Winston Churchill was first elected to the UK Parliament at the 1900 general election as one of two Conservative Party members representing the Oldham constituency. He took his seat in the House of Commons in February 1901 but soon became critical of the Conservative government on a number of issues. On 31 May 1904, he formally crossed the floor of the Commons to join the opposition Liberals, remaining a party member until March 1924.
Churchill was less prolific as a writer through this period; he completed a two-volume biography of his father in 1906 but did not begin his next major work, The World Crisis, until December 1921. He married Clementine Hozier in September 1908 and their eldest child, Diana was born in July 1909. As a Liberal, Churchill held several ministerial roles, most notably as Home Secretary (1910–1911) and as First Lord of the Admiralty at the beginning of the First World War. He took most of the blame for the failed Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and resigned from the government in November of that year to rejoin the Army. In January 1916, he was promoted temporarily to lieutenant-colonel of the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers who were active near Ploegsteert. Following a merger of battalions, he relinquished command and returned to politics. He reverted to the rank of major on 16 May.
In July 1917, Churchill was appointed Minister of Munitions by the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, and voted to support the Representation of the People Act 1918. In January 1919, he became jointly the Secretary of State for War and the Secretary of State for Air. In February 1921, he became the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Churchill suffered personal tragedies in 1921 with the deaths of both his mother and his two-year-old daughter, Marigold. His youngest child, Mary, was born in September 1922 and, in the same month, he completed purchase of his family home, Chartwell, in Kent.
Lloyd George's coalition splintered to necessitate the November 1922 general election. Churchill lost his seat at Dundee, which he had represented since May 1908. Out of Parliament, he devoted himself to painting and writing The World Crisis. In December 1923, he stood for the Liberals at Leicester West in the general election but lost. He was defeated again at the Westminster Abbey by-election the following March and became thoroughly disillusioned with the Liberal Party. In May 1924, he spoke at a Conservative meeting in Liverpool and, declaring that the Liberal Party was finished as a political force, he urged all Liberals to support the Conservatives to try and defeat the Labour Party and stop the spread of socialism. In October, following discussions with prime minister Stanley Baldwin, Churchill stood as a Constitutionalist candidate in the general election at Epping. He won and Baldwin appointed him as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Churchill severed his ties with the Liberal Party and rejoined the Conservative Party.
Liberal MP: 1904–1908
In the early 1900s, as an MP for the Conservative Party, Churchill had been growing dissatisfied with the Conservative Party's approach on several key issues. On 31 May 1904, as Parliament resumed following its Whitsun recess, he crossed the floor of the House of Commons, defecting from the Conservatives to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. His cousin Ivor Guest followed him. Suggested reasons for Churchill's changing sides have included the prospect of a ministerial post and salary, Originally an essay entitled "Churchill: The Aristocratic Adventurer" in Aspects of Aristocracy. Penguin 1998. a desire to eliminate poverty, and concerns for the working class, but the immediately preceding events were the rift with the Conservative Party over trade tariffs. He may simply have been more sympathetic to the Liberals, despite being personally conservative and traditionalist; in 1962 he reportedly told another MP "I'm a Liberal. Always have been." As a Liberal, he continued to campaign for free trade.
In December 1905, Balfour resigned as prime minister and King Edward VII invited the Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman to take his place. Hoping to secure a working majority in the House of Commons, Campbell-Bannerman called a general election for January 1906, which the Liberals won. Having had a previous invitation from the Manchester Liberals to stand in their constituency, Churchill did so, winning the Manchester North West seat. January also saw the publication of Churchill's biography of his father; he received an advance payment of £8000 for the book, the highest ever paid for a political biography in Britain to that point. It was generally well received. It was also at this time that the first biography of Churchill himself, written by the Liberal Alexander MacCallum Scott, was published.
In the new government, Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonial Office, a position that he had requested. He worked beneath the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin, and took Edward Marsh as his secretary; the latter remained Churchill's secretary for 25 years. In this junior ministerial position, Churchill was first tasked with helping to draft a constitution for the Transvaal. In 1906, he helped oversee the granting of a government to the Orange River Colony. In dealing with southern Africa, he sought to ensure equality between the British and Boer. He also announced a gradual phasing out of the use of Chinese indentured labourers in South Africa; he and the government decided that a sudden ban would cause too much upset in the colony and might damage the economy. He expressed concerns about the relations between European settlers and the black African population; after Zulu launched the Bambatha Rebellion in Natal, he complained of Europeans' "disgusting butchery of the natives".
