CHAPTER 21

MAKER OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST










In her heyday, the pleasure yacht Christina was the most ostentatiously opulent if not downright vulgar private boat that had ever floated on the sea. She had Impressionists on the wall and live lobsters in the pool and barstools upholstered with leather diligently harvested from the foreskins of whales. But of all the exotic items assembled by Aristotle Onassis, the most important were his guests—prize lepidoptera that he caught in his gossamer net.

You might find Marilyn Monroe on board; or Frank Sinatra or Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton—all toasting each other at the taffrail and draping themselves over the deckchairs before going off for whispering marital fisticuffs in the staterooms. Of all the global superstars that Ari assembled, there was one who outshone the rest; and on the morning of 11 April 1961, he had the proof of his renown.

The white-hulled, yellow-funnelled Christina—in fact a converted Canadian naval vessel that had been present at the Normandy landings—had nosed up the Hudson River, towards her mooring point on 79th Street. There was an aquatic festival of welcome. There were blasts from liners and toots from tugs, and a New York fireboat joyfully ejaculated a jet of water to mark the arrival of the most popular Briton in America (the Beatles being still a couple of years away).

Now it was getting on for dinner time on the same day. With the help of two strong maids the eighty-six-year-old Winston Churchill was making his way down the deck. He had sustained another small stroke; his dentition was wonky. But his face was as cherubic as ever. His rheumy eyes were bright, his spotty bow tie was around his neck. He tapped over the polished boards with the same gold-topped cane that Edward VII had given him for his wedding in 1908, and there flickered within him the same old enthusiasm at the prospect of a meal and a spot of alcoholic refreshment.

It was true that he did not always find it easy to make conversation with Onassis, the Smyrna-born shipping tycoon, with his tales of the ‘sons of bitches’ who were interfering with his casinos. But then Churchill didn’t mind much about that. In 1911 he had endured a six-week cruise with H. H. Asquith to the Mediterranean, during which he was heard to grunt that he had been asked to inspect too many ancient ruins. At least Onassis didn’t make him feel bad about his relative lack of a classical education.

No, he liked the sensations of the cruise: the cosseting, the travel, the endless diversions—the landscapes and seascapes; and now he looked out at a scene he had first clapped eyes on in 1895—a lifetime away—when he had come as a twenty-year-old to stay with his mother’s friend, Bourke Cockran, and learn his secrets of oratory.

When he had first seen New York it was physically a humbler place. There were some largish and handsome brick buildings, and there was all kinds of bustle, and smoke billowing from a thousand chimneys—and yet there were children in rags, and immigrant slums where the bodies of horses might lie in the streets for days. It was a city of energy and ambition, yes, but built on much the same sort of scale as late nineteenth-century Manchester or Liverpool or Glasgow. When Churchill first saw it, the skyline wasn’t a patch on London.

Now, though, as he stood in the darkness in 1961, looking out at Manhattan, the transformation was enough to make him blink. The buildings had sprouted to undreamt-of heights, spindles and spires of glass and steel, and their reflections twinkled towards him on the water with the light of a million windows. It was London that now looked dowdy, and dingy, and a shade undernourished.

This New York skyline was the embodiment of the change he had seen in his lifetime, and over which he had very largely officiated. These skyscrapers were not just a new template for urban life: they represented the twentieth-century story of America’s rise to greatness, and her eclipse of Britain. In his famous Mansion House speech of 1942, Churchill said he had not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. And yet that, pretty much, was how things had panned out.

He felt it keenly. There is a sense in which Churchill’s obsessive references to the triumph of the ‘English-speaking peoples’ were not just about ensuring a vital military and political Anglo-American alliance, though that was one of his purposes. They were also a psychological trick, a self-defence mechanism. The phrase was a way of masking and rationalising the humiliation of Britain’s position. Britain had declined in relative importance; but that decline was salved by the rise of those close cousins, those fellow-English-speakers who shared, as he constantly pointed out, the same values: the language, democracy, free speech, independent judiciary and so on.

