The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 18

THE GIANT OF THE SHRUNKEN ISLAND

The King was in a state of agitation, bordering on mild panic. It was 11 p.m. on a Friday night, and he still had not heard from his most important and in some ways his most insubordinate subject. He rang his Private Secretary. Any news from Churchill? There was no news.

The date was 3 June 1944, and in theory there were just two days to go until D-Day. The whole war depended on this operation, the largest and most complex military undertaking in history; the fate of the world seemed to hang in the balance—and Churchill was being utterly impossible.

The sixty-nine-year-old veteran of wars on four continents was insisting on one more hare-brained escapade. He was exercising his right, as Minister of Defence, to be conveyed on HMS Belfast to the coast of Normandy, where he would personally oversee the first bombardment of the German positions. He didn’t want to go on D-Day plus one, or D-Day plus two: he planned to be there with the first wave of ships and men; to see the water roiling with machines and blood; to hear the crump of the shells.

The idea was nuts. That was certainly the view of the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan or ‘Tommy’ Lascelles. The first he had heard of it was on 30 May, when the King emerged from a tête-à-tête lunch with Churchill at Buckingham Palace. Churchill had confided that he intended to go and watch events from the British battle-cruiser. The King had immediately said that he would go, too; a suggestion that Churchill did nothing to discourage.

‘This will never do,’ said Lascelles to himself. But at first he tried to be casual. Would it be quite fair to the Queen? he asked the King. It would be necessary to advise the young Princess Elizabeth on a choice of Prime Minister—in the perfectly conceivable event of both the heads of the British state and government ending up at the bottom of the Channel. And it was just unfair, added Lascelles, on the poor captain of the Belfast, who would have to worry about his sacred charges in what would almost certainly be an inferno of fire.

Hmm, said the King, who had no desire to be accused of such selfishness. He could see the point. Within a few minutes the courtier had talked down the Sovereign. But what about Churchill?

Quickly Lascelles drafted a letter for the King—which George VI wrote out obediently, in his own hand—and pelted round to Downing Street.

My dear Winston [said the King (or Lascelles)], I have been thinking a great deal of our conversation yesterday and I have come to the conclusion that it would not be right for either you or I to be where we planned to be on D-Day. I don’t think I need emphasise what it would mean to me personally, and to the whole allied cause, if at this juncture a chance bomb, torpedo or even a mine should remove you from the scene; equally a change of sovereign at this moment would be a serious matter for the country and Empire. We should both I know love to be there, but in all seriousness I would ask you to reconsider your plan. Our presence I feel would be an embarrassment to those fighting the ship or ships on which we were, despite anything we might say to them.

So as I said, I have very reluctantly come to the conclusion that the right thing to do is what normally falls to those at the top on such occasions, namely to remain at home and wait. I hope very much that you will see it in this light, too. The anxiety of these coming days would be very greatly increased for me if I thought that, in addition to everything else, there was a risk, however remote, of my losing your help and guidance. Believe me yours very sincerely George R I.

This elegant royal veto achieved nothing. Churchill forged on. The next day there was a meeting in the Map Room in the Downing Street annexe in Storey’s Gate. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was called from his duties, and asked to explain to the King and Churchill how Churchill could be present at D-Day. He did his best to rubbish the idea. The ship would never be nearer than 14,000 yards from the French shore, he said. Churchill wouldn’t be able to see a thing, and frankly he would know less about what was happening than those left behind in London.

Ramsay was then asked to leave the room. When he came back he was told that the plan had been changed. Operation ‘WC’ would go ahead—but with the King as well. Ramsay flipped; or, as Lascelles put it in his diary, ‘To this the unfortunate man, naturally enough, reacted violently.’

By this stage Churchill could see that it was going to be difficult to get the King on board; so he cut his losses. He announced in ‘his most oracular manner’ that he would need cabinet approval to allow the King to come with him on the Belfast, and he would not be able to recommend that they give it. As he chuntered on, it became clear to Lascelles that Churchill still intended to go himself, and the courtier allowed his features to register his general horror and disapproval.

As the King put it, ‘Tommy’s face is getting longer and longer.’ Churchill was oblivious, so—with some difficulty—Lascelles interrupted the conversation again, addressing the King.

