In March 1915, Winston Churchill was convinced the Turks were running low on ammunition. They were not.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill had championed the attempt to force the Dardanelles with warships alone. On 18 March, the great naval attack was beaten back by mines, and he wanted it renewed the next day. The commanders chose a landing instead. On 25 April, Australians and New Zealanders went ashore at what became Anzac Cove. Eight months later they slipped away in the night, on 19 and 20 December. Some 8,700 Australians did not come home.

Churchill paid with his job. The Conservatives made his removal from the Admiralty a condition of joining a coalition in May 1915, and by the end of the year he had resigned from the government to command a battalion on the Western Front. Gallipoli followed him for a quarter of a century. In Darkest Hour, the King recites it among his reasons for distrusting Churchill in 1940.

The same film gives Churchill a line that has been quoted endlessly ever since: ‘You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.’

There is no reliable record of him saying it; it appears to belong to the screenwriter, Anthony McCarten. What Churchill did say, as Lord Halifax pressed the War Cabinet to seek terms through Mussolini, was recorded by Hugh Dalton: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’ Perhaps Gallipoli explains why the Churchill of 1940 would not bet his country on a scheme that depended on someone else behaving as the planners hoped. He had learned, at terrible cost to others, what happens when strategy rests on an optimistic reading of the other side.

The tiger line found an unwelcome new audience this week. On Saturday, October 10, a man died after entering the tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park, near Doncaster. On Tuesday, his family pleaded with people to stop circulating the footage. The same day, the President of the United States posted it to Truth Social with the caption: ‘Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT.’ A young man is dead, and nothing here is about him. But ‘don’t ever mess with nature’ is sound advice from a man who has taken his country out of the Paris Agreement and is leaving the UN climate convention itself. Next month, in Antalya, Australia will chair the negotiations the Americans have walked out of.

A climate summit is not a war, and Antalya is a long way from the Gallipoli peninsula. Anzac memory deserves better than cheap analogy, and none is intended. But the pattern is worth noticing. Australia is again heading to Türkiye on a venture whose central assumption, that others will cooperate, already looks shaky.

What Canberra actually holds

It is worth being clear about the hand Chris Bowen will carry into the room in November.

At Belém last year, Australia gave up its bid to host the summit in Adelaide. In exchange, Türkiye agreed to host and Australia became ‘President of Negotiations’, with what the Prime Minister’s office described as ‘exclusive authority in relation to the negotiations’. Bowen put the best face on it: ‘Obviously it would be great if Australia could have it all. But we can’t have it all.’

He was right about that, and it has not got better. In September, Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s Environment Minister and the COP31 president, told journalists that the two countries are not co-presidents and that ‘the final decision lies with the presidency of COP31’. Exclusive authority, it turns out, comes with a landlord.

The landlord has views. The central question for Antalya is what to do about fossil fuels, after Belém ended with no explicit commitment and only a voluntary roadmap offered by Brazil. Kurum’s position is that simply telling nations to phase out fossil fuels ‘is not realistic’. So, Australia will chair a negotiation whose host calls the main demand unrealistic, without the largest historical emitter in the room.

That is not a seat at the head of the table. It is a head in the mouth.

The view from the enclosure

Churchill’s real argument in May 1940 was not about tigers. It was about what happens when you open talks from weakness. Halifax believed that asking Mussolini what terms might be available would do little harm. Churchill saw that the asking was itself the concession. Once you are seen to want a deal more than the other side, every future demand is priced accordingly.

Canberra has already started asking. At the pre-COP meeting in Fiji this month, Bowen said the summit’s cover text could acknowledge that the world will overshoot the 1.5C limit. That may well be honest. It is also a concession made before the bargaining starts, on the one number Australia’s Pacific neighbours care about most.

Meanwhile, the home front is not helping. Australia remains the world’s third largest fossil fuel exporter. Coal still supplies about 45 per cent of its electricity. In September an extension of the Saraji coal mine in Queensland was approved. Bowen has promised to lobby producing countries for a ‘meaningful step forward’ on the fossil fuel transition, but has said little about the roadmap itself. Delegates in Antalya can read export statistics. A chairman asking others to wind down what his own country is expanding does not negotiate from strength.

Nor does it help that the same government is asking Donald Trump to spare Australia his tariffs while chairing the process he has abandoned.

Who pays when the room cannot deliver

The real risk for Australians is not that Antalya fails. Most COPs disappoint. The risk is that a chairman desperate for a headline buys one with money he does not control and promises he cannot keep.

The Belém deal already provides for a session at COP31 on the climate finance needs of small island states, offering a platform for commitments to the Pacific Resilience Facility. Helping the Pacific is a perfectly respectable goal. But a president of negotiations who has conceded the target, cannot override the host and cannot bring the Americans back has only one thing left to offer the room, and that is Australian taxpayers’ money. That is what reasoning with the tiger looks like.

The alternative is less glamorous, and it starts with one rule: no new Australian climate finance pledge in Antalya unless the largest emitters still in the room, China and India among them, put comparable commitments on the table first. Beyond that, Bowen should aim for what a chair can actually deliver: transparency rules that make every country’s numbers comparable, and an honest account of Australia’s own exports. He could let Türkiye own the spectacle, since it has insisted on owning the final decision. And he could treat ‘exclusive authority’ as a duty to run a fair process rather than a licence to buy an outcome.

None of that will produce a triumphant press release. But Churchill did not win May 1940 by producing better press releases than Halifax. He won it by refusing to negotiate from inside the jaws.

The empty walkway

Back in Doncaster, the park stayed shut for days. The raised walkway above the tiger enclosure, built so visitors could watch the big cats in safety, stood empty. The tiger was unharmed and will not be put down. Nothing about the animal changed. Every meaningful choice belonged to people: how we keep visitors and predators apart, which the investigation will examine, how we care for those who are unwell, what we choose to film and to share.

The line McCarten gave Churchill survives because it is half true. You cannot reason with a tiger once your head is in its mouth. The other half is the part Canberra still controls: you can decide where to put your head.

Mr Bowen leaves for Antalya in a few weeks. Australians have landed on a Turkish shore with a borrowed plan before. He should pack accordingly.

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