Smeared, assaulted and frozen out — then he saved Britain
Our politicians remain in thrall to Churchill, but he wasn’t always so revered, explains Andrew Roberts
Iwas astonished at the Conservative conference, in Birmingham, quite how much people are still enthralled by the story and the principles of a politician who has been dead now for over half a century. Tories turned out in their hundreds on Monday to listen to the tale of a man who left their party and attacked it violently, only to return to it 20 years later and become its leader.
Sir Winston Churchill’s capacity to unite warring factions – he is cited by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, by Theresa May and Boris Johnson – in their admiration of him, is an extraordinary phenomenon so long after most British statesmen of his generation have been consigned to historical oblivion.
He remains an inspiration for conviction politicians whose views are driven more by the dictates of their consciences than opinion polls, focus groups and spin-doctors. They might not always be right – Churchill himself was very often found on the wrong side of history over important issues – but at least the public knows they were wrong for honourable, and often courageous, reasons.
“Nothing is more dangerous in wartime,” Churchill told the House of Commons in September 1941, “than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature. I see that a speaker at the weekend said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.”
Mary Soames, Churchill’s youngest daughter, always decried the game of “What would Winston do?”, which ascribed posthumous views to him. It is impossible to say with certainty, for example, what his view would have been over the Iraq War, or even Brexit. There can be little doubt, however, that he would have been aghast at the prospect of a Marxist-Leninist prime minister, considering his lifelong hatred of that doctrine.
It is often said that politics today is no place for good, honourable people, for all the unfounded personal attacks and trolling on social media. Yet, consider what Churchill had to endure before he was allowed to take the premiership and save Britain from disaster. He was socially cut by friends after he left the Conservatives in 1904, when the entire government bench left the Chamber sooner than hear him speak. Lies were told about his physically
‘ Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than always taking one’s temperature’
assaulting his beloved wife Clementine. He had a book thrown at his head in the Commons chamber, drawing blood. One man tried to horsewhip him in a railway carriage, he and Clementine were assaulted by suffragettes at the theatre, and he was placed on an IRA death list.
A Communist meeting at the Albert Hall called for him to be hanged from a lamppost, and he was smeared by any number of libels, some of which he was forced to sue over. He was almost deselected from his constituency for his opposition to Appeasement. At the time of the Munich debate, a member of the House of Lords proposed that he be interned.
Yet, despite all the personal abuse he endured, Churchill believed politics to be an honourable profession. His capacity for magnanimity was a surprising feature of the research for my new biography of him. He worked closely at the Treasury with the man who threw the book at his head, and told the leader of the conspiracy to deselect him: “So far as I am concerned the past is dead.”
If people rightly lament the paucity of great political leadership today, the cure lies in something Churchill told an American student in 1953: “Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.” For aspiring politicians who have the necessary moral and physical courage for the task, that study should begin with the story of Winston Churchill.
Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts is published by Penguin, £35. To order for £30 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk