Meeting Winston at a party for the first time in 1906, Violet Asquith had found him striking not only in his ‘magnificent and effortless use of language’ but for his impressive and ambitious arrogance. ‘We are all worms,’ he told her, ‘but I do believe I am a glow worm.’Winston had struggled with a lisp since his schooldays and had not yet succeeded in eradicating it entirely: the ‘S’ sound continued to emerge like a ‘sh’. But speech transformed his youthful face andWinston became by turns orator, pugilist, statesman; at times his expression was reminiscent of a puckish schoolboy’s. His face was incapable of concealing a secret and he was not afraid of using language that others considered over the top and grandiloquent. ‘Winston thinks with his mouth,’ remarked the Prime Minister.

  Another young parliamentarian, who habitually sat opposite the House of Commons’ green leather benches occupied by Winston and his Liberal colleagues, was almost as notorious as the young Home Secretary. Frederick Edwin Smith, generally known to everyone as ‘F.E.’, was a brilliantly successful lawyer and a Conservative back-bencher, just two years older than Winston and a man of electrifying oratory. Although he did not hold a job in the Shadow Cabinet, he was arguably the most famous member of the party after the former Prime Minister and present Opposition leader, Arthur Balfour. His opinions were so outspoken that occupants of the Government benches often left the debating chamber reeling from his attacks, and with Balfour’s position in the Tory party hierarchy seemingly precarious that summer, F.E. was assumed by many to be at the forefront of those in line for the leadership of his party. He and Winston held differ-ing views on almost all the fundamental issues of the current political term – on the power of the trade unions, on the proposed curbing of the powers of the House of Lords, on the enfranchisement of women. In fact, Winston’s politics differed so violently from F.E’s that he had even crossed the floor of the House to leave them behind. Yet despite their thrilling exchanges of political vitriol, F.E. Smith was Winston’s greatest friend.

  From the moment of their first meeting, shortly after F.E. gave his maiden speech, Winston was enchanted, dazzled and ensnared. He was reminded of the swagger, the confidence and the daring charisma of his own father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Though Lord Randolph had often behaved towards his son with detachment and indifference, Winston had grown to idolise his father. After his death in 1895 Winston’s passionate allegiance intensified with time, rather than diminishing. Liberated from the disapproval and anxiety that had crushed him as a child, in adulthood he was free to revere unchallenged a now-silent tormenter. In F.E. Smith he found not only someone to admire, but a soul-mate. The friendship became, in Winston’s words, ‘one of my most precious possessions. It was never disturbed by the fiercest party fighting.’ Although F.E. was capable of breathtaking personal insults in public, cautioning the Labour party that ‘the socialists had better not cheer the name of Mr Churchill for he will most likely steal their clothes when they go bathing – if they do bathe, which I doubt’, the friendship remained unassailable. ‘It was never marred by the slightest personal differences or misunderstanding,’ Winston explained; ‘it grew stronger . . . never did I separate from him without having learnt something and enjoyed myself besides.’

  Falling jubilantly upon an irresistible opportunity for political lampooning, the preceding year the Punch cartoonist had summed up their intriguing cross-party friendship. The two young men were depicted sitting on a sofa in such affectionate intimacy that their leaning heads were actually touching; they are reading a biography of Benjamin Disraeli and beneath the caption ‘Students on the Make’ they conduct the following exchange:

  Mr F.E. Smith: ‘Master of Epigram – like me!’

  Mr Winston Churchill: ‘Wrote a novel in his youth – like me!’

  Together: ‘Travelled in the east – like us. How does it end?’

  The supporters of the ‘Balfour Must Go’ campaign had found themselves a strong candidate. There were also rumours that if F.E. did not become leader of his own party he might join the Liberals, and the two friends would thus merge their considerable strengths. In May of 1911 this controversial friendship of several years came to the attention of the wider public outside the chamber of the House of Commons. Dining with Knollys and Esher, Winston not only reviewed with them the success of the day’s ceremonies in the Mall but also discussed the proposed name of the grand joint venture he and F.E. planned for the summer, the political club they were to found.