It was as though Churchill was trying to persuade himself (and the world) that the American triumph was somehow also a British triumph, and that the glory of these former colonies reflected on the mother country. It is valiant stuff, and of course not everyone sees it that way.

Many people might say that the story of Churchill’s life was in part the translatio imperii—the passing of one global empire to another. As the Persians gave way to the Greeks, and the Greeks to the Romans, so the British had handed the imperial torch on to the Americans. It was A. J. P. Taylor who once said that the Second World War was ‘the war of the British succession’—and if you accept that analysis it is obvious who won; and seventy years later it is astonishing to see that America, militarily, politically, economically, is still the most powerful nation on earth.

During the meal that night on the Christina, a mysterious phone call came through for Sir Winston. His Private Secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, was asked to dial ‘Operator 17’ at the White House. It was the new President, John F. Kennedy, wondering whether Churchill would like to get in the presidential plane and come down to Washington—‘to spend a couple of days’ with JFK. Browne had to think quickly, and he decided to thank the President very much for his kind offer, but to say no. Churchill just wasn’t mobile enough, and he was increasingly deaf.

It was perhaps a shame that they didn’t meet, because Churchill still had passages of vigour and lucidity. They had met already, but before Kennedy was elected—once aboard the Christina when eyewitnesses said he seemed to mistake the clean-cut Kennedy for a waiter, and once when they had a very friendly conversation about the young senator’s presidential ambitions (Kennedy said he was worried about being a Catholic; Churchill said he could always sort that out and remain a good Christian). This was Churchill’s last chance to sit in the Oval Office and meet a serving US President—and he had met most of them from William McKinley in 1900 onwards.

Here was Kennedy, the leader of the ‘Free World’; here was Churchill, physically bowed but with the vital spark still occasionally gleaming. Perhaps there was some hint that the old empire might have been able to pass to the new—because the problems confronting John F. Kennedy were certainly familiar to Churchill.

It was Churchill who pioneered the architecture of the Cold War, and the policy of standing up to Soviet communism. Now that policy was to be aggressively taken up by the young President: in Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere. Churchill had been in the vanguard of the movement for a united Europe—a cause still supported by the USA and by Kennedy. Then there was a whole arena of geopolitics where the Americans were obliged to take up the imperial purple, after Britain had faltered after the war, and then collapsed at Suez. It is an arena where Churchill’s role is now only hazily remembered; and yet it was critical.

Winston Churchill was one of the fathers of the modern Middle East. There is therefore at least a case for thinking that he helped create the world’s number-one political disaster zone, and then passed that disaster zone on, like a cupful of quivering gelignite, to be the responsibility of America. It was John F. Kennedy who first provided the American security guarantee for Israel. There are many who would blame the British—and Churchill prime among them—for creating the territorial incoherencies that made that guarantee necessary. Was he guilty? If not, whom do we blame?

As I write these words today, Israel is bombing the positions of Arabs in Gaza; Hamas is firing rockets at Israel; the casualties in Syria mount higher and higher; fundamentalist fanatics have captured large parts of northern Iraq. Churchill’s fingerprints are over the entire map.

Have a look at that map of Jordan—what do you see? The most striking feature is that weird triangular kink, a 400-mile salient from Saudi Arabia into modern Jordan. Some say that this fact of geography can be traced to one of Churchill’s liquid lunches, and to this day it is called ‘Winston’s hiccup’. That story may or may not be true. What no one contests is Churchill’s role in drawing that boundary. Kinky or not, it has lasted from that day to this.

He was integral to the creation of the modern state of Israel; and it fell to him, at the formative moment in the emergence of that nation, to try to make sense of the abjectly inconsistent commitments of the British government. He was the man who decided that there should be such a thing as the state of Iraq; it was he who bundled together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul—Shiite, Sunni and Kurd. If you wanted to put a single man in the frame for the agony of modern Iraq, if you wanted to blame anyone for the current implosion, then of course you might point the finger at George W. Bush and Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein—but if you wanted to grasp the essence of the problem of that wretched state, you would have to look at the role of Winston Churchill.

