Putting Winston back upon his pedestal

CHURCHILL: A STUDY IN GREATNESS by Geoffrey Best (Hambledon and London, 19.95)

GEOFFREY Best is not, I imagine, a name known to the general public. For years he has been a historians historian, attracting numerous admirers from among his historical colleagues. This life of Churchill deserves much wider acclaim. It is beautifully written; it reflects how the writer s views of Churchill have changed since, as a boy, he heard his radio speeches in 1940 and after, to the mature reflections he offers now from his retirement. I, too, heard Churchill speak in 1940. I was just 12. I visited his lying in state. I never had any doubt that, for all his faults and often eccentric judgments, he was and remains the leading figure in the pantheon of British history in the 20th century.

There seems no end to the flood of books on Churchill. What none of them have, to my satisfaction, at least, dealt with is how Churchill, the great patriot, envisaged England. As a Scot, I say England deliberately. His view of Britain, like most living south of Hadrian s Wall, was Anglocentric, even when he sat in Parliament as the member for Dundee. His was not a classless view; though he had no class-hatred. It was as much a country man s view as that of an imperialist; though he thought well, to put it mildly, of the empire. His mental map of the world seems not to have included any maps of the Far East or the West Pacific. He never visited Australia. He consistently belittled the military strength of Japan, from 1924, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, resisting expenditure on the Navy, to 1941, when he claimed not to have realised what a pushover Malaya and Singapore would be to a numerically weak Japanese attack. He was jubilant at America s entry into the war; but the price, the appearance of the Japanese on that page of the Atlas that features India and the Indian ocean, was an exceptionally high one to pay, one that could never be entirely redeemed.

He paid a similar price in 1945 for his insistence in 1940 on taking over the leadership of the Conservative Party. He remembered how Lloyd George had ended the 1914-18 war as the saviour of his country but not in control of a major party, and spent the rest of his life in the political wilderness. In 1945, the voters rejected the Conservative Party. He was cheered wherever he went. I know; I heard him speak in Rugby, a constituency lost to an independent at a wartime by-election, because of the calibre of the Conservative candidate. His party did not win there in 1945; but then he was not a candidate in Rugby. Local MPs mattered.

On most domestic matters he would be to the left of Mr Blair, not to mention Jack Straw. He understood the oppression that poverty embodied. He understood how urban misery could lead the young into crime in search of adventure.

He had no particular love for his fellow aristocrats; nor they for him. He relaxed with the work of his own hands; as a bricklayer, and as a painter. He could behave like a right b*****d towards people who earned his ire, and did.

Mostly he was magnanimous. His love for his wife was admirable and moving.

His respect for British institutions, especially for Parliament, would shame many of today s political leaders. He was at once a Victorian gentleman and a contemporary realist.

Like Geoffrey Best, we, his successors, can recognise his greatness and condemn those who seek to advance their own tawdry political causes by seeking either to enlist his posthumous support or to traduce his achievements for their own dubious ends. Geoffrey Best has done his best to recall and rearouse that pride.

Read him, and see if it works for you. It should.

Copyright 2001
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