  The members of London’s clubs had been particularly suspicious of F.E. after he was discovered using the ‘Gentlemen’s Facilities’ of the Liberal Club – of which he was, for obvious reasons, not a member. The Club was, however, conveniently situated on the corner of Whitehall Place and the Victoria Embankment, equidistant, in case of a pressing need, between his home in Pimlico and the House of Commons. When challenged as he emerged from the ‘Facilities’, F.E. had further damned himself by asking the affronted doorman, in a tone of surprise, ‘Oh, is it a club as well?’

  In December 1910 the distinguished literary institution founded in 1764 by Dr Samuel Johnson and the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, known simply as ‘The Club’, had blackballed both Winston and F.E. Later, over a weekend at Winston’s ancestral home, Blenheim, they devised their revenge. In consultation with Knollys and Esher, it was agreed to call the new venture ‘The Other Club’.

  On Thursday 18 May The Other Club was launched at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand. F.E. Smith kept a room in the Savoy, and staff there were accustomed to the brilliant young lawyer announcing that he would be preparing for a case the following day by working through the night. Having ordered two dozen oysters and a bottle of Bollinger champagne for sustenance he would remain locked in his room with his favourite pet dog and emerge the following morning, a carnation in his button-hole, dressed and prepared for the law courts. On that Thursday evening F.E. made his way to the grand mirrored and chandeliered Pinafore Room (so named by Richard D’Oyly Carte, under whose patronage the popular Gilbert and Sullivan operettas – among them HMS Pinafore – had always been performed). There, at the invitation of F.E. and Winston, an extraordinary gathering had begun to assemble.

  Many found the brilliant company of these two young men stimulating, but that reaction was by no means unanimous. Winston was viewed with profound scepticism by some members not only of the parliamentary Opposition, particularly those with roots in the aristocracy, but also by some in his own party. The grandson of a duke of Marlborough, born at Blenheim, one of the grandest houses in the land, Winston seemed to some to have betrayed his birthright when he crossed the floor to join the Liberals a few years earlier. He was opportunistic. He was fla-grantly ambitious. He lacked modesty. He was unpredictable, verging on reckless. He was a man to be watched, with caution. F.E. Smith, a character of equal arrogance and a Conservative with no acknowledged ‘background’, inspired similar distrust. In a few of the grand social circles in which senior parliamentarians were accustomed to move, Winston and F. E. headed the list of untouchables. With considerable self-knowledge Winston admitted, ‘I have a tendency, against which I should perhaps be on my guard, to swim against the stream.’ Violet Asquith wondered whether Winston was ‘inebriated by his own words’, adding ‘I did not care. I only knew that I was.’

  Violet’s pleasure in finding herself next to Winston at dinner was not a feeling universally shared. He was capable of remaining silent even in the company of the most scintillating conversationalist. So irritated was Lady Westmorland by his speechless self-absorption one day that she rose from the table, snatching up her knife and fork, and finished her lunch standing at the sideboard. Eventually Winston noticed the empty seat next to him and leaning across to Violet asked, in genuine puzzlement, ‘what happened to that jolly little trout?’ The society hostess Lady Desborough had observed with some irritation how at country house parties he ‘leads general conversation on the hearthrug solely addressing himself in the looking glass.’ The ill-judged ‘Sidney Street Siege’ earlier in the year had not been forgotten. A nine-day blockade at a house in Stepney in which a group of Latvian anarchists had barricaded themselves ended when a building caught fire and three policemen were killed. Winston was in the bath when he was told of the shoot-out and after ordering a detachment of Scots Guards and 750 more policemen to the scene, he dressed and hurried there himself. Directors of moving-picture palaces licked their lips over crowd-pulling footage of the Rt Hon. Winston Churchill, wearing an expensive astrakhan-collared coat and a silk top hat, personally directing the fire brigade while crouched in a doorway. He looked like a trigger-happy boy scout or, as a gleeful press put it, ‘Marlborough facing the army of Louis XIV’. Such behaviour was viewed as unwise, interfering, and neither dignified, nor appropriate for a Home Secretary. Even Margot Asquith was unsure of her husband’s cabinet colleague, writing in her diary: ‘While Winston is loveable and sincere there is not much judgement behind his genius.’ Others kept their reservations to themselves, and the inaugural dinner of The Other Club began with a reading of the Rules in a mood of optimistic fellowship.