His epic career intersected with the Middle East at several key points (and remember that he is credited with pioneering the very term Middle East); but the most important was his role as Colonial Secretary. He was a little surprised to be offered the post, at the end of 1920; but it is easy to see why Lloyd George thought he was the right man for the job. He had shown immense energy and dynamism as Minister for Munitions—equipping Britain with the tanks, planes and other technology that helped win the war. As Secretary of State for War he had been masterly in his demobilisation strategy: quelling mutinies by ensuring that those who had served the longest were the first to be reunited with their families. He had shown his gifts of charm and persuasion in the pre-war Ulster talks—and those gifts would be needed in spades. The First World War had left some snortingly difficult problems, and especially in the Middle East.

THE POST OF Colonial Secretary might sound less grand than that of Foreign Secretary—a role still occupied by that most superior person, George Nathaniel Curzon. But that is to forget the scale of the British Empire in 1921. The First World War was not meant to be an acquisitive conflict; Britain went in with the explicit aim of not expanding her empire. But as Walter Reid has pointed out, between 1914 and 1919 the surface area of the world ruled by Britain expanded by 9 per cent.

When Churchill took the reins at the Colonial Office, he was at the apex of an empire that comprised fifty-eight countries covering 14 million square miles and he was responsible—one way or another—for the lives and hopes of 458 million people. It was by far the biggest empire the world has ever seen—six times the size of the Roman Empire at its apogee under Trajan. The British flag flew over a quarter of the land surface of the planet, and there was scarcely a sea or ocean that was not patrolled by the might of the British navy—a navy much modernised and improved by Churchill.

When you think about it that way, it is perhaps less surprising that Churchill threw himself into the job. He surrounded himself with the best and most famous experts, notably the Arabists T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell. He boned up on such hitherto abstruse matters (to him) as the difference between Shia and Sunni. His first step was to summon a conference, at Cairo; and here he conducted himself with dazzling skill.

The press was sceptical about this venture. It was said that Churchill wanted a ‘durbar’—a magnificent and ceremonial gathering of the imperial court. He was accused of wanting to govern ‘on an oriental scale’. The truth was that someone had to take charge, because the situation in the Middle East was a total and utter shambles.

With the best possible intentions and motives, Britain had made a series of promises during the First World War, and those promises were now proving difficult to square with each other and indeed with reality. Perhaps it is a mitigation to say that they were made by a country in desperate straits, and with a population at risk of starvation from the German submarine campaign.

There were three British promises. The first was to the Arabs, in the form of the 1915 McMahon–Hussein correspondence. This was a series of fairly oleaginous letters from Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, to the Hashemite King Hussein—a bearded old worthy whose family claimed to be of the lineage of the prophet Mohammed. The gist of the letters was that the British government was all in favour of a big new Arab state—stretching from Palestine to Iraq and to the borders with Persia, with Hussein and his family on the throne; and the hope was that this promise would encourage the Arabs to revolt against the Turks, who were then allied with the Germans. The letters worked, in the sense that there was indeed such a revolt, a strategically piffling affair immortalised and wildly exaggerated in the film Lawrence of Arabia.

The next promise was to the French, who had been suffering appalling casualties on the Western Front. It was thought politic to paint them a picture of future French glory, once the war was over: and under the terms of the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement, France was to have a zone of influence stretching from Syria to northern Iraq and including Baghdad—a strip of land, incidentally, that bears some resemblance to the ‘caliphate’ proclaimed in 2014 by the fanatics of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It was not at all clear how this secret undertaking to the French could be reconciled with the more public undertaking to the Arabs—and nor, frankly, was it capable of being so reconciled.

The third and most tragicomically incoherent promise of all was the so-called Balfour declaration. This was really a letter from A. J. Balfour to Lord Rothschild, dated 2 November 1917, and contained this exquisite masterpiece of Foreign Office fudgerama . . .


