WHERE IS THERE A CHURCHILL WHEN WE NEED ONE?

Two films about a British giant and the shared values that united our nation hold up an unflattering mirror to today’s political pygmies and a divided country riddled by so many uncertainties

OF ALL the statues that gaze across Parliament Square towards the Palace of Westminster, from Benjamin Disraeli to Nelson Mandela, one in particular always draws the visitors.

Standing directly opposite Big Ben, the statue of Sir Winston Churchill — a mighty figure wrapped in a military greatcoat— has become the personification of Britain’s defiance during the grimmest hours of World War II.

Even today, almost 80 years after the war began, the bronze colossus carries an emotional charge. Standing in his shadow, you can almost hear the rolling cadences of the great man’s speeches, the wail of the air-raid sirens and the crash of the Nazi bombs.

It is surely no exaggeration to say that no character in our history — not even Elizabeth I, Nelson or Wellington — has left such a mark on our national imagination.

Churchill was not perfect, of course. Even during his lifetime, people regarded him as selfish, spoiled and unreliable, a supreme egotist who drank too much, expected others to dance to his whims and could be disastrously wrong.

Yet today his star shines brighter than ever.

This year has already brought us one Hollywood biopic, Churchill, starring Brian Cox, as well as Christopher Nolan’s magnificent Dunkirk, which closes with an exhausted soldier reading Churchill’s rousing pledge to ‘fight on the beaches’.

This week, meanwhile, saw the West End premiere of the film Darkest Hour, in which Gary Oldman — giving a performance that has made him an Oscar favourite — plays the great man during the crucial days in the summer of 1940, when Europe crumbled and Britain stood alone against the deadliest war machine the world had ever seen.

So why are we so drawn to the story of a man who died 52 years ago, and whose mission was to preserve an Empire that has long since passed into history? Why does Churchill still matter? Why do we still care?

One obvious answer is that history offers few lives with such colour and drama.

AS AN aristocrat’s son who fought in Africa, India and Europe, served as a Conservative MP, Liberal Home Secretary and Conservative Chancellor, masterminded the disastrous Gallipoli landings, warned of the dangers of appeasing Hitler, led the nation to victory and even picked up the Nobel Prize for Literature, Churchill has a unique place in our history.

It is no wonder that in 2002, viewers of the BBC series Great Britons voted him the greatest of all time.

A deeper explanation is that in a dark and confused age, Churchill remains a beacon of clarity.

Watching films such as Dunkirk or Darkest Hour, you are plunged into an era when the battle lines, daunting as they were, were at least unarguably stark.

In the age of Brexit, Trump, economic globalisation and mass immigration, many people feel bewildered and adrift. The world seems to be coming undone, and many of the principles most of us took for granted — from the sanctity of democracy to the importance of a free Press — have been thrown into confusion.

By comparison, the choices that faced the British people in World War II were more frightening, but also simpler.

Even amid the chaos of the summer of 1940, when France collapsed, our Army fell back on Dunkirk and Churchill was propelled into Downing Street, nobody doubted that Britain was on the side of the angels.

People might have quarrelled about our strategy, and as Darkest Hour shows, many senior politicians seriously wondered whether the war could be won.

But no decent person would have dreamed of defending Hitler, and none swallowed his vile propaganda. In that sense, our current love affair with Churchill is a kind of escapism, harking back to a time when good conquered evil in a titanic struggle for the future of the planet.

(This explains, by the way, why these films rarely mention the Russians — without whom Hitler would not have been defeated — for once you bring our blood-drenched ally Stalin into it, the moral picture becomes rather murkier.) In other ways, too, films such as Darkest Hour represent an antidote to today’s depressing world events.

They show a Britain united in the pursuit of victory, fuelled by an unaffected patriotism that embraced all regions and classes.

At a time when the Tories are consumed by internal wrangling, Labour has degenerated into a hard-Left personality cult and the wider political debate — fuelled by social media — is more hysterical than at any point in living memory, it is easy to forget that Churchill came to office as a Coalition Prime Minister, with the strong support of the Labour and