How great was Churchill?

There will be no apology for the title. This seems not only a fair question, but an essential one. Unless we can think about Churchill as someone who wasn’t destined, inevitably, to become the saviour of the nation, we cannot think about his pre-1940 life with any perspective. Without the war, it’s fair to say he would have been seen much less favourably, would not have been Prime Minister, and would be remembered as a more reactionary, less reliable figure.

Imagine if Lord Halifax had not been a peer, or if Chamberlain had clung on a little longer, or if there was somewhat more support for appeasement, and Churchill had not become Prime Minister. Imagine instead that one of the many times Churchill cheated death had gone differently. Without his exceptional achievements of 1940, what would his reputation be?

The problem with 1940 is that it is often used to either explain or excuse everything else. The Churchill of the movies is the Churchill of the finest hour speech. And the image we have of him in the lead up to the war — the one man prepared to speak out against Hitler, without who we would have been lost — is an image he promoted, not least in his history of the war. But this was not how he was seen at the time, and it is not the whole story.

The case against Churchill is easy to make and fairly compelling, albeit quite partial. Churchill’s early political life was, to a great extent, a failure. He switched from the Tory to the Liberal party in 1904 on principle. The Tories were abandoning Free Trade, so Churchill abandoned them. This created lasting bitterness, not least because Churchill was often pretty rude about the Tory party. His Liberal career, however, was a turbulent success.

Showing off at Sydney Street

As Home Secretary he put himself in the line of danger in order to get press coverage during the Sydney Street siege. If we didn’t value his courageous image as an emblem of resistance in 1940 we could see more clearly that Home Secretaries should not participate in police operations. His inflammatory language during the Irish Home Rule crisis meant that when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he moved the fifth fleet ‘menacingly close to Belfast’, the Unionists thought he was inciting a racial riot. Later on, he continued to champion the Gallipoli offensive while the death toll rose. At the same time the Unionists came into coalition, bringing their dislike of Churchill with them. As with Ulster, we might be able to defend his actions, but he invited criticism, much of which was fair. Paul Addison says,

Churchill's own egotism and impetuosity were factors in his downfall. He was over-confident of success, trumpeting victory in advance and passionately supporting the operation long after most people had written it off. Gallipoli was a cross to which he nailed himself.

The Tories were only too glad to see the back of him, and it was partly his fault. Churchill went to serve in the trenches for six months as penitence, but he spoke in the Commons on leave and his credibility was shattered when he called for the reinstatement of the notoriously unstable and unreliable Admiral Fisher, who had had a hand in Gallipoli. MPs actually gasped.

He lost his seat in 1922 and concentrated on publishing his history of WWI. He didn’t come back to Parliament until 1924, when Baldwin made him Chancellor. This is not a happy period. Churchill put Britain back on the Gold Standard at the pre-war rate of $4.86 to the pound. This was too high. Industry became uncompetitive, and unemployment was high. This decision was one of the factors that led to the General Strike. Keynes said this about Churchill’s decision:

Why did he do such a silly thing? Partly, perhaps, because he has no instinctive judgment to prevent him from making mistakes; partly because, lacking this instinctive judgment, he was deafened by the clamorous voices of conventional finance; and, most of all, because he was gravely misled by his experts.

Churchill also made cuts at the Admiralty, writing to Baldwin, ‘A war with Japan! But why should there be a war with Japan? I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime’. So much for his powers as a seer of war.

Churchill in 1916; his characteristic reverse-hand-on-hip pose is copied from his father, and is part of his carefully cultivated image.

His record in the 1930s has some holes in too. First, he was a desperate old reactionary about India. An imperialist in the Victorian mould, he simply didn’t believe in self-government for India. He was right about the immediate consequences, thinking it would be unworkable and bring out violence, up to a point. But that’s no argument against self-government in principle. And he totally failed to see the strength and legitimacy of the nationalist movement. His views were much more racist than most of his contemporaries’. His obsession with India distracted from the second theme of the 1930s, rearmament.