His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

Another way of putting it might have been that the British government viewed with favour the eating of a piece of cake by the Jewish people, provided nothing should be done to prejudice the rights of non-Jewish communities to eat the same piece of cake at the same time.

What prompted this bizarre declaration? Partly it was idealism. Ever since the vile pogroms in nineteenth-century Russia there had been a growing movement to find a homeland for the Jews. At one stage the British had even toyed with finding some space in Uganda; but Palestine, the land of the Hebrew Old Testament, was the obvious place. Palestine was still relatively underpopulated; and to some extent Balfour was merely adding the official British voice to the chorus that wanted to give ‘a land without a people to a people without a land’.

Balfour may also have been moved by a more practical consideration: there was much anxiety in the First World War that Jewish sympathy might be inclined towards the Germans, because that was the best way of paying back the Russians for their anti-Semitism before the war. As Churchill himself later admitted, the Balfour declaration was partly intended to shore up Jewish support, especially in America—and its manifest muddle arose from the countervailing desire not to alienate the many millions of Muslims (not least in India) upon whose troops the British imperial forces relied.

Look at these three promises together, and there is no doubt about it: Britain had sold the same camel three times.

This was the mess that Churchill had to clear up, and in March 1921 he summoned all the key players to the splendour of the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo—then also, of course, an informal part of the British Empire. Soon the lobby echoed to the calls of Arabists in states of excitement.

‘Gertie!’ cried T. E. Lawrence, as he spotted the elegant but mannish figure of Gertrude Bell.

‘Dear boy!’ said Gertrude Bell.

Churchill marched in, to cries of protest from a few Arabs outside, some of them carrying placards saying ‘a bas Churchill’. He was holding an easel and followed by a member of staff carrying a bottle of wine in a bucket.

He established himself in the garden and began a spurt of creative activity that was to produce enough paintings for him to hold an exhibition; but the biggest and most dramatic canvas of all was the political landscape of the Middle East.

At some point in the proceedings he organised a trip to see the Pyramids, and the entire party posed on camels in front of the Sphinx. Although he was an accomplished rider, Churchill managed to slip off the camel’s hump. Thinking that their principal tourist was at risk, the dragoman offered him a horse instead.

‘I’ve started on a camel, and I will finish on a camel,’ he said, and there we see him today, firmly in the saddle—as he was throughout proceedings.

By the end of the Cairo conference he had gone some way to making sense of the McMahon–Hussein letters. Of the four sons of King Hussein, Faisal was given the throne of Iraq (the French having chucked him out of Syria) and Abdullah was given the throne of Transjordan, now Jordan—where his family remains ensconced. T. E. Lawrence thought the summit was an outstanding success, and eleven years later he wrote to Churchill to point out that it had already delivered more than a decade of peace: not bad going.

Churchill’s work was not done. Now he had to see whether he could massage away the inconsistencies of the Balfour declaration. The next stop was Jerusalem, where he conducted sessions of Solomon-like wisdom and impartiality.

He held two consecutive audiences, first with the Arabs and then with the Jews. The first group in to see him was the ‘Executive Committee of the Arab Palestine Congress’. They did not make a good impression on Churchill; and it should be remembered that he already harboured the feeling that the Palestinians had failed to join the other Arabs in the revolt against the Turks.

The gist of the Palestinians’ case was that the Jews should hop it. The Balfour declaration should be annulled. ‘The Jews have been among the most active advocates of destruction in many lands . . . The Jew is clannish and unneighbourly, and cannot mix with those who live about him . . . the Jew is a Jew all the world over’, and so on. They gave no sign of being willing to compromise, or to come to any sort of accommodation with the settlers. A condominium, shared rule, joint sovereignty, a federal solution—none of it was acceptable. Jews out, they said. As Abba Eban was later to say, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and they started as they meant to go on.

Churchill listened carefully, and then responded with practical advice. He stressed the two sides of the Balfour declaration—the protection that it afforded to the civil and political rights of the existing peoples. He noted that the declaration referred to ‘a’ national home for the Jews, rather than ‘the’ national home, with the indefinite article giving the suggestion that this was to be a shared abode and not exclusively Jewish property.

