In the early-1900s, Winston Churchill, then in his late-20s, held dinner parties where he and other young Conservative back-benchers would entertain prominent politicians. One night, the guest was Joseph Chamberlain (father of future prime minister Neville), who as Secretary of State for the Colonies was responsible for administering the British Empire. There was tension. The Conservative government had barred an English journalist from returning from South Africa, where he’d served prison time for an article criticizing the Boer War. The young Conservatives agreed with the Liberal opposition that the government’s anti-free-speech position was indefensible.
Chamberlain demanded blind party loyalty, asking: “What is the use of supporting your own party only when it is right? It is just when it is in this sort of pickle that you ought to come to its aid.” William Manchester, who recounted the dinner scene in his great Churchill biography The Last Lion, noted that Churchill’s reply to that is unrecorded, but presumably he restrained himself, as the mood mellowed.
As Chamberlain left at evening’s end, he thanked his hosts and said he’d give them a “priceless secret”: “Tariffs!" There are the politics of the future, and of the near future. Study them closely and make yourselves masters of them, and you will not regret your hospitality to me. Manchester wrote: “They didn’t, but he bitterly regretted his advice, for Churchill took it, studying tariffs and then rejecting them, thereby contributing heavily to Chamberlain’s political ruin and the fall of the Tory government.”
Chamberlain led a push for “imperial preference,” a policy in which Britain and its colonies would trade on favorable terms, while imposing high tariffs on the rest of the world. Churchill was opposed, because this would raise prices in Britain, and because it would hurt ties with the U.S. If there were someday a war in Europe, he noted presciently, it would be “very much better that the United States should be vitally interested in keeping the English market open,” rather than indifferent to what had been its “principal customer.”
Churchill’s advocacy of free trade put him increasingly at odds with his fellow Tories, spurring his departure from the Conservative Party in 1904. Chamberlain’s proposals weren’t implemented. Churchill was a Liberal for the next couple of decades, eventually returning to the Conservatives with the famous quote, “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” In the early-1930s, the United Kingdom, battered by the Great Depression, took a protectionist turn, as did many countries.
In 1903, while still a Conservative, Churchill rose in the House of Commons in opposition to Chamberlain’s protectionism as signifying a deeper change: “The old Conservative Party with its religious convictions and constitutional principles will disappear and a new party will rise,” which he said would be “perhaps like the Republican Party in America.” By that he meant a party “rigid, materialist and secular, whose opinions will turn on touts of protected industries.”
The Republican Party’s sharp turn toward protectionism in 2025 stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy Churchill espoused, not just as a matter of policy but also for the lock-step way in which top Republicans have abandoned even a pretense of independent thought. A Washington Post article on the decision-making process that preceded Donald Trump’s announcement of massive tariffs reported that Vice President J.D. Vance and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller both declined to even give an opinion during the deliberations: “Miller and Vance in particular, said a person with knowledge of the discussions, continually expressed deference to Trump’s preferences — reiterating that they were in favor of whatever the president wanted to do.” Joe Chamberlain might’ve appreciated that whatever-you-want-sir obsequiousness, but Winston Churchill would’ve been disgusted.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky
