The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 19

THE COLD WAR AND HOW HE WON IT

We have seen the room where he was born. Let me take you now to the room where Churchill spent his last few days as wartime Prime Minister. It is a sad sort of place—like the frowsty lounge of a 1920s golf club or hotel. Outside the sun is shining; there are glorious phloxes and roses in the beds; and yet it is a bit Stygian here at the heart of this bogus essay in supersized steel-framed stockbroker Tudor.

The decor is drab. The accent is on oak—heavy oaken chairs, oaken fireplace, and a great oak banister writhing up to a sinister minstrels’ gallery. I stand looking at the table where they sat, the three little flags in the middle all drooping and dusty. I feel the unease and the hypocrisy of the occasion.

It was here that he came on 17 July 1945, to the Cecilienhof, one of the few buildings in Potsdam not damaged by Allied bombs. Originally intended for some minor offshoot of the Hohenzollern dynasty, it looked then as now like a vague German attempt to build an English country house. It was the last and least successful of his wartime conferences. He had tried and failed to hold the meeting in Britain—indeed, he never succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to visit Britain throughout the war. Now the summiteers were in the Russian zone of occupied Germany—in Potsdam, the home of German kings and kaisers.

This was the German Versailles, a place of palaces and pavilions, of lawns and lakes, a suburb of Berlin that today has UN world heritage status. In 1945 the greater part of the site was in ruins.

On the night of 14 April of that year the RAF had sent 500 Lancaster bombers, and dropped 1,780 tons of high explosive. Churchill was the author of this strategy; Churchill had insisted on area bombing—and with the specific and avowed intent of terrorising the civilian population. He pursued the aerial bombing—of doubtful military benefit—mainly because it was the only way he had of attacking Germany.

Short of launching a second front, it was the only means of expressing his pent-up aggression, of showing the Russians and the Americans that Britain, too, could inflict violence upon the enemy. It is true that he was himself seized by doubts. ‘Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?’ he said suddenly one evening at Chartwell when he watched footage of burning German towns.

He was alarmed by the controversy over the Dresden fireball, in which 25,000 were killed and in many cases carbonised by British aerial bombing (and which he denounced in a suppressed memo as a ‘mere act of terror and wanton destruction’), and he was furious when he found that the RAF had been so culturally insensitive as to attack the palaces of Potsdam. Now he came to see the results of a policy from which he could not easily dissociate himself.

More than 1,500 had died and 24,000 had been made homeless in Potsdam alone. As he picked his way through the rubble of Berlin he was filled with a typical compassion. ‘My hate died with their surrender,’ he said in his memoirs. ‘I was much moved by their thin haggard looks and threadbare clothes.’

Churchill’s war was never with the German people. It was the ‘Narzis’ that he wanted to smash; and now that he was at the apogee of his success, he found himself in the presence of another enemy, and one he had feared long before Nazism was even born: just as savage; just as ideologically driven; and in some ways more difficult to fight.

The Potsdam table is large and round, about ten foot in diameter, and reputedly made for the occasion by Russian carpenters. The massive oak is covered, as it was then, by a thick red felt cloth: perhaps in honour of the Russians whose red flag had been hoisted over Berlin, and who had organised the conference. It looks like the perfect place for poker; and there was one of the Big Three who seemed to have all the cards.

After four years of savage warfare, in which the Nazis and the Soviets had held each other by the throat like a pair of hydrophobic dogs, it is incredible to think that Stalin could still wield 6.4 million men in the European theatre alone. Russia had lost 20 million—and yet she ended the war as by far the most powerful military force in Europe.

In Stalin, the Soviet Union had a twinkling-eyed tyrant of total cynicism and ruthlessness. We have already seen how he baited Churchill in 1942, sneering at the alleged cowardliness of the British army. That was his style: sneer, flatter, fawn, bully, kill.

Stalin had risen to power by liquidating his enemies, and he maintained power by systematic murder of entire groups of people—the Tsarist officer corps, the kulaks, counter-revolutionaries, Poles, whoever stood in his way. He had the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands before the Second World War had even begun. It was in Tehran in November 1943 that Churchill got a flavour of his homicidal mania; and also of the eerie willingness of the Americans to indulge him.