‘If one promise stands, so does the other, and we shall be judged as we faithfully fulfil both,’ he told them. But there could be no getting round the substance of what Balfour had promised the Jewish people, he said.


It was a declaration made while the war was still in progress, while victory and defeat hung in the balance. It must therefore be regarded as one of the facts definitely established by the triumphant conclusion of the Great War . . . Moreover it is manifestly right that the Jews, who are scattered all over the world, should have a national centre and a National Home where some of them may be reunited. And where else could that be but in this land of Palestine, with which for more than three thousand years they have been profoundly and intimately associated?

He then heard from the Jewish deputation. Their speech, as you might perhaps expect, was couched in words much more calculated to appeal to Winston Churchill.

‘ . . . Our Jewish and Zionist programme lays special stress on the establishing of sincere friendship between ourselves and the Arabs. The Jewish people returning after 2000 years of exile and persecution, to its homeland, cannot suffer the suspicion that it wishes to deny another nation its rights . . .’

Churchill replied gravely, with the tones of a Roman proconsul arbitrating in a dispute. One tribe might be more advanced, more civilised—but they had a duty to those unrulier tribes that faced the prospect of dispossession. The Jewish settlers must show ‘prudence’ and ‘patience’, he warned. They must allay the alarm of others, no matter how unjustified that alarm might be.

Later, in a speech at the Hebrew University, he repeated his message. The Jews had a great responsibility, he said. They had indeed the chance to create a land flowing with milk and honey. But he warned them that ‘every step you take must therefore be for the moral and material benefit of all Palestinians’.

He was then given a symbolic tree to plant. Symbolically, it broke. There was nothing else to plant except a palm, and the sapling did not flourish.

There are those who say that Churchill was naive in his handling of the Arab–Jewish question, some that he was positively disingenuous. In March 1921 he took the crucial decision that the west bank of the Jordan was emphatically outside the terms of the McMahon–Hussein promises. It was not to be part of the Kingdom of Abdullah, the son of Hussein.

This was the beginning of the creation of that Jewish homeland promised by Balfour—and in taking that step there have been plenty of people who have accused Churchill of being a tool of the great global Jewish conspiracy.

There are loonies out there who will tell you that Churchill’s mother Jennie Jerome was of Jewish stock (she wasn’t; her father was descended from Huguenots. She may have been partly Native American, but she wasn’t Jewish). A little more plausibly, they will tell you that his views were warped by the very substantial donations he received from Jewish bankers and financiers: Ernest Cassel, Sir Henry Strakosch, Bernard Baruch. It is perfectly true that Churchill’s personal finances would not today pass the Private Eye test. They would not look good if splashed on the front page of the Guardian. He did indeed take money from these men, sometimes in considerable sums. But those were very different times, when parliamentarians and ministers were paid much less—and expected to have a private income—and it was by no means unusual for politicians to receive financial support from their admirers.

As it happens, I don’t think these donations made a bean of difference to Churchill’s views about Jewry, nor to his decisions about Palestine. He was basically philo-Semitic, like his father Randolph, and had been all his life. He admired the Jewish characteristics that he shared in such abundance—energy, self-reliance, hard work, family life.

As he wrote in a newspaper article in 1920, ‘Some people like the Jews and some do not, but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.’ He has from time to time been accused of adopting some off-colour sentiments—such as in an unpublished article in which he seems to suggest that Jewish people may be partly responsible for some of the resentment they inspire, and the feeling that they are ‘Hebrew bloodsuckers’. But the authorship of the article is contested (a ghostly hand alleged) and it is surely important that it was never published.

As Sir Martin Gilbert has demonstrated beyond the slightest doubt, Churchill admired Jews, employed Jews, enjoyed the company of Jews, and believed in a Jewish homeland. He was not a Zionist, he once said, but he was ‘wedded to Zionism’.

