My understanding is that the Labour Party would have been content to join a government led by Halifax; their red line was that Chamberlain had to go. And a lot of Labour MPs still associated Churchill with the Tonypandy and Liverpool riots and the (largely mythical) deployment of tanks to George Square in Glasgow in 1919. Halifax drew back when the question was posed whether he or Churchill should be PM, because he thought Churchill was better suited to wartime leadership and anyway would undermine him as Minister of Defence in the Commons while he was nominally PM in the Lords. (That said, officials looked into finding a way for Halifax as a peer to address the Commons; they’d have got round it.) I’m pretty convinced that it never occurred to Halifax this was his one and only shot at the premiership. No-one knew how long the war would last and there was felt to be a good chance Churchill would implode (that’s certainly what Lloyd George thought would happen).
My understanding is that the Labour Party would have been content to join a government led by Halifax; their red line was that Chamberlain had to go. And a lot of Labour MPs still associated Churchill with the Tonypandy and Liverpool riots and the (largely mythical) deployment of tanks to George Square in Glasgow in 1919. Halifax drew back when the question was posed whether he or Churchill should be PM, because he thought Churchill was better suited to wartime leadership and anyway would undermine him as Minister of Defence in the Commons while he was nominally PM in the Lords. (That said, officials looked into finding a way for Halifax as a peer to address the Commons; they’d have got round it.) I’m pretty convinced that it never occurred to Halifax this was his one and only shot at the premiership. No-one knew how long the war would last and there was felt to be a good chance Churchill would implode (that’s certainly what Lloyd George thought would happen).