TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About Winston Churchill - Andrew Roberts

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

Andrew Roberts is an English historian, journalist and member of the House of Lords. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society. He is a New York Times bestselling author, having written dozens of books including biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte (2014) and Winston Churchill (2018) - available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0241205638/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com Sponsors: Get 15% off using the code TRIGGER when you buy a GALAXY PROJECTOR 2.0 at https://galaxylamps.co/trigger Try Factor today and get 50% off by using code: TRIGGER50 at https://factormeals.com Go to https://givesendgo.com and raise money for anything important to you. Check out Barro’s campaign here: https://www.givesendgo.com/barro Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He was involved in three car crashes, two plane crashes. He went into no man's land in the First World War some 30 times. He got so close to the German trenches, he could actually hear them speaking in their trenches. He once said that there's nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot at without result. The Conservatives tried to deselect him, and every single thing that he said turned out to be right

and everything that they said turned out to be wrong. Robert Roberts, it's such a delight to have you on the show. You are, of course, the author of many, many books, but the one we really want to talk to you about is one that in internet terms has gone viral and selling, continues to sell thousands, tens of thousands of copies every year, is Churchill walking with destiny. And we wanted to spend some time, a long time actually talking to you about here in Westminster where we're sitting, about a man who shaped the destiny of this country, the history of this country, about whom actually people of my generation, we've got a couple of young, guys here, having been educated in this country, we know very little about. Very little about. Well, that's partly because he's not taught in the schools any longer. He used to be, but now he isn't. You can get through your entire history syllabus and only learn about Winston Churchill for 14 seconds on a video. Yes. Well, we are going to counteract that by spending some time doing it. So I suppose the best place to start would be right at the beginning. We really want to spend some time with you talking about Churchill's life from the beginning to the end. I went to Chartwell,

which is the house, is a house. Yes, it's a beautiful manor house in Kent, which he bought when he was about 60 and lived in for the rest of his life. Yes. And when you go there, you suddenly realize uneducated as I am. I mean, this guy, he lived about seven lives worth of lives in like one section of his life. We'll get to all of that later. But from the beginning, Where was he born? How did he grow up? What was the kind of beginnings of Churchill? Well, he was born in a much grander place even than Chartwell. He was born in Blenheim Palace, which is the grandest of all the ducal palaces, the Spencer Churchill's magnificent palace in Oxfordshire. And he was born there because his grandfather was the Duke of Morbara.

And his father was a very successful politician, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Randolph Churchill. And his mother was an American heiress called Gen. Jerome and so yes he grew up as an upper-class Victorian essentially. Not exactly humble beginnings. But then he actually having been educated and I'm understanding is he wasn't particularly successful student, is that right? Well actually he made out that he was less successful student than he was. In fact he was pretty good at he came in the top third of all his classes. He came top of history and English quite a lot in his in his classes. So when you read his school reports, they're an awful lot better than he made himself out to be.

But he certainly wasn't a A-class student. He wasn't going to go to Oxford or Cambridge, for example. And why did he do that? Why did he paint himself as intellectually mediocre? Surely that's not the smartest play, particularly if you want to lead a country? Well, exactly. He was a very unusual person, frankly. His autobiography, and this is where he made himself out to be a bit thicker than he genuinely was,

is the most beautifully written book. It's called My Early Life. It was published in 1930. I do recommend anybody read it. But you have to work out the bits where he's playing with the reader, as opposed to just giving them the sort of word-for-word accuracy about his life. So he was good at school, but not great. And where did he go from there?

Because in my understanding, he tried to go to, I think it's Sandhurst several times. It was a third attempt, wasn't it, that he got into Sandhurst? That's right. And he got in for the cavalry rather than the infantry. The cool kids went for the infantry. The ones who weren't so successful went for the cavalry. His father was angry with him about that because it was much more expensive to put a boy through as a cavalry officer.

Of course, you had to bite the horse apart from him. And he had to buy the horse. this belief in himself, though, that drove him all the way through his life, this sense of, driving sense of personal destiny. His father wasn't kind to him. He never seems to have appreciated that there was anything special about young Winston. His mother loved him, but saw virtually nothing of him in the way that Edwardian parents sometimes did, especially the aristocratic ones.