‘I was thinking, Sir, that it is not going to make things easier for you if you have to find a new Prime Minister in the middle of Overlord.’

‘Oh,’ said Churchill, ‘that’s all arranged for. Anyhow, I don’t think the risk is 100–1.’

Next Lascelles tried to suggest that Churchill was being constitutionally improper: no minister of the Crown could leave the country without the Sovereign’s consent. Churchill countered jesuitically that HMS Belfast didn’t count as abroad, since it was a British man-of-war. Lascelles said it was a long way outside British territorial waters; but it was no use. It was like holding a bull elephant by the tail.

Lascelles left the meeting feeling that ‘in this instance his naughtiness is sheer selfishness’. Everyone was against it: the staff at Downing Street, Pug Ismay, Clementine—but Churchill was absolutely determined: to smell the cordite, to see the plumes of salt water as the shells and bombs exploded around him in the sea. What was Lascelles going to do?

The only answer was another monarchical missive, he decided. He sat down and drafted a second and firmer reprimand, from the King to Churchill.

My dear Winston, I want to make one more appeal to you not to go to sea on D day. Please consider my own position. I am a younger man than you, I am a sailor, and as King I am head of all the services. There is nothing I would like better than to go to sea but I have agreed to stay at home; is it fair that you should then do exactly what I should have liked to do myself? You said yesterday afternoon that it would be a fine thing for the king to lead his troops into battle, as in old days; if the king cannot do this, it does not seem right that his Prime Minister should take his place. Then there is your own position. You will see very little, you will run a considerable risk, you will be inaccessible at a critical time when vital decisions may have to be taken, and however unobtrusive you may be, your mere presence on board is bound to be a very heavy additional responsibility to the Admiral and Captain. As I said in my previous letter, your being there would add immeasurably to my anxieties, and your going without consulting your colleagues in the Cabinet would put them in a difficult position which they would justifiably resent.

I ask you most earnestly to consider the whole question again, and not let your personal wishes, which I very well understand, lead you to depart from your own high standard of duty to the State. Believe me your very sincere friend George R I.

The dispute had now become a constitutional crisis. There was only one man who could conceivably have stopped Churchill from going, and that was the King; and in order to get his way George VI was obliged to write twice, and finally to warn Churchill that he was about to violate just about every code of loyalty he possessed: loyalty to the Crown, loyalty to the cabinet, loyalty to the armed services and loyalty to Britain herself. It was heavy stuff.

Finally, on Saturday, 3 June, Churchill climbed down—with much grumbling. He was entitled to go and watch any battle he saw fit, he protested. He was Minister of Defence. But he sulkily accepted the key point advanced by the King—that it was unfair to prevent the monarch from going to Normandy, and then to go himself and steal the King’s thunder. ‘That is certainly a strong argument,’ he said.

The episode casts an interesting light on the edginess of the government on the eve of D-Day, and on the evolving relations between ministers and the Crown—it must be one of the few twentieth-century examples of a prime minister being specifically countermanded by the King. In Tommy Lascelles we see the role of ‘them’—the shadowy mandarins and courtiers who take so many of the decisions the politicians are incapable of taking (and do so to this day).

But the really fascinating question is why Churchill cared so much; why he was so utterly determined to put himself again in the front line of battle. There are several obvious answers, and the first is surely that he was nervous about D-Day.

We have the advantage of knowing that the operation was going to be a success. That was far from clear at the time. Alan Brooke thought that it might be ‘the most ghastly disaster of the whole war’. The weather could so easily have turned bad. Rommel might have suddenly reinforced the target zone. Eisenhower was all set to take responsibility for an evacuation, if things went against the Allies.

This was the amphibious operation for which the Allies had been building up for years; this was their shot at winning back the Continent. And Churchill had previous form when it came to risky amphibious operations. Churchill wanted to be there because burned in his psyche was the memory of Gallipoli—and of all the errors of the Dardanelles the one for which he felt the bitterest remorse, rightly or wrongly, was his failure to go there himself. Now was his chance to exorcise that disgrace, to emulate the practice of his illustrious antecedent in leading his troops personally into battle and to show the world that he was truly a Marlborough, and not just a Marlborough lite. He needed to be there to make sure that the troops did not just get bogged down, as they had at Gallipoli, and indeed as they had on the Western Front in the First World War.

