Churchill, Chamberlain, and wartime carrier construction

Could Churchill's insistence on carriers have brought down Chamberlain's government and made Halifax prime minister?

Probably not; Chamberlain relied on Churchill politically, and Churchill had wide latitude over Admiralty decisions.

The public was not yet demanding escorts in the way later Battle of the Atlantic experience might suggest, because Germany entered the war with only about sixty submarines. Chamberlain had brought Churchill into government partly to strengthen it and accommodate the hawkish faction that Churchill represented. Churchill's First World War experience appears to have encouraged him to stop large-ship construction and rely on trawlers for some work that naval planners wanted purpose-built escorts to perform, even as the navy faced a war roughly three years earlier than planned. Naval leaders such as Third Sea Lord Bruce Fraser could resist some choices using work prepared by Reginald Henderson, but Churchill's political weight made him hard to contain and a carrier dispute was unlikely to topple Chamberlain by itself.