She was having affairs with the Prince of Wales and the Austrian-Aprosy and the Austrian-Aprosy and ambassador and so on, and saw very little of him and his younger brother Jack. But nonetheless, he did do well at Sandhurst because he loves everything, absolutely everything to do with soldiering. And you talk about his parents effectively, either not being present or not being kind to him. Did he have formative personalities in his life, people who guided him when he was younger, inspired him, drove him, challenged him?

Very much, he did, yes. The first of which actually was women called Elizabeth. Everest who was his nanny and she he loved and worshipped her and and she was kind to him and showed him the love and infection that he wasn't frankly getting from his parents and then there was a man who was a great orator an American politician called Burke Cochran who was one of his mother's lovers who also became sort of father figure to him after his own father, Lord Randolph died in 1895 when his father was 45 and Winston was 20. And the other thing I wanted to pick up sort of going away from the story of his life for just

one second, you mentioned that he was a Victorian. And there'll be a lot of young people who don't really know what that means exactly because this was a society of people who different values and different viewpoints and different approaches to many things to what we have today. What does it mean for someone to be a Victorian? Well, to be an aristocratic Victorian in the period that he was growing up, which was essentially the 1880s and the 1890s, meant that you were a believer in the empire.

He was born in 1874, and he believed that the British Empire was a good thing for civilization and the world in a way that obviously is not taught in any way today. To put it very mildly there. To put it very mildly. And this had the very positive aspects of essentially, thought he was recreating a combination of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, where Britain was going to be able to teach the native peoples of the empire development in many, many areas

of human development. And it had the negative side also, of course, of a belief that you were the very top, the apex of the sort of human condition, that you were racially superior to everybody else because you were white, and you were also racially superior to every other white because you were British. And this meant that there was a sense, you get it very much, of course, from Darwinism. Charles Darwin was still alive whilst Churchill was a boy, that there was a sort of a pinnacle. And that key, being upper class and British and white, was at the absolute top of the pinnacle. Now, what this meant was that he had deep responsibilities to everybody else.

This is something that's often misunderstood or ignored, that because he was, he was, this at the top of the pinnacle essentially. It was his duty to spend the rest of his life doing good things for everybody else. Privilege had a deep sense of responsibility attached to it, which sometimes we forget about that aspect of Victorian chivalry. And would that, coming back to the story now, by the way, we should say for our American and other view, Sandhurst is of course the Military Academy. It's their West Point. Just better.

You're going to get a little haymail now from a very angry Americans who have guns. Yeah. But so he goes to Hans Sandhurst, and is that part of why he wants to go into a military career because it is a career of service to your country? Yes, very much. The ethos of Sandhurst, like West Point in fact, is this concept of giving back to society because of the privileges that you yourself have enjoyed in life.

and he did have huge privileges, as I mentioned earlier, about his family. However, actually, both his parents were terrible spendthrift. They spent his inheritance, certainly his mother did after his father died. He had to work very hard. He wound up becoming the best paid war correspondent in the world when he fought in the Boa War in South Africa. So it wasn't as though he actually was rich. He never was, actually.

He was pretty much broke all his life until he wrote the war memoirs of the Second World War when he was in his early 70s. Wow. So money was always an issue for him. And you wouldn't think that by just a superficial glance at the man himself. No, but that's because he always bought the best of everything. And the reason was that he was always in debt and he could afford things because he was constantly getting into debt. There were two points in the 1930s where he nearly had to say, that beautiful house chart will that you visited because he was always broke.

And this is a good thing as far as historians like Mia are concerned, because what it meant was that he had to write 37 books and write over 800 articles. And the way, of course, that's the best way to get into the mind of a man like Churchill is to read what he wrote. And as a result, we have an awful lot of it. Many millions of words. He wrote more than Shakespeare and Dickens put together. Wow.

And what's his career in the most? military successful? It was after a fashion, but the trouble was, of course, he did need to make money and be a war correspondence. So the soldiers always thought of him as a journalist, and the journalists always thought of him as a soldier. And that meant he could never really get to the top in the British army. The highest he got was to be a colonel in the First World War. But he fought on five campaigns on four continents. I mean, it's an amazing. amazing military career.