The discussions of the Big Three had turned to Europe after the war. Stalin was already insisting that Poland should be bisected, and much of that country retained by Russia. Then, at the dinner in the evening, he sketched out his plans for post-war Germany.

Stalin: ‘Fifty thousand Germans must be killed. Their General Staff must go.’

WSC: ‘I will not be party to any butchery in cold blood. What happens in hot blood is another matter.’

Stalin: ‘Fifty thousand MUST be shot.’

WSC (getting red in the face): ‘I would rather be taken out now and shot than so disgrace my country.’

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: ‘I have a compromise to propose. Not 50,000 but only 49,000 should be shot.’

At this hilarious sally, the President’s son Elliott Roosevelt rose to say that he cordially agreed with Stalin’s proposal, and that he was sure it would receive the full backing of Congress. Churchill then left the room in fury, and it was only with some difficulty that he could be persuaded to return.

What the Americans did not understand—or did not choose to understand—was that Stalin was only half joking; perhaps not even joking at all. To shoot 50,000 people in cold blood was nothing to Stalin; as he was said to have put it, not a tragedy but a statistic.

Things had been no better at Yalta in February 1945, where Stalin irresistibly and blandly continued to push his agenda: the Soviet domination of eastern Europe. Roosevelt was by now desperately ill, passing in and out of consciousness; and Churchill simply did not have the military muscle to oppose the Russian demands. Stalin was charm itself, comically showing off his limited command of English (‘You said it!’ and ‘The toilet is over there’ were among the few but surprisingly idiomatic phrases he deployed); but the message was increasingly clear. Russia was to retain all the gains of the odious Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, and to command all of eastern Europe and the Balkans—with the exception of Greece (‘This brand I snatched from the burning,’ as Churchill boasted, ‘on Christmas day’).

The Baltic states were to go to Russia. Poland was to go to Russia—Poland, the country whose very sovereignty and integrity had been the cause of the war; Poland was once again betrayed, sacrificed and carved up to please a totalitarian regime. Again and again, Churchill found himself isolated, as Roosevelt sided with the Russian dictator.

When that great American President finally died on 12 April 1945, Churchill took what seems now to be the astonishing decision not to go to his funeral: astonishing when you consider how integral their relationship had been to Allied success; not so astonishing when you think of the gradual estrangement that had begun between them. America was still driving a very hard bargain over British war loans, and had been responsible for such minor vexations as cancelling meat exports to Britain. But the fundamental divergence was on the matter of Stalin, Russia and the post-war world.

On 4 May 1945 Churchill wrote to Eden that the Russian coup over Poland ‘constitutes an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel’. On 13 May he cabled the new President Truman to say that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across the Russian front—which shows that the phrase, later to become so controversial, had been used by Churchill almost a year before his Fulton, Missouri, speech. By the end of that month Churchill was so alarmed by the prospect of a communist and Russian-dominated eastern Europe that he proposed an operation that has only recently been disinterred, mainly by the historian David Reynolds. On 24 May he asked British military planners to look into what he called Operation Unthinkable—by which British and American forces would actually turn on the Russians, and push them back from eastern Europe. How would they do it? They would enlist the fighters who had proved most effective of all: the Wehrmacht.

Churchill suggested to Montgomery that captured German weapons should be stored in such a way as to be capable of being conveniently returned to the de-Nazified German troops; and used for an assault against the Soviets. All that remained secret until 1998, and it is probably just as well that it did.

Even if it had been desirable, there was no way Churchill could have persuaded the Americans to take part in such a plan. To understand the comparative American indulgence of the Russians, you have to remember how the world looked to Washington in 1944 and early 1945. The war in the Pacific was by no means over. The Japanese were offering frenzied and suicidal resistance. The Japanese population was being schooled in guerrilla warfare—even to fight with spears. The Americans knew that eventually they would win—but they feared (in spite of possessing the bomb) that the loss of life would be horrific. They hoped that the Russians would come in decisively on their side.