In August 1906, Churchill holidayed on a yacht in Deauville, France, spending much of his time playing polo or gambling. From there he proceeded to Paris and then Switzerland—where he climbed the Eggishorn—and then to Berlin and Silesia, where he was a guest of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He went then to Venice, and from there toured Italy by motorcar with his friend, Lionel Rothschild. In May 1907, he holidayed at the home of another friend, Maurice de Forest, in Biarritz. In the autumn, he embarked on a tour of Europe and Africa. He travelled through France, Italy, Malta, and Cyprus, before moving through the Suez Canal to Aden and Berbera. Sailing to Mombasa, he travelled by rail through the Kenya Colony—stopping for big game hunting in Simba—before heading through the Uganda Protectorate and then sailing up the River Nile. He wrote about his experiences for Strand Magazine and later published them in book form as My African Journey.
Asquith government: 1908–1915 President of the Board of Trade: 1908–1910
When Asquith succeeded Campbell-Bannerman in 1908, Churchill was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Aged 33, he was the youngest Cabinet member since 1866. Newly appointed Cabinet ministers were legally obliged to seek re-election at a by-election; in April, Churchill lost the Manchester North West by-election to the Conservative candidate by 429 votes. The Liberals then stood him in a by-election in the Scottish safe seat of Dundee, where he won comfortably. In his Cabinet role, Churchill worked with Liberal politician David Lloyd George to champion social reform. In one speech Churchill stated that although the "vanguard" of the British people "enjoys all the delights of all the ages, our rearguard struggles out into conditions which are crueller than barbarism". To deal with this, he promoted what he called a "network of State intervention and regulation" akin to that in Germany. His speeches on these issues were published in the volumes Liberalism and the Social Problem and The People's Rights.
One of the first tasks he faced was in arbitrating an industrial dispute among ship-workers and their employers on the River Tyne. He then established a Standing Court of Arbitration to deal with future industrial disputes, establishing a reputation as a conciliator. Arguing that workers should have their working hours reduced, Churchill promoted the Mines Eight Hours Bill—which legally prohibited miners working more than an eight-hour day—introducing its second reading in the House of Commons. In 1908, he introduced the Trade Boards Bill to parliament, which would establish a Board of Trade which could prosecute exploitative employers, establish the principle of minimum wage, and the right of workers to have meal breaks. The bill passed with a large majority. In May, he proposed the Labour Exchanges Bill which sought to establish over 200 Labour Exchanges through which the unemployed would be assisted in finding employment. He also promoted the idea of an unemployment insurance scheme, which would be part-funded by the state.
To ensure funding for these social reforms, he and Lloyd George denounced Reginald McKennas' expansion of warship production. Churchill openly ridiculed those who thought war with Germany was inevitable—according to biographer Roy Jenkins he was going through "a pro-German phase"—and in autumn 1909 he visited Germany, spending time with the Kaiser and observing German Army manoeuvres.
In his personal life, Churchill proposed marriage to Clementine Hozier; they were married in September at St Margaret's, Westminster. They honeymooned in Baveno, Venice, and Veveří Castle in Moravia; before settling into a London home at 33 Eccleston Square. The following July they had a daughter, Diana.
To pass its social reforms into law, Asquith's Liberal government presented them in the form of the People's Budget. Conservative opponents of the reform set up the Budget Protest League; supporters of it established the Budget League, of which Churchill became president. The budget passed in the House of Commons but was rejected by the Conservative peers who dominated the House of Lords; this threatened Churchill's social reforms. Churchill warned that such upper-class obstruction would anger working-class Britons and could lead to class war. To deal with the deadlock, the government called a January 1910 general election, which resulted in a narrow Liberal victory; Churchill retained his seat at Dundee. After the election, he proposed the abolition of the House of Lords in a cabinet memorandum, suggesting that it be replaced either by a unicameral system or by a new, smaller second chamber that lacked an in-built advantage for the Conservatives. In April, the Lords relented and the budget was passed.
Home Secretary: 1910–1911
In February 1910, Churchill was promoted to Home Secretary, giving him control over the police and prison services, and he implemented a prison reform programme. He introduced a distinction between criminal and political prisoners, with prison rules for the latter being relaxed. He tried to establish libraries for prisoners, and introduced a measure ensuring that each prison must put on either a lecture or a concert for the entertainment of prisoners four times a year. He reduced the length of solitary confinement for first offenders to one month and for recidivists to three months, and spoke out against what he regarded as the excessively lengthy sentences meted out to perpetrators of certain crimes. He proposed the abolition of automatic imprisonment of those who failed to pay fines, and put a stop to the imprisonment of those aged between 16 and 21 except in cases where they had committed the most serious offences. Of the 43 capital sentences passed while he was Home Secretary, he commuted 21 of them.