Boris: Brexit is the Churchillian thing to do

Former foreign secretary likens current dilemma to wartime leader’s ‘bet against Hitler and Nazis’

BORIS JOHNSON has compared his Brexit dilemma to that faced by Winston Churchill during the outbreak of the Second World War, arguing that “sometimes you must take the decision which is fraught with risk”. The former foreign secretary likened the challenges facing Britain to those encountered by the wartime prime minister, whom he described as a “compulsive gambler” who “prevailed” despite overwhelming opposition from “a huge coalition of people in London” prepared to give in to Hitler.

Mr Johnson said Churchill went against the will of the establishment and business – which he claimed would have secured a “pretty sweet” deal from appeasement – but ultimately he emerged “triumphantly right”. Churchill is Mr Johnson’s greatest political hero, whom he often invokes during speeches and the subject of The Churchill Factor, his bestselling book.

Speaking to financial firms at a private event in Amsterdam on Tuesday, Mr Johnson added: “When you look at Winston Churchill, you see a man whose whole career was about risk taking – he was a compulsive gambler.

“This was a man who took one compulsive gamble after another – and he took all sorts of positions on things that went disastrously wrong. He was wrong about Gallipoli, he was wrong about the gold standard, he was wrong about India … he was spectacularly wrong for most of his political career.

“But in the 1930s he, of course, took one giant bet. He took a giant bet against Hitler and the Nazi party.

“And to use the language of finance, he shorted the Nazis in a big way, at a time when much of the British establishment was actually filling their boots with that particular stock. You can’t say he was wrong. In fact he was triumphantly right. And I think the only lesson I draw from that is that sometimes you do need to do the difficult thing, and you do need to take a position that everyone says is too fraught with risk.”

Mr Johnson, who faced attacks from within his own party over his defiance of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, said that Churchill was himself “deeply disliked” by “much of the aristocracy”, who railed against “what he stood for and his shameless opportunism”.

But even when he faced mutiny from the “faction” led by Lord Halifax, who wanted to strike a deal with Hitler, Mr Johnson said Churchill’s perseverance had saved democracy in Europe.

“The fact is if Churchill hadn’t been there in that room, if he hadn’t made the case that he did, then democracy in Europe as we know it would have been extinguished for a very long period.

“He had a helluva struggle in the Cabinet in 1940 to persuade them that it was right for Britain to fight on … The long-term gain was to rescue this continent and even the country we are now in from a pretty odious tyranny.”

Mr Johnson, who has previously compared the EU to Hitler and Napoleon, insisted that he was not attempting to make “a comparison between events today and 1940”.