Next, Davies asked Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, the leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party, to request a confidence motion—a vote of confidence—at the end of the debate. The Labour men refused. Without the support of Conservative MPs, the motion would fail, and Attlee and Greenwood found it impossible to imagine any set of circumstances under which rank-and-file Conservative MPs—those business-friendly go-getters from the suburbs and upright Tory knights of the squire—would vote a Conservative prime minister out of office.

Meanwhile, the prime minister’s supporters, sensing a challenge to his leadership, began to plot a defense. In late April, Alec Douglas-Home, a senior Chamberlain aide, collared Henry Channon in the House and “pumped” him for information: “Did I think Winston should be deflated? . . . Ought he leave the Admiralty?” Douglas-Home’s interrogation was one of the first indications that Chamberlain’s allies planned to mount a whispering campaign against the first lord, who was widely viewed as the prime minister’s most probable challenger. Harold Nicolson, a Churchill supporter, also noticed that “the Tapers and Tadpoles [Chamberlain’s operatives] were putting it around that the whole Norwegian episode is due to Winston.” Out in the Conservative Party heartland, the home counties, where people spoke of England rather than Britain, the anti-Churchill campaign grew vehement. “W. C. they regard with complete mistrust,” Nancy Dugdale wrote her soldier husband, Tommy, in Palestine. “They hate his boasting broadcasts. W. C. is really the counterpart of Göring in England, full of the desire for blood—blitzkrieg and bloated with ego and over feeding, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air. I can’t tell you how depressed I feel about it.”

As the Whitsun debate approached, Churchill’s supporters mounted a whispering campaign of their own. “Winston is being lauded by both the Socialist [Labour] and Liberal opposition and being tempted to lead a revolt against the PM” the ever-watchful Henry Channon noted in his diary. “Tonight, [he] sat joking in the smoking room surrounded by A. V. Alexander [a Labour Party official] and Archie Sinclair [leader of the Liberal Party], the new Shadow Cabinet. A Westminster war added to the German one.” Chamberlain was also suspicious of Churchill’s intentions. Winston “is too apt to look the other way while his friends exalt him,” he complained to his sisters in a letter. In the debate over Churchill’s loyalties, the final word is usually given to John Colville, who had heard from a trusted source that “Winston was being loyal to the P.M. but his satellites (e.g., Duff Cooper, Amery etc.) were doing all in their power to create mischief and ill feeling.” Perhaps, but at the very least, it is likely that Churchill was aware of his friends’ politicking. In early May, a time when Chamberlain was still expected to survive the Whitsun debate, Churchill felt confident enough about his own political future to ask Lloyd George if he would accept a post in a Churchill government. Unsurprisingly, the former prime minister refused to give him a straight answer.

The March Gallup poll had indicated that fully a quarter of the British public favored “a discussion of peace proposals with Germany now,” and, as Lloyd George was the only politician of national standing who represented that point of view, he was also spoken of as a possible successor to Chamberlain. “People call me a defeatist,” Lloyd George told Cecil King, editor of the Sunday Pictorial, a 1940s version of People magazine. “But what I say to them is this: Tell me, how can we win? Can we win in the air? Can we win at sea, when the effect of our naval blockade is wiped out by Germany’s connections with Russia? . . . Hitler cannot win any more than we can. . . . The Germans cannot get through the Maginot Line. . . . The war will drag wearily on.”

Other well-informed Britons agreed. In March, when a reporter asked Basil Liddell Hart, Britain’s leading military analyst, what the government should do, he replied, “Come to the best possible terms as soon as possible. . . .