Joseph Chamberlain Amongst the dignitaries present were former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, Bonar Law, Chamberlain's sons Austen and Neville (then Lord Mayor of Birmingham), and other members of the Chamberlain, Hutton and Martineau families. Winston Churchill called Chamberlain "a splendid piebald: first black, then white, or, in political terms, first fiery red, then true blue". This is the conventional view of Chamberlain's politics, that he became gradually more conservative, beginning to the left of the Liberal party and ending to the right of the Conservatives. An alternative view is that he was always a radical in home affairs and an imperialist in
Neville Chamberlain seat in the small War Cabinet. The new First Lord proved to be a difficult Cabinet colleague, deluging the Prime Minister with a sea of lengthy memos. Chamberlain castigated Churchill for sending so many memos, as the two met in War Cabinet every day. Chamberlain suspected, correctly as it proved after the war, that "these letters are for the purpose of quotation in the Book that he will write hereafter". Chamberlain was also able to deter some of Churchill's more extreme plans, such as Operation Catherine, which would have sent three heavily armoured battleships into the Baltic Sea with an