And even if Churchill could have persuaded the Americans, there remains the prior question: what of his own army, and his own British electorate? What would they have said, if they had been told that it was now time to turn on the Russians? It is safe to say that if the British public had heard of Operation Unthinkable, they would have reacted with bewilderment and outrage. They knew little or nothing of Stalin’s purges. In the minds of many British people, the Russians were heroes who had shown a courage and spirit of self-sacrifice that put other armies (including their own) to shame.

In popular imagination Stalin was not yet a blood-soaked tyrant; he was Uncle Joe, with his folksy pipe and moustache. If the British public had been told in 1945 that it was now time to turn their guns on Moscow, I am afraid they would have drawn the conclusion that Churchill had mounted his ancient hobby-horse of anti-communism—and that he was both wrong and deluded. The idea was never a runner, as British military planners made clear in their response to Churchill. Operation Unthinkable would require vast quantities of German troops and American resources; and I don’t suppose that conclusion came as any real surprise to the British Prime Minister.

As ever, he was allowing his mind to roam, to go through all the logical options—no matter how mad-sounding they might be. It says something for his undiminished martial instinct—after six grinding and debilitating years—that he should even contemplate the possibility of such an action. However impractical, Operation Unthinkable also reveals the depths of his anxiety about the communist threat; and here at least he was surely right.

As he looked at the map of Europe, he saw Germany in ruins, France on her knees, Britain exhausted. He saw that Russian tanks were capable of advancing to the Atlantic and to the North Sea—if they chose. They had shown their willingness to engulf the capitals of eastern Europe, and to impose a form of government that he believed to be wicked. What could be done to stop them? That was the big strategic question he posed—and a question that many Americans, for the time being, seemed to have no interest even in asking.

By the time Churchill came to leave the Potsdam conference, on 25 July, he had achieved little or nothing. He had filled the air of the dingy room with some brilliant phrases—which the interpreters had struggled to translate; but it was as if Britain was visibly continuing to shrink in the shade of the two emerging superpowers.

On the American side, Truman revealed that Washington now had the capacity to wield an atomic weapon—and refused to share the technology with Britain: which you might think a slightly offhand way to treat an ally that had honoured scrupulously the terms of the Anglo-American technology-sharing agreements. Most of the early theoretical work on nuclear fission was British, and it was all handed on a plate—along with radar and everything else—to America. In the end, Truman was to take the decision to bomb Hiroshima alone; the consultation of Churchill was a mere formality.

For the Russians, Stalin continued to play his hand with economy and skill. When he spoke, it was to the point. He was never at a loss for a fact (unlike Churchill, who sometimes had to lean back to allow his seconds to whisper in his ear); and when he thought it necessary the Russian tyrant continued to dispense his lethal charm. He told Churchill how sorry he was that he had not been more publicly effusive in thanking Britain for helping Russia. He made a great thing of gathering up the menus and going round to get Churchill’s signature. ‘I like that man,’ Churchill was heard to say—being a bit of an old sucker for flattery.

And all the while the Bear was engulfing eastern Europe, smiling complacently as he chomped away, securing at Potsdam not just war reparations but war ‘booty’, carting away whatever he could to feed the Russian economy. The puppet Soviet-controlled Polish government appeared before the leaders at Potsdam. Churchill asked whether they might have some non-communists in their ranks. Nyet, was the answer.

Then on 26 July Churchill was back in London, to receive the Order of the Boot, first class, from the British public. It was now that he really showed what he was made of; as if there had been some previous doubt about the matter.

He was seventy years old; he had emerged victorious at the end of the most violent conflict humanity had ever seen. He had his memoirs to write. He had not even been to Chartwell during the war: the place had been under dustcloths. He had his fishponds to restock, his pigs to tend. He could have left public life amid the applause of a grateful nation and of a world in his immortal debt. That was not his way.

It is true that at first he found it hard to cope with the loss of his status. A black cloud descended, as his daughter Mary has recorded. His family did their best to lift his spirits, playing him favourite old tunes such as ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. It wasn’t much use. He quarrelled with Clementine, who spoke of ‘our misery’.

