Perspectives on Churchill
ASIANS living in Britain do not have to join in the national adulation of Sir Winston Churchill, but in order to understand the English, it is probably essential that we have deeper knowledge of the great wartime leader.
I note that the historian Dr Andrew Roberts is offering a five-day tour, “Explore the life of Churchill”. It includes a four-night stay at London’s five-star Royal Horseguards hotel, and visits to the Churchill War Rooms as well as Chartwell and Blenheim Palace.
There will also be a talk by Roberts, whose biography, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, is highly regarded.
This is the kind of thing I would find enlightening. The only drawback is the cost – £1,849 (£1,799 for subscribers of the Daily Telegraph, which is backing the project).
No doubt, it will offer the conventional view of Churchill – that the flaws in a complex man can be forgiven when set against his inspired leadership during the Second World War.
To offer a more complete portrait of Churchill, the equally distinguished historians, Shashi Tharoor and Madhusree Mukerji, may wish to offer a very different kind of tour.
They are the authors respectively of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India and Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II.
Their tour would probably include a journey to the plains of eastern India where an estimated three million Indians perished during the Bengal Famine of 1943, allegedly because of Churchill’s wartime policies, as well as the prisons where Mahatma Gandhi was jailed. Gandhi, who was ridiculed as a “naked fakir”, was, of course, Churchill’s bête noire.
It might conclude with a visit to Churchill College, Cambridge, whose Master, Professor Dame Athene Donald, and Fellow, Prof Priya Gopal, have been undertaking a “critical re-assessment of Churchill’s life and legacy in light of his views on empire and race”.
A trip to Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square might also be part of the tour. It was daubed with the word, “racist”, during the Black Lives Matter protests last year, which prompted Churchill College, named after the leader, to take a fresh look at his career.
Incidentally, the “antiwoke” actor Laurence Fox, who used an image of Churchill to promote his Reclaim party, lost his £10,000 deposit in the London mayoral election – despite getting positive publicity from some newspapers and generous backing from Jeremy Hosking, a former Tory donor who also funded the Brexit party.