Never has so much rot been talked by so many to so few

By any measure Scott Kelly, the retired US astronaut, is an extraordinarily brave man. Nearly 60 years after yuri Gagarin’s historic flight, only 536 people have been in space.

Eighteen of them were killed, to say nothing of dreadful deaths during training. yet Kelly went on four missions for Nasa, two of them long term, spending almost a year in one instance on the International Space Station.

By 2015 he had logged more time in orbit than anyone else in history – and when you think of the metallic claustrophobia of it, or could imagine month upon month not feeling the wind on your face or hearing its breath in the trees, the tension of lift-off and the uncertainties of re-entry and landing, that calls for courage of a high order.

yet most of us are unmanned on one point of vulnerability – heights, rats, the dentist. In Scott Kelly’s case it has proved to be Twitter – the usual sadsack saga of the past decade or so. Someone tweets something perhaps a bit daft. Others re-tweet it.

Suddenly, it goes viral. There is much point-and-shriek virtue-signalling – highly confected outrage – until, finally, the miscreant publicly surrenders and says something like: ‘I regret my deeply problematic heteronormative comments. In future I will check my privilege.’

In Scott Kelly’s case, it was about Churchill, and in the aftermath of the US Senate’s confirmation last weekend of a new Supreme Court justice after much emotive stuff that has divided America.

Kelly tweeted gloomily: ‘One of the greatest leaders of modern times, Sir Winston Churchill said, “in victory, magnanimity”. I guess those days are over.’

WITHIN the hour he was assailed by massed cyberspace crazies – denouncing him for not denouncing Churchill as a racist, an imperialist, foe of Indian independence, an oppressor of the Irish, a drunk, the villain of the 1942 Bengal famine and so on.

Kelly could have ignored this. Instead, evidently shocked, he made a cringeworthy apology. ‘Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies. I’ll go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support. My point was we need to come together as one nation. We’re all Americans. That should transcend partisan politics.’

And thus offended the informed and sensible rest of us who believe the best of men is man at best – and can still be great.

Two things colour this sad tale. Churchill has become rather a football in US politics. Barack Obama had scarcely tossed his briefcase into an Oval Office armchair before ordering the removal of a bronze bust of the former PM.

Donald Trump, after his inauguration last year, no less ostentatiously restored it. Millions of Americans – a people prone to moral panic – accordingly now identify the hero of 1940 with all that is evil.

And, one suspects, this being America, that money here has talked. Scott Kelly will spend the rest of his career giving lucrative lectures, endorsing products, opening things. He is now a brand with, no doubt, management and agents, and the speed of that climbdown suggests his people panicked. Churchill did have faults, vulnerabilities and blind spots. He was long remembered, and with hatred, by many Irish people, Welsh miners and Glasgow trades unionists.

He was a thoughtless husband, an ineffectual father: one daughter would take her own life and his only son, Randolph, became a detestable adult. (When a benign tumour was removed by surgeons in 1964, Evelyn Waugh cracked, ‘It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the one part of Randolph which was not malignant and to remove it’.)

His father’s greatest failure was not knowing when to stop. Churchill clung pathetically to power, long after his health and judgment were gone. On the merits of 1951-55 alone, he could fairly be regarded as our worst post-war prime minister – but, as John Mackintosh put it, that second term was really a reward for his first.

Had Churchill died in 1939 – when he was already 65 – he would be best remembered as the trigger-happy home secretary who sent troops to quell strikes and opposed votes for women; the man responsible for Gallipoli; the chancellor who witlessly put our economy back on the Gold Standard, and an erratic Parliamentarian who, in the abdication crisis, lobbied openly for the weak, silly Edward VIII. But, of course, he did not die early and is now rightly remembered as great. He was the first significant leader to identify the menace of Nazi Germany and to deplore appeasement. In the crisis of 1940, he was, with fire-breathing intent, the only credible leader in sight. ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last,’ he rumbled, ‘let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’

AGAINST the counsels of many, he insisted that Germany must be defeated, and to this end he convinced the Cabinet, he convinced Parliament and he convinced the country.

As John F Kennedy later and sweetly put it, ‘he mobilised the English language and sent it into battle’.

The Queen, once asked who was her favourite PM, let slip: ‘Oh, Winston, of course, because he was such fun.’

All the wilder charges against Churchill are false. He deplored the Amritsar massacre, never set warplanes with guns against Irish demonstrators, or suggested the dropping of poison gas on Iraqis.

The Bengal famine of 1942 was in no way his fault and, with much of the wider region occupied by Japan, he was in no position to ship in food supplies. Even the widely held belief that Churchill was an alcoholic has scant foundation in fact. He drank frequently, but not heavily, always ate well – and lived to 90.

Scott Kelly could have learned all this for himself: there are excellent and most readable Churchill biographies by such as Andrew Roberts or Boris Johnson, even leaving aside far weightier tomes. But he panicked – and folded like a chocolate teapot.

It takes, admittedly, a degree of self-possession to withstand a Twitterstorm. Something about laptops and smartphones seems to unhinge too many of us, typing and screeching things we would never dream of saying to someone’s face – and few seem able to defuse such insults with aplomb.

When one woman unwisely tweeted, ‘James Blunt just has an annoying face and a highly irritating voice’, the star’s response was swift: ‘And no mortgage.’

One rather thinks Churchill would have approved. ‘If you were my husband, I’d poison your tea,’ Nancy Astor once spat at him.

‘Madam,’ said he, ‘if you were my wife, I’d drink it.’