He took part in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire at the Battle of Onderman where he charged with the 21st Lancers. He went into no man's land in the First World War some 30 times and doing trench raids and so on. So he showed tremendous courage. And there people talk about his courage

and they talk about his, particularly when it comes to his military career, obviously afterwards. How did that shape? the way he viewed war and conflict? Well, he hated war. He was not a warmonger. He was accused all his life of being a warmonger,

but because he'd come up close and personal to death, seen so many of his friends killed from the age of 21 onwards. He had seen his close friends die in war. He never was a warmonger. He believed in deterring war by military strength. And so that was his immediate feeling about war. However, once war had started, he believed in winning it, and he was

absolutely fascinated by every aspect of war. He would go out of his way to use scientific knowledge to try to ensure that Britain was at the absolute forefront, the cutting edge of all the new war technologies. Of course, in a sense, he's the godfather of the tank, which completely altered the whole nature of war and still has. And Andrew, just flesh out the military career for us first. So he goes to Sandhurst. Goes to Sandhurst. And then what happens from there?

And then he gets sent off to India, fights in the northwest frontier of India, where he fights against the various clans and tribes, such as the Taliban, the Afridi tribes, that were attacking the... Punjabi farmers. So he defended the Punjabis up in the northwest frontier. Then he went off to Cuba and fought on the side of the Spanish in Cuba, really more watching than fighting, but nonetheless, on his 21st birthday, he heard bullets fired. He was tremendously lucky that he was never hit.

He once said that there's nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot at, without result. And he was shot out without result a great deal. He then fought in the Sudanese campaign, sorry, he went back to Northwest Frontier. Then the Sudanese campaign, what's called the River War in 1898, when he took part in this great cavalry charge.

And then he fought in the Boer War in 1890 and 1900. And then he got elected to Parliament. So he had fought in all of those wars prior to, of course, later on fighting in the First World War. And the Boer War in particular, I think, is a moment when his courage really comes through because there is this incredible story about him having to work his way through without any I don't want to miss tell the story. He essentially escapes from prison.

He gets captured after taking part in the defense of a train which has been ambushed by the Boers, the Afrikaans, white South Africans. and he gets put in a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria and then escapes and makes his way 300 miles through enemy territory. At one point he has to sleep down in a mine and the candle gutters out that he was given and he could feel the rats scurrying over his face down in the depths of this mine. And he manages, at another point he's actually followed by a vulture,

and nonetheless he manages to escape to freedom in Mozambique. So this is the thing really that A. tells him that he's got something special. He always thought he had anyhow, but this actually does give him the sense that he's special. And also, of course, it makes him a hero of the British Empire because he has escaped and he did it in the same week as a series of disastrous defeats for the British Empire.

It's called Black Week because there are three serious military defeats in one week. And the only really good news at that time was Winston Churchill successfully escaping from prison. Wow. Wow. So he almost became a celebrity of his time then, really. Not almost. He was. He was the first great modern celebrity, war celebrity, as it were. Oh, wow. So did that then help with his transition into becoming a politician? Precisely that, yes. He'd already seen. stood for Parliament once for Oldham in Lancashire and could fail to get elected. But now, when he

came back after this extraordinary prison escape, his celebrity status did help him get elected with a decent majority. So he was a politician and then he decided to enlist during the First World War? During the War. During the War, yes. Absolutely. But he'd already fought in the World War. So he came back in order to stand and had already stood for Parliament before he went out to the Boer War and had lost. And then he went back having fought in the Boer War and won. And then I guess what Francis is getting at is what happens when World War I breaks out? He's, I'm assuming, an MP at this point?

