Churchill and Home Rule for Ireland

Having twice changed political parties, Winston Churchill was especially sensitive to the charge that this displayed political inconsistency if not opportunism on his part. Indeed, his 1932 collection of essays Thoughts and Adventures contains an entire chapter on “Consistency in Politics.” In it he suggests, “A change of Party is usually considered a much more serious breach of consistency than a change of view.” Churchill disagreed. Consistency should be to principle, not party. He had been taught that from an early age in 1895 by his American mentor Bourke Cockran, a hard-money Democrat, who in 1896 opposed his party’s nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan, over the inflationary policy of free silver.

Churchill illustrated his point by comparing himself with Joseph Chamberlain, who had supported free trade in the late nineteenth century but switched to advocate protective tariffs in the early twentieth. As First Lord of the Admiralty before the Great War, Churchill supported increased expenditure for the Royal Navy, but as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s Churchill favored economy.

Whereas the Imperial German Navy posed an existential threat to Britain before 1914, Churchill contended that in the 1920s no comparable threat existed. In contrast, Churchill wrote that all the arguments Chamberlain advanced for protectionism in the early twentieth century had been rebutted by Chamberlain himself in the days when he had supported free trade. Churchill maintained that he himself had switched parties from the Conservatives to the Liberals in