And then there was another reason for getting in that ship—a motive that will come as no surprise to us by now, and which Lascelles certainly detected. As the royal Private Secretary wrote to sum up the whole affair, ‘The King, in fact, was only trying to save Winston from himself, for the real motives inspiring him to go to sea in Belfast are his irrepressible, though now most untimely, love of adventure, and, I fear, his vain, though perhaps subconscious, predilection for making himself “front page stuff”.’

There, I am sure, Lascelles has judged our man well. Churchill could see the headlines; he could see the photos—standing impervious on the bridge, soggy cigar clamped to his lips, as he called the shots from the Belfast’s 12-inch guns; the conductor of the loudest and most explosive overture in the history of ballistics. He could see the way it would look—the man entrusted to give the roar of the British lion; and this time a roar of artillery and not just rhetoric.

That was why he at first endorsed the idea of the King coming too; because that would have been an even bigger story: Britain’s monarch and Prime Minister, dauntless and unbowed by five years of war, directing the recapture of the mainland. That was the ‘front page stuff’ he was after; and in a way it wasn’t just about him and his ego, and what he had achieved. It was about Britain, and her standing in the world.

—

IN MY INNOCENT youth I believed that Britain had ‘won the war’ not just through Russian sacrifice and American money, but thanks also to the heroism of the British fighting man. I read ‘Commando’ comics, in which men with woolly hats and supercolossal forearms would lunge at cringing Germans, with a cry of ‘Take that, Fritz’ from their huge jaws and with a candle-flame of bullets bursting from the muzzle of their guns.

I remember vividly being taught by a fine classicist who had himself been imprisoned by the Japanese; and I received the clear impression that the battle of El Alamein was the turning-point in the war. Monty hit Rommel for six, and then Jerry began to take a bit of a pasting, what? So it came as a bit of a shock to read, over the years, what really happened.

It appeared that the battle of El Alamein, at the end of October 1942, was not quite as pivotal to history as I had been led to suppose. Indeed, there were some British historians who were so ungracious as to call it the ‘unnecessary battle’. Operation Torch was due to happen only a few weeks later—Allied landings to drive the Germans out of North Africa. It seemed that El Alamein wasn’t so much a decisive military victory as a vital political figleaf.

By the autumn of 1942, Britain’s military record was a virtually unbroken series of bungles, evacuations, catastrophes and all-round defeats, often at the hands of forces that were numerically vastly inferior. It was as though the country had entered the Premiership with the reputation of Manchester United and ended up playing like Tunstall Town FC. ‘I can’t get the victories,’ complained Churchill. ‘It’s the victories that are so hard to get.’

It wasn’t just at Norway, Dunkirk, Greece and Crete where British forces perfected the manoeuvre that might be known as the ‘rabbit’ or headlong scuttle. The year 1942 was even worse, with a dismal series of debacles that began in the Far East with the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Then there was the fall of Singapore, when Churchill wrote to his generals specifically instructing them to fight to the last man and to choose death before dishonour.

They decided, on the whole, to ignore his advice, and that dishonour was vastly preferable. Rangoon was abandoned. The raids on St Nazaire and Dieppe were much trumpeted for propaganda purposes, but achieved little, for the cost of many lives. Then there was the fall of Tobruk—news of which was handed to Churchill on a pink slip while he was actually sitting with Roosevelt in the White House. He was utterly mortified—especially since he had once again issued his personal and express instructions that the troops should fight to the bitter end.

Once again, British troops had been routed by a much smaller German force. All sorts of possible explanations have been offered for this relative underperformance of Britain—previously regarded as one of the most ferocious and successful military powers the world has ever seen. In his various brilliant meditations on this theme, Max Hastings has been unsparing in his criticisms.

By Hastings’ account, none of the generals appears to have been much cop. Not even Monty deserves a place in the ranks of ‘history’s great captains’. When they were not simply dim, they were too often idle and complacent. They were also risk-averse and had a serious dislike of bloodshed; perhaps understandable, given the memory of the First War, but a disadvantage in a fighting force. The wider officer class contained a large supply of duffers who had joined the military on the grounds that it was a cushy billet and an easier way of living than trying to run a business.