Well, this is 15 years later, of course. So, yes, he's actually the first lord of the admiralty. So by this stage, he, in 1915, he'd become first Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. By the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he was still First Lord of the Admiralty, and he managed to get the whole of the British Expeditionary Force over 100,000 men across to France without losing a single man from German U-boats or any other disaster. So he was very successful in that. He had the British Navy ready for the First World War

and then the catastrophe of the Dardanelles struck. And this was largely his fault. He was the person who believed that if you could get the British Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean from the Eastern Mediterranean up through the Dardanelles Straits and anchor it off Constantinople, modern-day anchor up. That's sorry, what I would say, Istanbul. You would be able, through the threat of shelling,

to take the Turkish Empire out of the First World War. And if that had happened, it would have been one of the greatest strategic victories of modern warfare. But it didn't. And on the 18th of March, 1915, the Anglo-French flotilla lost no fewer than six ships, either destroyed or sunk. So we had to pull. back and then they attacked five weeks later on the 25th of April 1915 and got horribly stuck on the on the Gallipoli Peninsula which is on the western side of the straits and in the end no fewer

than 147,000 men were killed or wounded in that campaign and it completely wrecked Churchill's career because it had been his idea and he that decided that he was going to leave the government and fight in the trenches. He didn't need to. He was 40 years old. We weren't calling up married 40-year-olds at that stage, but he did because he wanted a form with redemption, and that's why he went to join the... That's absolutely incredible. Can you imagine any politician doing that today? God. No, is it the blunt way of putting it. But also as well, in many ways, that was facing certain death, because many men who went to fight in World War I didn't come back. Officers in some stretches of the same front that he was fighting on had a six-week long survival rate. Their

longevity for fighting the trenches was six weeks. So when he went to fight, how long did that career last being? He was there for a year. He was fortunate. It was one of the quieter sides of the front. However, as I mentioned, he went on 30 trench raids. And he got so close to the German trenches, you could actually hear them speaking in their trenches. So you can imagine how dangerous that was. There was one occasion when a German whizbang, high explosive shell, came and hit his dugout and decapitated everyone inside it, but he had left five minutes earlier. So, and he said on that occasion that he felt as if he could hear invisible wings beating over him, a real sense that he was being kept for something important.

you know, in life. And he had that sense about him. This is why I called my book, Walking with Destiny, because although he, of course, himself said that he felt as if he were walking with destiny and that all his part of life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial, all the way through his life,

he thought he was walking with destiny. It wasn't just in May 1940 when Hitler invaded Europe. He was born two months prematurely, which in Victorian England could be a death sentence. He nearly died of pneumonia when he was 11. He was involved in three car crashes, two plane crashes, nearly drowned in late Geneva, very nearly died in a house fire. It's incredible how close he came to death on so many occasions.

And the event, including, of course, that time when he left the dugout and it got hit. And the result was that he felt that he was being specially kept back for a great occasion. That's so interesting. And one of the things I was going to ask you, we've got past it now, but I can't imagine being somebody in charge of tens of thousands of men ships your country's war effort and making a cock-up that costs men lives that causes your country to. to suffer a defeat in a major war in public, and then you're so gutted by that experience, you go into the trenches to fight. I imagine that's a bit of a setback

in terms of your self-image. I imagine that's really difficult to preserve that sense of destiny in that moment. He must have been distraught. He was distraught. His wife said it was the only time that he ever seriously considered committing suicide. He took up painting, which helped, in fact,

helped him. emotionally and psychologically. But yes, I mean, people would still, even in the 1930s, so 15 plus years later, would still shout, what about the Dardanelles at him when he was making speeches in public addresses. And in one, in fact, funny enough, he stood for Westminster just here, this constituency, and people would shout at him, you know, what about the Dardanelles? And so you do have a real sense that he was, that he understood this setback. But one of the great things about Winston Churchill was that he learnt from his mistakes.

And never in the Second World War, when he was Prime Minister in the Second World War, never once did he overrule the Chiefs of Staff in the way that he had done in the First World War in order to pursue the Dardanelles expedition. So he actually learned from that mistake. and it was a very important lesson to learn, of course. Oh, sorry, go for it. I was going to say he talked frequently. He gave it a term, which his depression was the Black Dog.

Was that, do you think that stemmed from the experience with the Dardanelles and Constantinople? The only time he ever used that phrase Black Dog, he only used it once, was in a letter to his wife in July 1911 when he was talking about a particular moment of depression. He was not a black dog depressive, as in it didn't suddenly strike him for no reason. He got depressed for the same reason that anybody would get depressed under those circumstances. The classic examples being the fall of Tobruk in June 1942, the fall of Singapore in February 1942. These are moments when anyone would have got depressed. He wasn't somebody who had a sort of chemical imbalance.

