Straight to the point

Twee tea towels; tubby Toby jugs; cigar-puffing cosplayers. Churchill’s apotheosis surely ranks among the most odd developments in British cultural life. He has grown so larger-than-life that one in five teens thinks he’s a fictional character. And for some, moist-eyed invocations of the old Bulldog still serve as a kind of shorthand to signal a reassuringly old-school conservatism. The nostalgia understandably grates on the Left, whose ranks often think “good riddance”. What unites both sides, however, is the sense that Churchill’s England is truly dead. It certainly is, though perhaps not in such a straightforward way.

The fact is that Churchill, who would have turned 150 this week, was no curmudgeonly conservative. His Right-wing fanboys and Left-wing haters today would both no doubt prefer to live down his reputation as the “grandfather of the welfare state”. Indeed, along with Lloyd George, he was the architect of the Liberal programme — a slate of pension, healthcare, insurance, and wage reforms. He was also viewed as a “class warrior” by his Tory contemporaries. In his handling of the 1910 miners’ strike in the Rhondda, for instance, he came under fire in the press and in parliament for his leniency. In his lax Lib-Lab ways, he had kept the army at arm’s length, hoping for a peace between labour and capital. This is the wet Churchill whose life-size portrait greets you as you walk into the National Liberal Club.

Here, then, is one of the unexpected ways in which Churchill’s England is now dead. From austerity Osborne to scrounger-baiter Starmer, the welfare state has now become something of an embarrassment across the spectrum. Churchill, perversely, is too lefty for our unforgiving age.

This is not to suggest, of course, that Churchill was on the Left. He was, after all, the same chap who, on returning to the Tory party in 1924, returned the pound to the gold standard as chancellor of the exchequer — a move that betrayed “jejune and intellectually sterile” thinking, thought Keynes. Churchill at a stroke caused an unemployment crisis, the upshot of which was the General Strike. This he put down with the help of blacklegs drawn from the constabulary and British Fascisti. His politics, in short, were clear as mud. Even Lord Beaverbrook, a crony of Churchill’s, recognised this, maintaining that he had held every opinion on every subject over the course of his life.

It was precisely Churchill’s chameleonic character that enabled him to clamber upwards despite chronic blundering. Having the right background helped: he was born at Blenheim Palace, birched at Harrow, and schooled at Sandhurst. So, too, did the derring-do: he fought as a mercenary in Cuba and the Soudan, and escaped his captors after a jailbreak in Pretoria. Politically, he proved a poor fit in the Tory party, calling for defence spending cuts practically until the eve of the First World War. Then, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he abruptly reversed his position by defending his department’s budget. Churchill likewise wasn’t exactly married to party fidelity in the prewar period, crossing the floor to join the Liberals in 1904; as MP for Oldham, a cotton town, he was committed to free trade, and therefore could have no truck with imperial preference, the creed of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition. As it was, Churchill returned to the Tory party two decades later, closing ranks against Labour in 1924.

Churchill’s First World War record showed a man out of his depth. Disregarding the counsel of his generals by trying to “force the Dardanelles” and finish off the Ottomans, he ended up getting 50,000 of his men killed at Gallipoli. The Turkish victory was followed by Churchill’s demotion. After the war ensued another cack-handed operation was launched to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib”, as Churchill put it. Once again luck eluded him. The British soldiers dispatched to assist the Whites were sent packing. The Second World War saw him reprise his role as First Lord of the Admiralty. Disaster struck again with his botched handling of the Norwegian campaign. Still, strategic failure was one thing, personal advancement another. Chamberlain lost the premiership over the affair. So it was that when Lord Halifax, declined the top job, it fell to Churchill — some irony, given his mishandling had brought about his predecessor’s fall.

Churchill’s luck turned in his precarious prime ministership. Dunkirk proved to be a serendipitous success, if only thanks to the Wehrmacht. The blitzkrieg was halted 13 kilometres from the evacuation because the Germans had other fish to fry. Still, the final outcome of the war, decisively resolved by American money and Soviet manpower, nevertheless secured Churchill’s place in history. He was able to claim that he had been right all along about British strength, even if much of his understanding derived from questionable racist assumptions. Indeed, race was an all-consuming obsession for Churchill, which sets him apart from a great many of his contemporaries; generally speaking, Brits in the first half of the 20th century were more likely to think along class or developmental lines. Not Churchill, though. Small wonder he was struck dumb by the fall of Singapore: “How came 100,000 men (half of them of our own race) to hold up their hands to inferior numbers [35,000] of Japanese?” Elsewhere, he was blunter: “I hate people with slit eyes & pig-tails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them.”