The equipment was substandard, or at least not as good as German equipment; and then there was the awful suspicion that man for man the British just did not have the same kind of fire in their bellies as their foes. As Max Hastings puts it, ‘Many British officers perceived their citizen soldiers as lacking the will and commitment routinely displayed by the Germans and Japanese.’ Or as Randolph Churchill shouted, rather unpleasantly, during a 1942 discussion in Downing Street, ‘Father, the trouble is your soldiers won’t fight.’

Whether this was true or not—and plainly it was a verdict that was at odds with the innumerable acts of individual bravery performed by British troops around the world—the important point was that people believed it to be true. British underperformance became the subject of embarrassment at home, and mockery abroad. In July 1942 a survey of American opinion asked which nation was doing the most to win the war: 37 per cent said the USA, 30 per cent Russia, 14 per cent China and only 6 per cent thought highly of the British and their exertions.

All this was of course gall and wormwood to Churchill, whose whole political raison d’être was to boost the prestige of Britain and the British Empire. After the fall of Singapore, Churchill was politically at his lowest point during the war, and may even have contemplated resignation. His frustration was obvious when, in the wake of Singapore, he declared, ‘We had so many men, so many men. We should have done better.’ When he heard of the fall of Tobruk, he said, ‘Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.’

His ego had become entirely engaged and identified with British military success—which made it easy for his rivals to torment him. ‘He wins debate after debate but loses battle after battle,’ said the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, brutally, in the House of Commons; and indeed, public anxiety became so acute that Churchill’s own domestic position actually became quite shaky.

When in August 1942 he went to Moscow to see Stalin, to explain that there would be no second front that year, the Soviet leader taunted him unmercifully. ‘You British are afraid of fighting. You should not think the Germans are supermen. You will have to fight sooner or later. You cannot win a war without fighting.’

This was pretty nauseating coming from Stalin. The Russian leader was the man who enabled the whole Nazi aggression of 1940 to take place—by authorising the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, and carving up Poland with Hitler. Stalin had been so shocked and terrified by Hitler’s eventual betrayal, when the Führer turned on Russia and launched Barbarossa, that he went and hid himself for five days in a darkened hut. It goes without saying that Churchill was an infinitely better, braver and greater man. But it rankled to hear such stuff—and the insults were all the more wounding for containing an element of truth.

When it finally came, victory at El Alamein did much to redeem British prestige: the political threat to Churchill abated. He no longer had to worry—incredible as it may seem to us today—that his Labour rival Stafford Cripps could replace him as war premier. Aneurin Bevan’s wounding sarcasm was stilled. The British public were given the victory they craved. But the truth was unmistakable: as the war wore on, Britain counted for less and less.

In 1940 the nation had stood alone—an embattled paladin with her banner raised for freedom. By 1944 Britain was contributing only a fraction of the Allied effort. The Americans were supplying the money, the Russians were getting on with the grisly business of killing the Germans—750,000 of them at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. And so it became Churchill’s function to try physically and personally to assert Britain’s right to respect, to be the lead-lined boxing glove that enabled the country to punch above her weight.

That explains his love of summits, his amazing itineraries during the Second World War. Sir Martin Gilbert has calculated that between September 1939 and November 1943 he travelled 111,000 miles, spending 792 hours at sea and 339 hours in the air—far exceeding the work rate of any other leader. We see his prodigious energy on these trips: a man of almost seventy sitting on his suitcase before dawn at a cold airfield in North Africa, while his staff try to work out where they are meant to be. We see him bouncing in the unpressurised cargo holds of bombers, his oxygen mask adapted so as to accommodate his cigar. Planes he had used were shot down later, flying the same routes.

On the morning of 26 January 1943 he arrived at the British embassy in Cairo, in time for breakfast. To the amazement of the ambassador’s wife, he asked for a glass of cold white wine. Alan Brooke recorded that

a tumbler was brought which he drained in one go, and then licked his lips, turned to Jacqueline and said, ‘Ah, that is good, but you know, I have already had two whiskies and soda and two cigars this morning’!! It was then only shortly after 7.30 am. We had travelled all night in poor comfort, covering some 2300 miles in a flight of over 11 hours, a proportion of which was at over 11000 ft, and there he was, as fresh as paint, drinking wine on top of two previous whiskies and two cigars!!