And as we know with actual manic depression, which black dog is, a terrible. terrible disease, that you can't chair over 900 meetings of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet at all times of day or night if you are suffering from that kind of depression. So it's a misunderstanding to think that he was a manic depressive. He wasn't. He got sad when sad things happened. Yeah, precisely. Yeah, exactly.

Which happened a lot in his life, of course, because his whole life was a total rollercoaster and down the entire time. Well, right. And so he fights in World War I. And World War I, many people have argued, Peter Hitchens, who's been on our show, you wrote a whole book about it, was really the moment when the British Empire

starts to feel like it's on the downslope. Was he aware of this at the time? Did he feel this? Did he say anything about it? He was acutely aware of it. Absolutely, he was. And of course, it was in his great 1942 speech that was made at the Guildhall when he said, I did not become the King's First Minister

in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. He was very, very aware that Britain was becoming weaker. This was obviously clear with regard to the Quit India campaign of the Congress Party in India. He was very much stood up against Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s. He saw the way in which the United States was becoming, richer and more powerful and was likely one day to take the place of the British Empire and he didn't like it. He preferred the Americans to take over from anyone else. I mean, the Germans

or any fascist power, but nonetheless, he didn't like the idea of Britain's place in the sun being taken by anybody else. This was a natural reaction, of course, of a British imperialist of his age and class and background. Well, quite. And so, He fights in World War I, and what happens then? Is he, by the way, is he, from a public perception, you mentioned people continue to heckle him about the dials, etc., but does his decision to go and fight, rehabilitate him in the public consciousness in any way?

In a sense, it does, and he does come back to become Minister of Munitions for the rest of the last part of the First World War. And there, he does a fantastic job. And you look at the graphs of output of shells necessary, and all the various other munitions necessary to win that war. And they go straight, you know, off the charts. He worked so hard. And that's appreciated too.

Then he became Minister of War and was in charge of demobilization of the army. He did a very good job there as well. But he also put his reputation, he essentially damaged his reputation again because he was tremendously in favour of strangling in his words. and he had the most extraordinary mastery of the English language, as you can imagine, strangling Bolshevism in its cradle. He wanted to send the British Army, or at least a proportion of the British Army,

to help the white Russians try to destroy Bolshevism. And he's been criticised an awful lot for that. He's been attacked. There's just a book last week that was published saying how terrible all this was. But frankly, I think it was a brave thing to do. if you had managed to strangle Bolshevism and you hadn't had Soviet communism, about 100 million people

would be, their lives would have been saved who were murdered by communism of various types in the 20th century. So actually, I think it was a very far-sighted thing to have done, but at the time, it was another thing that he was accused of having, of having, you know, been disastrously wrong about.

When we look at his political career, if he had a very interesting political career, because there were many times he was actually criticized by both the conservatives and labor. And the liberals as well, of course, yeah. Well, I mean, he changed sides twice as well. He started off as a conservative like his father had been. And then in 1984, over free trade, he became a liberal. And then in 1924, again over free trade, he went back to the conservatives.

You know, he kept his belief, but the parties changed theirs. and he stuck to his beliefs. But it looked very much as though he was just jumping ship because each time he jumped ship just before that party killed into government. And so he was thought of very often as being just an opportunist. And he did make mistakes. That's the other thing.

He wrote to his wife when he was in the trenches. He said, I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes. He got loads of things wrong. We've already got the Russian Civil War, the Gallipoli campaign. just the biggest of them. But he was opposed to female suffrage at the beginning. He was opposed to...

