Is Churchill a hero or villain? Why both sides have missed the point
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On Nov 12 2022, 1,500 Albanians went to Parliament Square to express their dismay about a speech by the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman. Some gathered at Ivor Roberts-Jones’s bronze effigy of Winston Churchill and wrapped the double-headed eagle flag of Albania around its plinth. Sir John Hayes, leader of the Conservative Common Sense Group, took offence. “It’s insulting and staggering that at a time when we remember the two European wars and other 20th-century conflicts, these protesters have targeted a statue of our great war leader.”
A student of Churchill’s relationship with Albania might have been less staggered, given that he was a lonely advocate of using British naval power against Mussolini’s 1938 invasion of the country, made the Albanian resistance the priority of the Special Operations Executive, and remained a respected figure even under the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha. (“Imagine, young comrades … if there did not exist Churchill with his rare qualities of leadership.”) But as Sinclair McKay’s book shows, Churchill spent much of his life as a human Rorschach Test, a duty of which he shows no sign of being relieved.
Some Churchill biographies are praised as “magisterial” – which usually means they have footnotes and more than 500 pages. Meeting Churchill: A Life in 90 Encounters will not be among them. It is best considered part of the genre established by Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret – a chronological collection of anecdotes with a number in the title. In the absence of personal papers, chatty relations or a co-operative estate, Brown’s subject was perfect for this treatment. It suits Churchill for the opposite reason – the plenitude of primary sources makes him a prospect as big as the Moon or the two European wars in which he was involved. So McKay describes curious craters, small diverting skirmishes, most too minor for magisterial attention.
Bracingly, many of the figures he quotes are not as generous as Hayes or Hoxha. “Rallied the nation indeed!” snorted Evelyn Waugh, 72 hours after Churchill’s death. “How we despised his orations.” Others put the boot in decades before. “Mr Churchill not only poses as a statesman; he is accepted as such,” wrote H G Wells in the Daily Express, thinking of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign: “He is the running sore of waste in our Government ... He has smeared his vision with human blood, and we are implicated in the things he abets.”
This remark appears in several books about Wells, but – as far as I can tell – has never appeared in a biography of Churchill. And McKay’s switch of perspective creates illuminating effects. For instance, many accounts of Churchill make passing mention of Bessie Braddock, the Labour MP said to have questioned his sobriety in the Commons. “Madam,” he replied, “you are disgustingly ugly, but I shall be sober in the morning.” McKay provides some useful context to this much-repeated remark. Though Braddock once refused, on principle, to sign a birthday gift book to Churchill because she thought him unworthy of the John Bunyan quotation on the cover, she also regarded him as a “great man” and possibly “the greatest living Englishman”.
The text that frames this material is sometimes florid. McKay believes that adjectives, like policemen, should always travel in pairs, and finds his subject both “under the ancient skies” and “amid the antique sands” of Sudan and Egypt. He occasionally misses the conclusion to which his evidence points. If Churchill knocked on the dressing rooms of both Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier during the interval, apparently looking for the lav, I think it’s fair to detect a strategy rather than a weak bladder.
But he has a straight unflustered line on issues that generate the most heat in current Churchill discourse, from Tariq Ali’s error-strewn demolition job Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes to The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill: A Review, a Policy Exchange pamphlet written by Andrew Roberts and Zewditu Gebreyohanes, which is impressively confident that Churchill’s use of racial slurs “was not intended to convey race hatred at the time”.
For McKay, “there is nothing controversial about applying the relatively modern term of ‘racist’ to Churchill, even though it was not a term that was much in use in the 1950s.” So the graffito “was a racist” sprayed by Black Lives Matter supporters beneath the Roberts-Jones bronze in June 2020 was – in his view – an offence against public property but not against fact.
A plinth has no room for footnotes, but a biography of fragments turns out to be a good space to conjure the life of a man of so many contradictions – who condemned the Amritsar massacre but shocked a friend with his remarks about the Chinese; who wanted no restrictions on immigration in 1904, but in the 1950s considered using “Keep Britain White” as an election slogan; who led a victorious war against fascism.
“Trying either to demonise Churchill or deify him is misguided,” argued the journalist Tomiwa Owolade in The New Statesman last November. Sinclair McKay’s book demonstrates that cohorts of commentators have been doing it perfectly well, without trying, since the beginning of the last century. Where might we go for a more balanced view? Try Albania, maybe.
Meeting Churchill: A Life in 90 Encounters is published by Viking at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