Having been a Chancellor who cut the Admiralty budget, he now became a prophesier of war. Addison details well the ways in which Churchill misunderstood how rearmament ought to happen. He said this in August 1939, for example:

The French front cannot be surprised. It cannot be broken at any point except by an effort which would be enormously costly in life and would take so much time that the general situation would be transformed while it was in progress.

It’s also something of an exaggeration to say Churchill had been in the wilderness throughout the 1930s. He served on the air defence committee from 1935, for example, and had some popular support in the party membership over India. He had chosen to leave the government over India. He was also a strong defender of Edward VIII, taking an almost ludicrous position on the Abdication, defending the king even when he knew he could not accept Mrs Simpson as Queen himself. On these crucial issues, he willingly went into a sort of internal opposition.

He was then slow to see Chamberlain as his opposite. (He even seconded Chamberlain’s nomination to party leader.) It wasn’t until after Munich that Churchill broke ranks. At that point he truly was in the wilderness, with almost no support. His constituency association nearly dropped him. It was at the invasion of Prague in March 1939 that his reputation began to recover.

The war, especially 1940 - 1941 represents an astonishing achievement. It may not be fair to say he saved the free world. As he himself admitted, America would have stepped in. But he was the reason the UK resisted Hitler. He brought the determination and energy the government needed to wage the war. He was the crucial link in May 1940 that avoided surrender. Without him, the world might have looked very different.

But after that his record is not unblemished. Even the loyal Brendan Bracken thought Churchill would have to resign if the Battle of El Alamein had been lost in 1942. The generals were sick of him interfering, especially Alan Brooke. His role in the Bengal Famine of 1943 is disputed. Something like 2-3 million people died in that famine. Whether Churchill bears responsibility is disputed, and many historians think not. But it ought to be a bigger part of the discussion.

After the war, Churchill clung onto power for too long. His 1951-55 government didn’t achieve great things, and his chosen successor, Anthony Eden, wasn’t up to the job. Churchill said that himself, which may be one factor in his refusal to give up power despite repeated promises to Eden. Screwing up the succession to a new leader remains one of his biggest errors. Clinging to power for too long and handing over to someone you know is not up to the job is typically something we criticise leaders for very heavily. There’s a sense with Churchill that, having won the war, he was entitled to his second period of office.

This is a selective history of Churchill’s career, and one that shows us the side of Churchill we are not used to seeing. This is not just the Churchill of the movies and The Crown and Boris Johnson. Andrew Roberts’ recent biography is defensive to the point of being lopsided. Roberts’ approach is almost a double standard. He is prepared to praise Churchill for being ahead of the times of military technology and strategy (such as his role in the development of the tank) and simultaneously to defend Churchill’s racial views by saying they reflected the world Churchill grew up in. Is he a man of his time or not? Similarly, Churchill’s parents are blamed for being cruel to him. But in the case of Churchill’s own children, three of whom were divorced alcoholics, Churchill is given a free pass, Roberts saying merely that it is difficult to be the child of a great man.

The real flaw with the book is that Roberts believes in destiny. It is subtitled Walking with Destiny and the structure encourages us to think of Churchill as progressing towards 1940, his early failures preparations for his great trial. Roberts reinforces this by totting up the staggering numbers of times Churchill was nearly killed (covering everything from tetse flies to New York car accidents) but managed to dodge death. This destiny framing is not empirical or useful.

Only the things that contribute to this idea of development towards destiny are allowed to be failures. His time at the Admiralty, Gallipoli, relationships with military top brass, Admiral Fisher — these are admitted as partial faults, in the style of a barrister defending a client. Churchill’s pugnacity, his egoism, his verve, would be combined with the lessons he learned from these events to make him the great man of 1940.