Slowly, however, he began to get himself together. He went for long painting holidays to Italy (where on one occasion he tactlessly painted some bombed buildings, and got booed by the locals). He had his duties as Leader of the Opposition. He continued to denounce the ‘Bolshevisation’ of eastern Europe, and said that the Russians were ‘realist-lizards of the crocodile family’. Towards the end of the year he received an interesting invitation from Truman, to come and give a speech at a ‘wonderful school’ called Westminster College at Fulton in his home state of Missouri.

On 4 March 1946 he and Truman left the White House to make the twenty-four-hour train journey to Missouri. It is important to note that the themes of the speech had now been long in gestation, and that Churchill had by no means kept his thoughts secret. He had shared the gist with James Byrne, the US Secretary of State, who ‘seemed to like it very well’. He had discussed it with Clement Attlee, who wrote to him on 25 February to say, ‘I am sure your Fulton speech will do good.’ He had shown a draft before boarding the train to Admiral Leahy, Truman’s senior Service adviser, who was (at least according to Churchill) ‘enthusiastic’. He continued to polish the speech as they drew into Missouri, and as they chugged by that vast river he gratified his host’s curiosity, and showed the whole thing to Truman. ‘He told me he thought it was admirable,’ reported Churchill. And so it is.

Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, is unlike anything from modern political discourse. It has not been written on a word-processor. It has not been composed by a committee of speech writers. The thing is almost five thousand words long, and every phrase is redolent of the author.

He swoops from a Thomas Hardy-esque poetic style (the future is the ‘after-time’, for instance) to various hard-edged if batty proposals for defence cooperation. He at one stage proposes that every nation should commit a squadron to an international air force, to be directed by a world organisation—an idea that I have seen properly taken up only in the 1970s kids’ TV programme Thunderbirds. He meditates on ideas that unite Britain and America:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence . . .

All this means that the people of any country have the right, and should have the power by constitutional action, by free unfettered elections, with secret ballot, to choose or change the character or form of government under which they dwell; that freedom of speech and thought should reign; that courts of justice, independent of the executive, unbiased by any party, should administer laws which have received the broad assent of large majorities or are consecrated by time and custom. Here are the title deeds of freedom which should lie in every cottage home. Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind. Let us preach what we practice—let us practise what we preach.

The majority of the electorate may no longer live in ‘cottage homes’—not unless they have a million or two—but these are still the ideals in which American and British democrats believe. They were the causes for which Churchill fought all his life. Finally he comes to the key point—the bombshell that he knows his audience is half expecting. ‘There is a threat to the safety of the world, a threat to the Temple of Peace; and that threat is the Soviet Union.’ He begins by insisting that he bears no ill-will either to the Russian people or towards his ‘wartime comrade Marshal Stalin’ . . .

We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone—Greece with its immortal glories—is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

He goes on in his tour d’horizon, taking in virtually everything from the atomic bomb to the situation in Manchuria. He calls for a ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA, with ‘similarity of weapons and manuals of instruction’. He calls for a united Europe and a brotherhood of man; a spiritually great Germany and a spiritually great France.

It is a magnificent speech and an inspiring vision—but it was of course the commie-bashing which made the news.

Churchill was denounced as an ‘alarmist’—just as he had been accused of over-egging the threat from Nazi Germany. In London, The Times sniffed that his sharp contrast between Western democracy and communism was ‘less than happy’. The two political creeds had ‘much to learn from each other’, said the fatuous editorial.

In New York the Wall Street Journal was appalled at the suggestion that the USA might enter into some new period of close cooperation with Britain. ‘The United States wants no alliance, or anything that resembles an alliance, with any other nation,’ said the Journal; absurdly, in view of what was about to happen in just a couple of years. The rumpus grew so loud that Truman was obliged to give a press conference, at which he weedily denied that Churchill had showed him the speech in advance.

