Churchill is invoked to give substance to the claim that all it will take for Brexit to work is for us to believe in Britain, and the exceptional “British spirit”. But seen through the filter of a distorted memory of the second world war, our European partners are depicted by Brexiters as enemies against whom we must take a stand. This has, in one sense, been an uphill task for the Brexit camp, given that in 1946 Churchill advocated what he called “a kind of United States of Europe”, and throughout much of his career underlined the importance of remaining engaged with the continent. And even before the EU referendum, the two sides in the battle of Brexit had begun to claim that the memory of Churchill was on their side.
Churchill the war leader has to be disentangled from the propaganda image created by him and those around him, and which was itself a significant part of the war effort.ĭuring almost every foreign policy crisis and conflict, especially if the idea of appeasement is relevant, politicians and journalists ask: what would Churchill have done? President George W Bush, who launched his calamitous war in Iraq with a bust of Churchill by his side in the Oval Office, is said to have modelled his style of leadership on him. His command of language was such that he was a recipient of the Nobel prize in literature.
I say this as a sceptic who, although publicly critical of the man and deeply wary of the myths that surround him, named my production company, Uplands, after a phrase taken from his most famous wartime speech (“If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands”). Like the lines of Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time”, some of Churchill’s more lyrical passages are so perfectly constructed and deftly targeted that they can induce, even in sceptics, momentary lapses of critical analysis. Are we able, more than five decades after his death, to peer over the mountain of his reputation and his writings – more than 40 books and thousands of speeches – and find the real man?Īs well as the size of Churchill’s output, there is the seductive eloquence of his words.
H ow to assess the career of a world-changing politician who was also a prolific journalist, writer and incessant self-publicist? Aside from his other achievements, Winston Churchill wrote a six-volume, 1.9m-word account of the second world war and his role in winning it.
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