While Hitler and Stalin stayed in their bunkers, Churchill would do anything to get to the action. That was why he was so keen to inveigle himself and the King on that boat: to show the world—and especially the Americans—that Britain and the British Empire still counted: because he and the King, the incarnations of that empire, were personally recapturing the Continent. And with the same motive he insisted that British and Canadian forces should have the glory of comprising half those vast invading forces—even if the operation was led by an American, and even though it was the Americans who did most of the eventual fighting.

When he finally got to go over to Normandy—on D-Day plus six, and with the consent of the King—he insisted that the ship he was on ‘had a plug’ at the Germans. The captain happily complied, and a volley was duly discharged in the general direction of the Nazis. It was a completely abstract exercise; but Churchill was thrilled. He had become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911—and he had never yet fired a shot from ship.

It was as if he could somehow aggrandise Britain’s military effort by taking part himself—inflating the British contribution with his own presence and prestige. In August 1944 he went to watch the landings at St Tropez; and in the same month he was to be found in Italy, personally firing a howitzer towards Pisa. He picnicked in an Italian castle, with the Germans firing towards him from a distance of 500 yards away.

In December 1944 he launched his entirely personal mission to rescue Greece from communism—in which he succeeded—and gave a press conference in Athens to the sound of shellfire outside. In the spring of the following year he was there in Germany, to see the Allied advance. In early March he came to the Siegfried Line—huge dragon’s teeth of concrete that were meant to serve as an impenetrable frontier, sinister and symbolic guardians of the Fatherland. Churchill inspected these carefully—but somehow it wasn’t enough. He needed to express the full ecstasy of his triumph.

He lined up the generals: Brooke, Montgomery, Simpson, about twenty of them—and one reporter from the Stars and Stripes. ‘Let’s do it on the Siegfried Line,’ said Churchill, and then, to the photographers, ‘This is one of the operations connected with this great war that must not be reproduced graphically.’

He then undid his flies and pissed on Hitler’s defences, and so did his colleagues. As Alan Brooke later wrote, ‘I shall never forget the childish grin of intense satisfaction that spread all over his face as he looked down at the critical moment.’ To anyone who feels the smallest disapproval, think of what he had been through. If any dog had the right to mark his new territory, it was Churchill.

A few weeks later he insisted on walking on the German-held side of the Rhine, at a place called Buderich, and then came under fire, with shells exploding in the water about a hundred yards away. The American General Simpson came up to him and said, ‘Prime Minister, there are snipers in front of you; they are shelling both sides of the bridge; and now they have started shelling the road behind you. I cannot accept responsibility for your being here and must ask you to come away.’

Alan Brooke watched as Churchill put his arms around a twisted girder of a bridge. ‘The look on Winston’s face was like that of a small boy being called from his sandcastles on the beach by his nurse.’ Churchill was doing what we have seen him do all his life, from the first day he came under fire in Cuba. He was trying to insert himself into the military narrative; and this time his purpose was political.

In manpower and in fighting ability Britain was now dwarfed by Russia and America. As he put it, a small lion was walking between a huge Russian bear and a great American elephant. But he was still there; he was still one of the ‘Big Three’. He was still fighting the war in a way that no other political leader would have dreamed of doing. No other wartime jefe—not Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini—had his compulsive desire to interpolate himself in the battle and to become the story.

By sheer force of personality he asserted his right to equality in the conference chamber, as he struggled with Stalin over the fate of eastern Europe. As long as Churchill had to be given honour and respect, the same could be said for Britain and the empire; or so he imagined. In the end, of course, his priorities were not exactly shared by the British people, or indeed by the British army.

They weren’t as interested as he was in concepts of ‘glory’ or ‘prestige’—and that is perhaps not entirely a bad thing. All sorts of uncomplimentary things have been said about the fighting spirit of the British troops, but the key point is surely this: that they were citizen soldiers from a mature democracy with a long history of free speech. They knew not to have blind faith in the orders they were given; the First World War put paid to that.

They did not go into battle propelled by a horrible ideology of racial supremacy. They did not have Soviet commissars behind them with revolvers, waiting to blow their brains out if they hesitated. Perhaps the paradox is that the very freedoms they enjoyed and fought for made them less vicious as a fighting force. And I wonder whether the Tommy-bashers sometimes take a perverse pleasure in minimising their achievements—rather like the ingrained (and psychologically self-defensive) national pessimism about the England football team.