  The House of Commons was sometimes said to be the most elite club in the land, but this new venture was more select still. Its members were to number no more than 40, including a maximum of 24 MPs, these to come from the Conservative and Liberal parties. Representing either side of the political divide, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George and the heavyweight Conservative Andrew Bonar Law were the most impressive recruits. No member of the Labour Party was considered eligible for an invitation to join, but the Club Register included distinguished gentlemen from the Services and the worlds of business and the arts, and a few editors of national newspapers. T.E. Lawrence, a bright 23-year-old Oxford graduate working at the British Museum on plans for a dig in Mesopotamia was among those asked to become a regular, as were the actor and producer Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Lord Kitchener and Lord Northcliffe. Sir George Riddell, owner of the News of theWorld though not as yet an actual ‘newspaper baron’, was another who attended that first dinner. The presence of the King’s joint private secretaries, convivial Lord Esher and austere Lord Stamfordham, lent an irrefutable respectability. Representatives of the Church were barred. So were bores. And women. The membership was essentially made up of those who were young, witty and unconventional, several of them only hovering on the decorous fringes of the Establishment.

  The chairmanship of The Club was to be rotated between the members of the two political parties. It was said that a waiter was co-opted to make up the number in the event that only 13 guests turned up to dine – until itwas realised that he could not be trusted to keep his mouth shut, and a large wooden black cat was imported to fill the extra seat in his stead. ‘To Dine’was the ostensible object of The Other Club, but at £2 a head, the equivalent of a week’s wage for the average working man, and despite the inclusion of a delightful pudding of ‘poires rafraichies au citron avec la Bombe glacée pralinée’ and some extremely fine wine, it was an expensive evening. Churchill always ordered ‘off the menu’ when it came to the dessert course. His choice of Roquefort cheese, a peeled pear and mixed ice cream never varied.

  The unspoken purpose behind the Club was the lessening of deeply divided political hostilities over a delicious dinner. The founding members hoped that the animosity expressed daily between the two parties on opposite benches of the two Houses would be tempered, at least for the course of the Thursday gatherings. Though it was intended that the proceedings be ‘wrapped in impenetrable mystery’, news of the appointment of the Chancellor of the Exchequer as Chairman of the Wine and Cigars Committee had somehow already been leaked to the press.

  Rule number twelve laid down that a gathering of The Other Club was never to become a forum for the plotting of coalition plans. Written, as were all the rules, by F.E. Smith himself, it also dictated that ‘Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of party politics.’ The Club offered a refuge, a place where conviviality thrived and a tolerant exchange of views was encouraged, during a summer in which party politics were already threatening to become more vicious than most members could recall. The Club was a symbolic manifestation of the friendship between Winston Churchill and F.E. Smith. The first evening was considered a triumph by everyone who attended, and all agreed to gather again at the Savoy the next Thursday, and thereafter on alternate weeks.