In Moscow there were inevitable denunciations, with Churchill depicted as a crazed hand-grenade-toting warmonger. With his sinister racial theories about the superiority of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ he was the heir to the Nazis, said Pravda—a point explicitly echoed in an interview by Stalin himself.

At Westminster, Tory drips such as Butler (the old appeaser) and Peter Thorneycroft, later Tory Party chairman, used the kerfuffle as an excuse to start briefing against Churchill. ‘Winston must go’ was the word from the lunch tables. Labour MPs were so scandalised by his red-baiting that they called on Attlee to repudiate the speech, and when Attlee (with typical integrity) refused to do so, they tabled a motion of censure against Churchill, calling the speech ‘inimical to the cause of world peace’. Among the ninety-three signatories of this motion was the future Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan.

I have not been able to discover any public act of contrition by Callaghan—but he must surely have eventually realised that he had made a fool of himself, and that Churchill, again, was right.

Within only a couple of years it was obvious that communism in eastern Europe did indeed mean a tyranny. Stalin shut off his dominions from economic integration with western Europe. He blockaded Berlin, and attempted to starve the population into surrender. A new entity was created—the Eastern bloc—in which brutal one-party states were forced to toe the Moscow line, and in which hundreds of thousands were killed or bullied into silence. With his Iron Curtain speech (as it became known) Churchill sketched out the whole moral and strategic framework of the world in which I was born; and it was emphatically not the world he wanted, but the world the Russians, in their paranoia, insisted upon.

Having disowned Churchill after Fulton, Truman saw that he was right—and adopted his famous doctrine of ‘containment’. His successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was if anything even more hardline against the communists; and by the time Churchill came back to office as Prime Minister, in 1951, he was sufficiently alarmed by the state of global tension—and the new menace of the hydrogen bomb—that it was he, Churchill, who became the peace-monger.

He became obsessed by the idea of a ‘summit’, a frank and personal exchange of views between America, Russia and Britain (incarnated by himself). If only the world leaders could come together, he said, he was sure that world war could be avoided.

But by now he was seventy-six. He had led his country through five years of war; he had been Leader of the Opposition for six. He had marshalled his parliamentary troops heroically in the run-up to the election—staying up all night for debates, and in the course of the night he would make a series of brilliant little speeches, studded with jokes and sarcastic asides, and then at 7.30 a.m. he would top it all off with a truck driver’s breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausages and coffee, followed, as Harold Macmillan noted, by a large whisky and soda and a huge cigar.

These things take their toll. The psychic urge to power was still as strong as ever but the mortal stuff of him was beginning to fail. He suffered from arterial spasms; he had skin irritations and eye complaints. He could no longer hear the voices of children or the call of birds. A splendidly named nerve specialist called Sir Russell Brain said that the reason he suffered from a ‘tightness’ in the shoulders was that the cells in his brain that received sensory messages from the shoulder were dead.

The story of Churchill’s last years in office is not of some giant red sun, heat gone, sinking slowly out of sight. He is no volcano puttering himself to extinction. He is Tennyson’s Ulysses—always struggling, striving, seeking: always convinced that some deed of note may yet be done. It is a story of unbelievable courage and willpower—and cunning.

In March 1953 Stalin was dead; Churchill seized the opportunity to call for a new start. I know what, he told Eisenhower: a summit! With the Russians! And let’s build on the Anglo-American partnership as the foundation for world peace. Eisenhower wasn’t interested.

On 5 June 1953 Winston Churchill sustained a serious stroke. His doctor thought he would die; and yet through sheer force of will he carried on. The following day he insisted on presiding at the cabinet, even though his mouth was twisted and he was finding it difficult to use his left arm. His colleagues didn’t even notice that he was ill—just a bit pale and quiet.