On other issues, Roberts is less willing to admit Churchill might be imperfect. His racism is defended as merely Victorian. (Like his friend, Edward VIII, Churchill’s racial views were pretty extreme for the time.) On the Bengal Famine (which isn’t mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) Roberts is entirely defensive, giving little space to the issue. And so it goes. He only went onto the Gold Standard because his advisors told him to. The way his children turned out wasn’t his fault. The 1951 government, rather ludicrously, is said to have presided over a golden age. The Eden topic is given a light, albeit more critical, touch.

These are the areas where Roberts cannot accept any role in Churchill’s development towards 1940. To admit fault would be to blot the copy book. He remained a stubborn imperialist who thought British people racially superior. Roberts tries to spin this as a contributory factor in Churchill’s astonishing resilience in 1940, but really, India is a mark on his record. It plays no part in the destiny narrative. Roberts’ claim that Churchill’s opposition on India meant the public were prepared to accept bad news from him during the war isn’t backed up with any evidence of contemporary opinion. It seems dubious, at best.

The other major flaw in Roberts’ book is the way it practically ignores Churchill’s marriage. This is not just important because Churchill saw Clementine as an equal, and for the solid and stable life she provided him with. She played an important political role too. During 1940 she was cruising round London publicly bollocking senior members of the establishment for not listening to Winston. She was also the main thing standing between Churchill and his less impressive decisions, as Brian Harrison says:

Winston Churchill would have been saved from many mistakes if he had listened to her more often: he would have been less resentful at losing cabinet office in 1915, backed off more quickly from a hard line on Ireland in 1921, trusted Baldwin's judgement during the abdication crisis in 1936, paid more heed to Attlee’s complaints about his disorganized ways of handling the cabinet in the Second World War, and refrained from his ill-judged ‘Gestapo’ reference in the general election of 1945 to what a Labour government might do. He might also have preserved his reputation more securely if he had retired from public life in that year.

For Roberts to have told us this would have involved admitting bigger flaws in Winston than he wanted to, I think. It’s true that Churchill needs reviving. Amazingly, there are polls showing 20% of school pupils think Churchill is fictional. However, we ought to be able to accept, and admire, Churchill for all that he was. The 1940 inevitability story is degrading. That’s how you end up with both sides claiming Churchill for their campaign in the Brexit referendum. (He was, for what it’s worth, as a staunch, reactionary, imperialist, profoundly opposed to Britain joining the EEC, even though he supported it as a continental project.) He was a great man, as well as a flawed one, a failed one, and a weird one.

What would Winston have been without Clementine?

We enjoy the stories and the witticisms (often invented), but we laugh too readily at things he meant seriously. On his way to visit Canada during the 1951 government he learnt their navy had stopped singing ‘Rule Britannia’, and said he wanted to cancel his visit. Clementine had to telegram him threatening to sell Chartwell and leave him. It’s only funny because it’s absurd: you wouldn’t be laughing if you woke up to find your Prime Minister had said something similar today.

Like most great figures, Churchill was a very complicated person. He was vast. That’s precisely why he is so impressive and interesting, and why there are over a thousand books about him. If we really think he was a great man (and he was) we should also accept that he wasn’t.

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My previous post How much did Churchill really drink? (An all time favourite)

Churchill was on my original list of late bloomers

Andrew Roberts Churchill: Walking With Destiny (US link) (huge, meticulous, biography, very favourable)

Erik Larson The Splendid and the Vile (US link) (A history of the Blitz with great material about Clementine and excellent use of Mass Observation data)

Peter Clarke Mr Churchill's Profession (US link) (Churchill’s career as a writer, excellent details, terrible index)

John Lukacs Five Days in London, May 1940 (US link) (Micro-history of how Churchill became PM, compelling narrative style)

William Manchester The Last Lion (US link) (Vivid, epic, three-volume biography)

Martin Gilbert In Search of Churchill (US link) (account of how Gilbert wrote his biography, fascinating)

Malcolm Gladwell podcast The Prime Minister and the Prof (not favourable to Churchill, well worth listening to)

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