  When F.E. and Winston had first met in the Commons in 1906, although an MP of only a few months’ standing, F.E. Smith was even then a considerable political figure. His maiden speech, a triumph of sheer audacity, had brought him overnight fame, his reputation made as soon as he came to the end of his oration from the back of the Tory benches. He was tall and slim, with slick black hair, distinctively clean-shaven among the rows of mousta-chioed men; his pale high cheekbones contrasted dramatically with the crimson carnation he wore in his button-hole. In a beautifully cut tail-coat, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, he resembled a young blade who had sauntered in after a particularly successful day at the races. Violet Asquith was in the Speaker’s Gallery that day, and realised when F.E. was invited by the Speaker to begin that some members of his own party were unaware of his identity. ‘Who is this boy?’ they grumbled. ‘Haven’t we got anyone better?’ Maiden speeches are by convention short and uncontroversial, even deferential to all sides of the House; for his debut, F.E. dared to challenge the Government over their questionable tactics in winning the last election. ‘Light badinage and cutting sarcasm came with equal dexterity in that even magnetic voice which never faltered, never failed,’ wrote G.D. Faber admiringly in The Times ; he went on to describe the speech as ‘a long sustained tour-de-force which captivated and held friend and foe alike. His logic was inexorable; his denunciations were wonderful, his satire played like forked lightening.’ Another MP marvelled how, during F.E’s ‘brilliant cluster of impertinences’, he never once allowed an expression of utter contempt for the Liberals to leave his face. Violet Asquith watched from the gallery above as the Conservative rank and file ‘shouted and roared in ecstasy, their leaders rolled about on the Front Bench in convulsions of amusement and delight.’ As he sat down on the green leather bench at the end of an hour to the sound of a great ovation, she noticed ‘a flutter of excitement in the Ladies’ gallery’, and a very important hostess leaned across to ask her if she knew how F.E. could be secured for a Saturday-to-Monday party. Invitations to dinner arrived from two of the most powerful figures in society, Lady Londonderry and Lady Desborough. A day after the speech, a hand-delivered envelope arrived at F.E’s chambers: Lady Savile was having a very, very small party and would be pleased if Mr Smith could attend because the King had expressed a desire to meet him. Everyone wanted to know him. ‘Who is this Effie Smith?’ asked one distinguished old lady. ‘She can’t be a modest girl to be so talked about.’

  Ambition had driven F. E. Smith all his life. ‘The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords,’ he declared, determined to prove the truth of his words to himself. He was ambitious both materially and politically. In Winston’s phrase, he wanted to make ‘a great stock or scrip of securities’. The grandson of a Yorkshire miner, like Winston he had lost his father very young. He liked to talk about the poverty in which he had grown up after his father’s death, and his story became elaborated in the telling: his elder daughter Elinor, with the insight, unforgivingness and brutality of youth, later revealed that her father came from a middle-class family in Birkenhead. ‘He loved afterwards to exaggerate the miseries of his life, which was actually by no means wretched,’ she explained. ‘His father died when he was sixteen but as far as I can make out he lived until ten in complete comfort. If one reminded him of this he flew into a rage.’

  After an impressive career in the Oxford Union while a scholar of Wadham College, F.E. altered his raw northern accent and practised the art of high living so effectively that no one on first meeting him dreamt that this sophisticated and arrogant young man had not been born into a life of privilege and breeding. There was an air of glamour about his arrest in a student demonstration during a visit to Oxford by Edward VII, while the story of how he had insulted Oscar Wilde by suggesting that that iconic figure was too narcissistically obsessed by his own life had become the stuff of undergraduate legend. After leaving Oxford F.E. read for the bar, to which he was called in 1899. In early 1906 he was elected Honourable Member for the constituency of Walton in Liverpool.

  F.E. had been happily married to his accommodating wife Margaret since 1901. Margaret was neither disturbed by her husband’s notoriety nor jealous of the time he spent in the Commons and on his legal commitments. The couple shared a love of their children and of sport, in particular tennis and riding. They had a country cottage near Oxford. Margaret was artistic and musical and had her own interests to absorb her. F.E. might enjoy discreet friendships with women, among them a chaste flirtation with a pretty girl named Frieda Dudley Ward, but for him it was the open doors to ambition-furthering salons to which these friendships often led that were important, rather than the liaisons themselves.

  Winston’s wife Clemmie did not share her husband’s admiration. She liked Margaret Smith, but thought F. E. a most terrible influence on Winston, particularly in their joint passion for gambling. On the day Winston asked Clementine Hozier to marry him, F.E. and his wife Margaret were staying at Blenheim. As Winston and Clemmie left the little Greek temple in the park where she had accepted his proposal, Winston agreed to tell no one the news until Clemmie had found a chance to speak to her mother. But as they walked back to the house, they spotted F.E. Smith coming across the lawn towards them. Winston broke into a run and, to Clemmie’s irritation, threw his arms around his friend and blurted out their secret.