All that is true. On the other hand, it does not mean that Churchill was in any sense anti-Arab, let alone anti-Muslim. Indeed, there were times both in 1904 and in the 1920s when his general ‘tendency to orientalism’ encouraged him to join Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in actually wearing Arab-style robes. He hero-worshipped the headdress-sporting Lawrence of Arabia, and as Warren Dockter points out in his new survey, Winston Churchill and the Islamic World, he was always mindful that the British Empire was the greatest Muslim power on earth: the home in 1920 of 87 million Muslims.

He inveighed against the loss of India not just because of the blow to British prestige, but also because he worried about future Hindu oppression of the Muslims; and since Muslim troops were invaluable for the empire, Muslim goodwill was vital. He tended to side with the Turks over the Greeks, even though the Turks had been his opponents in the First World War.

Remember what he did in the depths of 1940, when Britain was most desperate for friends: he found £100,000 to build the Regent’s Park mosque in London—a gesture that was intended to be noted in the Muslim world.

So when Churchill paved the way for Jewish entry to Palestine—and his 1922 White Paper encouraged more immigration—it was because he genuinely believed that it would be the best thing for that otherwise arid and neglected part of the world, and that it would be the best thing for both communities. He saw Jew and Arab living side by side.

He imagined the technically expert Schlomo giving eager young Mohammed a hand with his tractor, and teaching him the art of irrigation. He saw orchards blossoming over the desert, and prosperity for all. Indeed, he had some support for this vision from the old King Hussein himself, who wrote in his publication al-Qibla that Palestine was a ‘sacred and beloved homeland of its original sons—the Jews’. The Hashemite King went on to make precisely the same starry-eyed prediction as Churchill.

‘Experience has proved their capacity to succeed in their energies and their labours . . . The return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually an experimental school for their Arab brethren in the field, factories and trade.’ Alas, things did not work out that way. As the years rolled on, tensions got worse; Jewish immigration increased, especially as the Nazi persecutions began.

As it turned out, Churchill was too optimistic about the caring, sharing spirit of the early Zionists. They did not tend to employ Arabs on their farms. There were Arab riots and protests, and the poor soldiers of the British mandate were caught in the middle, driven to shoot Arabs—when many in Britain were starting to feel that a serious injustice was being done.

In 1937 the position had got so bad that it was decided to set up the Peel Commission, to understand what had gone wrong in Palestine. Churchill gave some secret testimony to that Commission—and here we can see exactly what he imagined he was doing when he opened the door to substantial Jewish immigration, and created that homeland on the west bank of the Jordan.

‘ . . . We committed ourselves to the idea that some day, somehow, far off in the future, subject to justice and economic convenience, there might well be a great Jewish state there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country . . .’ (Today we can see how his vision has come true. There are more than eight million Israelis, and 75 per cent of them are Jews.)

Of course it would be right to protect the Arabs, he told the Peel Commission, and it was wrong of the Jews not to hire them; but he saw the Zionist project as something that was fundamentally progressive, enlightened and civilising. It made no sense to allow the Arabs to get in the way of that progress—when ultimately it would be to the advantage of all.

‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger,’ he said. It was like saying that America should be reserved for the Native Americans or Australia for the Aborigines. It was absurd, in his view—an offence against his Whiggish concepts of social improvement.

In any event, he denied that he had imported a ‘foreign race’ to Palestine. ‘Not at all,’ he said: it was the Arabs who were the conquerors. Churchill pointed out that in the time of Christ the population of Palestine was much greater—and the people had been mainly Jews. That all changed in the seventh century AD. ‘When the Mohammedan upset occurred in world history, and the hordes of Islam swept over these places they broke it all up, smashed it all up. You have seen the terraces on the hills which used to be cultivated, which under Arab rule have remained a desert.’

The Commission pressed Churchill: when did he imagine that this would be reversed? When would the Jews become a majority again? ‘The British government is the judge, and should keep the power to be the judge.’

There he was being overoptimistic, if not romantic; and at some level he must have known it. Britain could not conceivably have kept power in Palestine for long enough to ensure that there was lasting fair play between Jew and Arab.