The British military performance wasn’t as bad as all that. It was rare for the Germans to be beaten by anyone unless outnumbered, and often by a factor of two or three. El Alamein was a significant achievement, in that it made the North Africa landings much easier, and helped divert crucial German air support from Stalingrad; and there were many other great achievements, not least the essential one of fighting on and ending up conspicuously on the winning side.

As someone once said, the English lose every battle but the last. Perhaps they sometimes—though by no means always—lacked a fanatical spirit of semi-suicidal banzai bloodlust; that does not seem to me to be a wholly unattractive defect.

Churchill spoke to the depths of people’s souls when Britain was alone, when the country was fighting for survival—and he reached them and he comforted in a way that no other speaker could have done. His language—stirring and old-fashioned—suited the moment. But as the country neared the end of six long and debilitating years of war, the people needed a new language, a new vision for a post-war Britain—and that an exhausted Churchill could not find.

—

AS HE APPROACHED the general election of 1945, he told his doctor, Lord Moran, ‘I have a very strong feeling that my work is done. I have no message. I had a message. Now I only say “fight the damned socialists. I do not believe in this brave new world”.’ On the morning of 21 July, four days before the election results were due to be heard, he was in Berlin for a victory parade.

Hitler was dead. The Führer’s bunker was in ruins along with all the other odious apparatus of Nazi rule. Europe could look forward to a new era of peaceful democracy; and everyone knew in their hearts that this was his achievement, and that without his iron resolve, at critical moments, this would not have been possible. This was what he had promised and fought for.

Churchill and Attlee drove in separate jeeps along a line of cheering British troops. Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Peck, soon noticed something peculiar.

‘It struck me and perhaps others as well, though nothing was said, as decidedly odd that Winston Churchill, the great war leader but for whom we should never have been in Berlin at all, got a markedly less vociferous cheer than Mr Attlee, who—however great his contribution to the coalition—had not hitherto made any marked personal impact upon the fighting forces.’

On the afternoon of 25 July Churchill left the Potsdam conference in Berlin, with both Stalin and Truman confident (publicly and privately) that he would be back as a triumphantly re-elected Prime Minister. The following morning, as the count was nearing completion, he awoke before dawn with ‘a sharp stab of almost physical pain’.

A hitherto ‘subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke forth and dominated my mind’. He was right. Labour had won by a colossal margin of 146 seats over all other parties. Churchill and the Conservatives had been routed. The outside world was amazed, and to this day people find it hard to understand how Churchill could have suffered such a rebuke.

Surely it is not surprising at all. Elections are won not on the basis of a politician’s achievements, but on what is promised for the future. It was Churchill who in one of his protean incarnations had helped found the essentials of the welfare state; and in his wartime speeches he outlined the key reforms of the post-war Labour government. But it was Attlee who managed to claim the agenda.

In the very moment of his triumph, Churchill paid a price for his unique status—as a national figure who transcended party. He was after all the man so confident in himself that he had ratted and re-ratted. He was not coextensive with the Conservative Party; and therefore his achievements did not rub off on them. ‘Cheer for Churchill; vote for Labour’ was the Labour slogan. It worked.

It was perhaps not exactly how he saw it at the time, but there is a sense in which his very defeat was a triumph. He had fought for British democracy, and here it was: the ejection of a great war hero and leader, not by violence but by millions of small and unobtrusive strokes of the pencil.

As Clementine put it, ‘It may well be a blessing in disguise.’

‘At the moment,’ replied Churchill, ‘it seems quite effectively disguised.’

When someone else suggested that the electorate were guilty of ‘ingratitude’ Churchill said, ‘I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.’ That is what I mean by his greatness of soul.

He had been humiliated in his hour of glory, but Churchill ended the war with the crossover complete. Britain was exhausted and her global status diminished. Churchill was exhausted but with a global status that no other British politician has ever achieved: a moral giant. Not bad for a man who had been denounced in 1911, by the Spectator, as ‘weak and rhetorical, without any principles or even any consistent outlook upon public affairs’.

A lesser man would have packed it in, and gone off to Chartwell to paint. Not Churchill. He never gave up; he never gave in. He now made a series of interventions that were to shape the world to this day.