PURLOINED STATE PAPERS? CHURCHILL LED THE WAY

EVEN Donald Trump’s allies have struggled to defend his purloining of multiple boxes of classified documents, seized by the FBI in a raid on the former U.S. president’s home in Florida.

But one Republican Congressman, Ken Buck, made a desperate effort: ‘He may be writing a memoir; he may be writing an autobiography. The fact he had the documents isn’t of itself a concern.’

Nice try. But under U.S. law, all presidential papers are the property of the National Archives — and the FBI got involved only after the Archives Record Administration had been given the runaround by Trump.

But Buck’s spurious justification was one employed (in this case genuinely) by Winston Churchill, and in a way from which he and his family gained financially. Even at the height of the Blitz, Churchill would instruct his secretaries to gather boxes of his official papers every month, and mark them as ‘Personal Minutes’ — though they were stamped as the property of ‘His Britannic Majesty’s Government’.

By the end of the war he had taken a veritable shedload of state papers home. He told his successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee, that he needed them to write his book on World War II (‘I am convinced it would be to the advantage of our country to have it told, as perhaps I alone can tell it’).

It was certainly to Churchill’s advantage: according to Andrew Roberts’s masterful biography of the war leader, Churchill received by way of advance, in today’s money, the sum of £16.7 million from his British publisher and $16.1 million from an American one. Not only that, but as John Major’s cabinet secretary Robin Butler informed the then prime minister, Churchill had ‘set up a trust fund to ensure that any financial benefit from the use of the archives accrued to his heirs’. Butler wrote this memo because Major was weighing up whether the National Heritage Memorial Fund should fork out to buy the papers from Churchill’s grandson (also called Winston), who was one of Major’s colleagues on the Tory benches and had been lobbying governments since the 1970s to buy them off him.

He got Sir Jock Colville, his grandfather’s former private secretary, to tell one of Butler’s predecessors: ‘He felt that since he has very little money of his own, it was a little bit rough if he just had to surrender the papers without any quid pro quo.’

Lots of quids, in fact. Major agreed to the deal, the Heritage Memorial fund in 1995 coughing up £12.5 million for the papers, which included 68 bundles of documents that should in any case have been the state’s own property.

Say what you like about Trump, but he hasn’t been attempting to sell his hoard of government papers to their rightful owner.