When Churchill became Colonial Secretary in 1921, he was responsible for the greatest empire the world has ever seen, but also one where the financial elastic was already stretched fit to bust. What was his mission, in fulfilling the British mandate in Mesopotamia? Yes, it was partly to secure oil interests—though it is interesting that Middle Eastern oil had not yet acquired its dominance in British strategic thinking. In 1938, 57 per cent of British oil came from America and only 22 per cent from the Middle East.

His main purpose was to cut the costs of patrolling a place that he described—in words that will not endear him to the Iraqi tourist board—as ‘a score of mud villages sandwiched in between a swampy river and a blistering desert, inhabited by a few hundred half naked families, usually starving’. Why waste infantry on this dump, he said, when they could be in India? So he cut military expenditure, and decided to rely on the RAF—which could well achieve British objectives by strafing and bombing. This was to lead to some ugly episodes later on, for which he was not directly responsible and which he deplored, when British planes bombed civilians.

He also favoured (that’s right, you guessed it) the use of gas—the very sin for which the world most abominated Saddam Hussein. He was, thankfully, frustrated in this ambition, though he protested: ‘I can’t understand why it should be thought legitimate to kill people with bullets and barbarism to make them sneeze.’

Whatever Britain did in Mesopotamia, he decided it should be done as cheaply as possible: indeed, he at one stage proposed abandoning Baghdad altogether, and to cut costs to only £8 million a year by restricting the mandate to Basra in the south.

The point is that Britain did not want to hang on to the place out of some misplaced desire for prestige, or colonial swagger. Before he was even Colonial Secretary Churchill suggested in 1919 that the mandates for both Mesopotamia and Palestine should be handed over to Turkey: and after he had some experience of dealing with Iraq he said: ‘I hate Irak and wish we had never gone there. It is like living on top of an ungrateful volcano’—words that the US-led Coalition forces might have heeded before they invaded in 2003.

The British mission in Iraq and Palestine was to bring as much order to the area as was compatible with the straitened financial circumstances in which they found themselves: to fulfil the mandate, and then to ensure that the successor regime was as friendly to Britain as was possible, given their diminished powers of military projection overseas. The Iraqi mandate continued officially until 1932, though British influence persisted for much longer. By the end of the Second World War it was obvious that the British efforts to hold Palestine were doomed.

Jewish immigration was now morally and physically unstoppable; and since the Arab reaction was as violent as ever, the British troops found themselves desperately trying to uphold the principles of Balfour, and to be fair to both sides. The British still tried to restrict the pace of Jewish immigration, and there were awful scenes as the victims of Nazi concentration camps were themselves detained, in British-organised camps, rather than being allowed into Palestine.

Jewish terrorists began to turn their guns and bombs on the British themselves—the very people who had created the homeland. They murdered Lord Moyne, the British minister in Palestine, on whose yacht Clementine Churchill had dallied in the South Seas with the suave art dealer Terence Philip. They killed British soldiers who were only doing their job, to the black fury of Ernest Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary.

Even Winston Churchill was shaken in his Zionism. He described the attacks as ‘an odious act of ingratitude’. His relations with Chaim Weizmann, the Manchester-born father of the Zionist movement, were never the same. In the end the British simply scarpered from Palestine, literally leaving the key under the mat. The flag came down, and a new nation was born.

It was a procedure that took place—with a bit more dignity—in India in the same year; and it happened around the world in the great recessional that marked the last phase of Churchill’s life. Across the planet he saw the Union Jack come down, from Malaya to Malawi, from Singapore to Suez—where the Americans finally pulled the rug in 1956 from under the military pretensions of the tottering old empire.

As he said bitterly towards the end of his life, ‘I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end’. That is rot, of course (as he surely knew). Consider his achievements in the Middle East alone.

Jordan has been amazingly stable, from that day to this, even if his arm wobbled as he drew it. Iraq was to remain broadly in the British sphere of influence for forty years after the Cairo conference, and Iraqi oil was to prove invaluable in helping Britain to survive and win the Second World War. As for the birth of Israel, at which he performed the role of midwife, well: your view will depend on the existential question of whether or not you believe in the value of the Jewish state.