Even Bolshevism was cast in ethnic terms: it was a “sinister confederacy” of “International Jews”. Ashkenazi Jews supplanting dark Palestinians in the Levant, on the other hand, was a positive development: “I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race has come in and taken their place.” As for black people, they were really not “as capable or as efficient as white people”, he said to a Kenyan settler in 1954. The following year, Eden noted in his diary as Caribbean migration picked up steam, “Churchill thinks ‘Keep England White’ is a good slogan.” Churchill, of course, wasn’t alone in expressing such views, though it must be said they weren’t exactly comme il faut even in his time. These days, moreover, ever-fewer Brits set store by racial thinking — we don’t really have a racial wage gap; nor are our cities as ethnically segregated as, say, American ones —  which is one of the reasons why Churchill has come in for a cool reassessment.

There was a time when he was seen as the arch-defender of democracy. We know better now. As it is, he was no antifascist to begin with. In 1935, he expressed his “admiration” for Hitler, applauding his “courage” and “perseverance”. Only after Munich did he drop the idea of cutting a deal with the Nazis, by which point Clement Attlee, too, had come out against appeasement.

Then again, the sore point was balance of power on the Continent, not fascism per se. On taking office in 1940, Churchill was not above trying to appeal to the better instincts of Franco and Mussolini. The latter he called “the greatest lawgiver among men”, endorsing his “triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism”. The former likewise was a bulwark against the red menace: “I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism.” In 1944, Churchill reacted violently to Allied plans to impose oil sanctions to foil Franco’s bid to reignite the civil war: “You begin with oil; you will quickly end in blood.” Worse, without Franco, the communists would “become master of Spain”.

Churchill also propped up the Greek monarch George II — discredited for supporting Ioannis Metaxas’s fascist dictatorship — who decamped to London once the Wehrmacht stormed Athens. Real resistance was left to the communist partisans of EAM and ELAS, which moved from strength to strength once Roosevelt ruled out Allied landings in August 1943. Aghast at the prospect of a red Greece, Churchill called for “bloodshed if necessary” to suppress EAM and ELAS. Accordingly, Nazi collaborators were brigaded into British-sponsored militias to massacre liberation fighters. Meanwhile, Greek soldiers in Egypt clamouring for the Resistance to be included in the government in exile were deported to African camps on Churchill’s orders.

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When the Germans abandoned Greece, thanks to the Red Army push into Bulgaria, Churchill had George Papandreou installed as a puppet ruler. With the help of the British military governor Ronald Scobie, Papandreou set about rehabilitating Nazi collaborators and disarming ELAS partisans at gunpoint. Protests ensued, and Churchill sent in some 75,000 troops to crush the Resistance. So it was that communism was stamped out of Greece by the White Terror unleashed by Churchill. It was one of his last achievements before he was kicked out of office, in part because of his lack of enthusiasm for the Beveridge Report and in part thanks to an 11-hour crass gaffe, likening Labour to the Gestapo, that repelled voters.

A desultory final term of little moment followed in 1951. Domestically, its biggest triumph was Harold Macmillan’s housebuilding programme. Internationally, it is remembered for the brutal violence inflicted on Kenyans and Malayans in a misguided attempt to cling to the British Empire, by then already seen as an anachronism by both parties. Churchill was one of its last cheerleaders. To this end, Agent Orange was deployed on the Malayans, many of whom were left with the kind of crippling deformities that would become commonplace in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the slaughter of the Kikuyu and the corralling of over 100,000 souls into detention camps without trial forced Churchill to recognise that the Kenyans were a proud people wronged by empire — not “savages” but “persons of considerable fibre and ability and steel… armed with ideas — much more difficult to deal with”. This was Churchill the liberal imperialist, the chap who once showed some consideration for the natives of Natal and Omdurman and condemned the Amritsar massacre.

Yet this was the same man who had deployed the paramilitary Black and Tans to dispatch Irish nationalists, and used chemical weapons against the Kurds: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… Gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would leave a lively terror.” In Bengal, three million had starved to death in 1943 as a result of wartime policies despite there being enough food supplies to go around. The anxious viceroy of India had demanded urgent wheat supplies, to no avail. Absurdly, London arm-twisted Delhi into exporting rice from famine-struck Bengal. Churchill’s own response had been to take a dig at “Indians breeding like rabbits”. As it was, Bengal went a long way in discrediting the colonial enterprise in the eyes of its already dwindling fan base of compradors. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” Churchill had declared in 1942. Yet in the years that followed, he played an outsized part in begetting the world that buried his own tout court.

Now, evidently, we no longer live in Churchill’s world. Decolonisation has been achieved, and with the Chagos handover, even overshot. Denigration of the darker races, too, has lost its edginess; a third of Brits will be mixed by the end of our century. Deference to the ruling class likewise has slipped into quaint oblivion; “posh” these days has departed from the lexicon of the aspirational classes to become an adjective of disparagement, often preceding a ruder four-letter word. This is no country for Churchillians anymore.

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