Winston Churchill is perhaps the ultimate British icon. But I suspect we French know in fact little about him. Reading a biography recently, I have learned many things, not all in favour of Sir Winston's grandeur.
1. Churchill did not belong to the ordinary gentry but to the highest and most glorious aristocracy. He was a descendant of John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722). Winston's uncle became the seventh Duke of Marlborough while Winston's father made a disappointing political career.
2. Churchill was used to live in luxury but his immense family fortune would not have sufficed had it not been for the huge revenues he got from his books. All his life, starting right after his colonial adventures, he was one of best selling writers of his time.
3. I discovered that Churchill had been a Liberal earlier in his career. A great aristocrat himself his natural move should have been to the Tories and indeed he was first elected to the Commons as a Tory MP in 1900. But only three years later he changed sides and joined the Liberals, which at the time was the other big party (Labour was much smaller). The move was probably half opportunist half dictated by his being in favour of Free Trade (whilst Tories had turned protectionist). From 1905 to 1922, Churchill was a member of the Liberal cabinets (Asquith and then Lloyd George) almost without interruptions. Then in 1922 he left the Liberals to join the Tories again – without being particularly welcome. As a result of his lack of loyalty and arrogance to his colleagues Churchill was one of the most hated men among his peers, from all sides.
4. Churchill had many not-so-admirable traits. He had a rude and cruel wit, he was ego-centric, arrogant, bad tempered. More surprisingly he was not in fact the cool, self-controlled of the Churchillian legend. Instead he was impulsive, anxious, alternatively over-excited and self-assured, and then depressed. The downs of his political careers drove him into periods of depression but, interestingly, he was never so happy and at ease as during war times.
5. Churchill was anything but a visionnary. He was not a man whose ideas and views were in advance on his time - which is one of criteria of greatness. He was a progressist Tory, attached to democratic values and ready to vote social laws but not because he was fond of the working class but to buy social peace. But on many moral, social, political issues he was considered traditional if not reactionary. He profoundly despised women and female vote, he shared the conventional racism of the time. He would never listen to any plans of self-determination for the peoples of the British Empire. He actually became a rebel inside the Tories in the 30s because they had opened the door to self-determination of India in 1929.
6. As a young man, Churchill was ruthless and ambitious to the extreme. As a young officer, he managed to take part in every colonial war between 1995 and 1999: not only the well-known South-Africa (Boer war), but also in India, and Sudan. Very much a Victorian character in his love for action and danger, whatever the cause, like the ambiguous heroes Conrad and Kipling. Maybe because there were enough British wars to fight for him, he even became a mercenary when he enlisted the Spanish army to fight a Cubans rebellion in 1898. In all those occasions he proved truly heroic. Witnesses acknowledge his physical courage. In passing, even long after he never expressed any reservations about those nasty wars that were bloody, merciless and disproportionate - machine guns facing tribes with swords. What is even less admirable is that this bravery came not only from sheer patriotism; he had a clear agenda to become a hero and then quit the army to monetize his fame as a writer and leverage it as a politician. Before each of his campaigns he had secured a column with British newspapers and each war led to a best-selling book. It worked beautifully. Before he entered the political career in 1900, Churchill was already a popular hero in Britain. The fact that Churchill was privately admitting this agenda with a smile and a joke would make it more amiable to some; but one can also consider that confessing the plan made it even more cynical and arrogant. His mere name would have guaranteed him a Tory career anyway. So one can assume that unconsciously he wanted to owe nothing to his family, or he wanted to wash the stain of his father’s failure (however this Conradian pattern was not at all mentioned in the biography I read).
7. Churchill was not at all the infaillible strategy genius some believe he was. I knew he was involved in the Gallipoli disaster in Turkey in 1915 when around 115000 British soldiers died uselessly. But I discovered he was utterly the number one responsible: as First Lord of the Admiralty (minister for the Navy) he had personally convinced the cabinet to lead this operation that – all historians agree – was badly thought, badly prepared, badly executed. After the disaster he had to resign and it looked as if his political career was over. But I did not know at all is that he made another huge strategic mistake in 1939-1940. As First Lord of the Admiralty of the Chamberlain cabinet, he was the main responsible for of the operations of Narvik which failed so miserably. Ironically, the Prime Minister took most the blame of the Norwegian failure and it was one of the reasons that caused the cabinet reshuffle in May 1940…. And led to the first Churchill cabinet.
8. Not a great general, Churchill also made several important blunders in non-military functions too. When Lord of the Exchequers in 1928 he restored the Gold Exchange Standard, which is retrospectively considered a deep mistake by most economists. Keynes immediately denounced the move in his paper ‘The consequences of Mr Churchill’ . Worse than that, Churchill was not genuingly interested by civilian affairs, the economy, the society. Unlike FD Roosevelt whose curiosity embraced all aspects off public life from Navy to agriculture, Churchill was not a statesman for peace times.
Let us summarise: an incompetent general, not a visionnary but a reactionnary victorian, a political opportunist. So where was exactly Churchill’s greatness? Where did he really excelled?
9. Well Churchill was simply the right man at the right place at the right time. Had it not been for 1940, Churchill would be remained in history as a highly-coloured figure of the early XXth century, a gifted speaker and political survivor, who occupied several important functions, with varied success, failed to achieve his lifelong ambition which was the top job, and finally retired from political life to end his life to write bitter memoires and paint modest landscapes. A politician who made a brilliant carrer but simply failed to make an enduring impact in history. Churchill was this sort of leaders, like De Gaulle. By contrast, two great warlords of 1940, Roosevelt and Stalin, would have stayed in world history with or without the great war.
10. Churchill was above all, the warrior and warlord that Europe needed in 1940. An action man and a charismatic leader in times of crisis. In May 1940 he was the most hardcore bellicist of all British politicians. The resilience of the British people was not so spontaneous as some believe. Had it been for Churchill's famous speeches, which galvanised the public gathering around radios in pubs*, the British people demoralised by the German bombs could have listened to arguments in favour of capitulation or a separated peace with Germany. Of Britain's darkest hour, he made his 'finest hour'.
*The most famous and historic speeches are blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech and the immortal line, "We shall defend our island (...) we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, ...; we shall never surrender."
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