If you are among those who hold that the Balfour declaration was the biggest single error of British foreign policy, then you will obviously think that Churchill was wrong to give it practical effect. There again, if you think that on the whole it was right after 2,000 years of persecution to give the Jews a homeland in a place they had once occupied and that was now relatively sparsely populated; if you think it was a visionary idea to hope that their talents would let the desert bloom; if you think that it is not a bad idea to have at least one democracy—no matter how imperfect—in that part of the world, then you will perhaps think Churchill a bit of a hero.

He could not have known in the 1920s that his vision of a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ would be so betrayed by the short-sightedness and selfishness of both sides. He can’t be blamed for the shameful way Israelis have treated Palestinians, nor for Palestinian terrorism, nor for the generally woeful quality of Palestinian leadership. Nor can he really be blamed for the apparent disintegration of Iraq, if that is indeed what is now happening.

It was as good an idea as any to amalgamate the three vilayets, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was what the Arab leaders said they wanted—and it was what they had been promised: a strong unitary Arab state. It was hardly Churchill’s fault that no Iraqi leader has arisen with the greatness and generosity to unite the country.

Churchill certainly understood and denounced the perils of Islamic extremism, but he can’t be blamed for the failure of Arab leadership. Perhaps the only way to end intercommunal and schismatic conflict in the patchwork of the Middle East would be to install a new Roman Empire, complete with ruthless proconsular violence and a system of compulsory loyalty to the central power. That would be unacceptable for many reasons—and it didn’t work that well for the Romans, either (they had a hell of a drubbing near Baghdad).

Far from achieving nothing, Churchill’s ideals actually helped not to perpetuate the British Empire, but to ensure that it was unbundled in a relatively dignified and effective way. It was one of the paradoxes of his life that Churchillian goals, of freedom and democracy, were espoused by the very children of the empire as they campaigned for their own independence.

As Richard Toye has pointed out, the Atlantic Charter of 1941 may not have cut much ice in Washington. But it was heard by Nelson Mandela and other African leaders.

When he stood on that yacht in 1961, there was certainly a case for saying that Churchill and his country had been diminished. He was old and frail; Britain had been bankrupted by the war, and greatly reduced in financial and military muscle—an outcome that had surely been anticipated and connived at by the Americans.

His own country was now so short of millionaires that he had to rely on the hospitality of the gangsterish social climber Aristotle Onassis. He stood beneath the long shadow of New York’s Empire State Building, a tower that dwarfs Big Ben in London as the American defence budget dwarfs that of the whole of western Europe, Britain included.

He knew that the fate of the world now lay in America’s hands—and he was right. In our own time it has fallen to the Americans to try to hold the ring in Palestine, to reason with the Israelis, to try to cope with the ungrateful volcano of Iraq. As a British imperialist, he was inevitably a failure. As an idealist, he was a success.

That handy conceptual elision of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ has helped to carry Churchillian ideas around the world. The English-speaking peoples are now far more numerous than the peoples of the old British Empire—perhaps 2 billion, and they are growing in number every day. There are more Chinese English-speakers than there are in England; even the EU Commission, in the last ten years, has unofficially adopted English.

There are more democracies around the world, and there are fewer wars. Whatever you may think about the American-led imperium of free markets and free trade, they are lifting billions of people out of poverty. Those are all ideals for which Churchill fought, and which he identified as common to Britain and America.

Those nights on the Christina were the last time he saw the land of his mother. The next day he went to Idlewild airport and boarded a flight home that had been equipped with two bottles of cognac, seven bottles of wine, one bottle of brandy and two pounds of Stilton. That should have seen him through.

The yacht Christina, incidentally, has lately been put up for sale. She can be found in a dockyard in East London.

So, too, can people from countries around the world, with 300 languages spoken in the city. Churchill not only transformed much of the world; by the time he left office he had begun the process—not altogether intentionally, perhaps—of creating the modern multicultural Britain.

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