. They were long-standing personal friends, their lives intertwined. Both were Etonians and North Yorkshiremen, High Anglicans who worshipped and hunted foxes together.
    “He was helpful, I trust,” Wilson prompted.
    “As always. Got a pocket full of editorials that'll take me right up to the weekend. But that's not what I'm concerned about. It's my young pup of a parliamentary reporter, Anthony Winn. He's written some god-awful eulogy about Duff Cooper's resignation speech this afternoon, about its nobility, how it was a resounding parliamentary success, its barbs striking home. How it shamed the Government's troops into silence, even. That sort of stuff.”
    “Then change it.”
    “Steady on, Joey. Editorials are one thing. Chopping a news reporter's copy around is considerably more tricky. A little like kicking cradles. Not made any easier by the fact that, according to my sources, he's got it absolutely bloody right.”
    Wilson and Ball glanced at each other uneasily. “Right only on the day, perhaps. Not in the overall context,” Wilson mused. “He had to go. Duffie is a man who