The next day he was even worse: his left side was paralysed. He was taken to Chartwell to recover, and the press was given a message that the Prime Minister required a ‘complete rest’. No one thought to ask why. A week after the stroke he received his Private Secretary, Jock Colville, and the Cabinet Secretary, Norman Brook. Churchill was in a wheelchair, and after dinner he said he was going to try to stand up. Brook recounted:

Colville and I urged him not to attempt this, and when he insisted, we came up on either side of him so that we could catch him if he fell. But he waved us away with his stick and told us to stand back. He then lowered his feet to the ground, gripped the arms of his chair, and by a tremendous effort—with sweat pouring down his face—levered himself to his feet and stood upright. Having demonstrated that he could do this, he sat down again and took up his cigar . . . He was determined to recover.

And he was utterly determined to get his meeting with the Soviets—the nuclear summit at which he could reinsert himself at the head of global events. The Russians were non-committal. Eisenhower was vague. His cabinet colleagues were more or less in a state of mutiny—secretly or openly hoping he would jack it in, and yet fearful of abandoning their talisman, the one British politician to be known around the world.

By 1954 he was under subtle and continuous pressure to go, and though he was capable of astonishing feats of exertion for a stroke victim, he was starting to feel, as he put it, ‘like an aeroplane at the end of its flight, in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing’. Still that plane flew on for almost a year, dodging and weaving through the flak of his enemies (and quite a lot from his friends) until finally, on 5 April 1955, at the age of eighty, he went to the Palace and resigned as Prime Minister.

‘Man is spirit’, he informed the cabinet at the last meeting, and gave them one piece of advice: ‘Never be separated from the Americans.’

The so-called warmonger had spent his last years in office engaged in what was—for him—a futile mission to bring the great powers together and to promote a ‘world easement’: by which he meant abating what he saw as the unparalleled menace of thermonuclear weapons. And yet that summit did take place—three months after he finally left office, when Eisenhower, Eden, Faure and Bulganin met in Geneva.

Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism—that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous. He also understood that only capitalism, for all its imperfections, was capable of satisfying the wants of human beings.

I am of the generation that saw communism in action, in that we were sometimes able to travel behind the Iron Curtain before 1989—and to see how right he was, in every particular, in that astoundingly prescient speech in Fulton, Missouri. We saw the fear, we heard the whispering, we read the ludicrous propaganda slogans of a failing system that could not supply basic needs, and which controlled the population by taking away the elementary freedom to travel.

Churchill foresaw all that with unerring clarity, just as he had understood the threat from Nazi Germany. He also prophesied that one day the whole thing would collapse—and with unexpected speed. He was right, and we lived to see that moment of joy, too.

—

OUTSIDE THE CECILIENHOF in Potsdam the sun seems very bright, after the gloom of the conference room. We get on our bikes and cycle through the meadows and gardens by the Wannsee.

I look at the name of the road. Mauerweg, it says. Of course! This is the place where the East German regime constructed the hideous wall that once divided the city, and which was felled in that glorious eruption in 1989. Once it was a symbol of terror and oppression: now there is nothing but a kingly cycle path.

On one side of the path, lounging brazenly in the sun, we suddenly come across a crowd of German nudists: nut-brown old men doing Junker calisthenics, young women in pairs communing mystically with nature. It occurs to me how different, in some ways, the Germans must be: this is not the sort of scene, after all, you would expect in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon—and we are in the Berlin equivalent. And yet these undraped and obviously defenceless people are the very personification of the pacifism and gentleness of modern Germany.

They vote for whom they choose. They say what they like. They pierce whatever portion of their body they please. They believe in free-market capitalism. They do not fear the knock on the door in the night. Their world has changed since the Wall came down. These sun-worshippers are much more obviously the children of Churchill’s ideology than of Stalin’s.

Who walked around the White House with no clothes on? I rest my case.

It was his ideas which were to prevail, his concepts of freedom and democracy which won. In that speech at Fulton he helped shape the essential architecture of the post-war world—the transatlantic alliance that in 1948 was to become NATO, and which was integral to the final defeat of communism in Russia and throughout eastern Europe.

He was also one of the very first to articulate an idea that is central to that security architecture—the vision of a reconciled France and Germany, and of a united Europe. That is an idea that remains in some ways exceedingly controversial today; and so is the question of what Churchill really meant by a united Europe, what he intended to happen, and what role he thought Britain would play.