He wanted to bring Britain into the gold standard at the wrong time, at the wrong level, as it turned out. He was in favour of the black and tans trying to put down the Irish uprisings of the early 1920s as well, which horribly boomeranged on the British. And so all in all, he did make mistakes. But as I mentioned earlier,

From each of those that I've mentioned, he learned his lesson. So from 1918, he returns after the First World War. What happens then? From being Minister of Munitions to the point that the First World War ended, he then became Minister of War and Air as well, and he was the father of the RAF. So actually, the Royal Air Force was very much his idea. And then after that, in 1924, he became the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

And he was not much of an economist, frankly, but nonetheless, he presided over the most difficult period because it coincided with the outbreak of the general strike in 1926. And he wanted to be as generous as possible to the mine workers who led that strike. But nonetheless, it was a terribly difficult period. By 1930, he was out of office. The Conservatives had lost the subsequent general election, and he fell out with the front bench, with the Conservative leadership, over independence for India, and resigned from the front bench.

And so let's go into that, because obviously that is, you know, that's a huge part of the story here. Where did he lie when it came to this particular issue? He very much thought that the British, should not move towards what's called dominion status, which is essentially self-government for India. He thought that India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, that if you gave the majority Hindu population of India, essentially the power over all Indians, then it would be disastrous for the Indian princes, which ruled about a third of India at the time, also very bad

for the Muslim minority in India and also bad for the untouchables, who he feared would be kept down even more than they were by Indian society at the time. And so he opposed it and did everything he could to stop Indian self-government but failed. And the Indian South Government Act of 1935 passed against his opposition. And were his fears actually really, and obviously it was inevitable that India was going to self-govern. But were his fears actually correct as to what would happen? Well, if you look at Mr. Modi's way of ruling India at the moment, and especially where the princes, where the Muslims

and where the untouchables are in Indian society, actually Churchill might have had a bit of a point, frankly. And Andrew, it strikes me that this isn't strictly a Churchill question, but I think it's important to flesh this out for all of us, including myself, to understand. Francis said something which may be a question, something which may or may not be true, but Indians and self-governance was inevitable. Which begs the question really, why was the British Empire at this point starting to essentially

decline and all of these conversations about self-governance here, independence there? Why were they taken off? The major problem for the British Empire after the First World War was a financial one. It was broke. It had spent an enormous amount of money fighting that. and compared to countries like America, it had no resources. It had sold off a lot of its assets during the war to continue fighting the war. It was also morally demoralised because of the loss of an entire generation of essentially

young men who'd been killed, three quarters of a million of them, in the war. It got bigger actually physically up until 1921, but it was. It was hollowed out, essentially. And then when the threats to India started, it seemed very much that the whole organisation essentially was being run by, by, you know, more of wilderness of mirrors, really, than an empire of the kind that had been there 20 years previously. Was there also a rising cynicism from the working classes to the upper classes

because of the debacle of the First World War, lines led by donkeys, etc. There was a very strong, yes, that was an important aspect, was that although the actual officers in the trenches themselves had been incredibly brave, and the working classes admired their officers of their own units, who died in greater proportion than the working classes did in that war, also the high officers, the generals, who had come up with the grand strategy, were, not respected because of the disastrous grand strategy that was adopted. Now, there are a lot of historians, and to an extent I'm amongst them, that tries to look at any other kind of grand strategy that could have won that war, frankly. But nonetheless, yes, there was a sense that the officer class had let the working classes down. But not the officer class in the trenches, but the ones back in the chateau.

So the empire is morally weakened, financially bankrupt, not bankrupt, but... And also, it's one other aspect of it, which I didn't mention, also strategically outmaneuvered, because you have Japan in the Far East, Italy, in the Mediterranean and Germany, all coming up in the 1930s, and all, of course, joining with each other in the anti-comiturn pact of 1937, and that posing three separate threats to the British Empire in three separate geographical areas. So it's a very difficult position. Churchill is in the Conservative Gumberry. He resigns over India.

This is 1931, did you say? 1930. 1930. And this is just about Hitler and his Nazi party are about to take over in Germany. So how does the next few years play out in the early 30s? Well, the whole of the 1930s can be seen really as one decade. of what he called the trawling tides of drift and surrender when the locusts et.

He was opposed to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He made the most magnificent speeches warning about exactly what was going to happen. He tried to stop it from happening and no one listened to him. He was ridiculed. He was shouted down in the House of Commons. He was attacked in the press.

They tried to take away his. seat, the Conservatives tried to deselect him for his parliamentary seat. On the basis he was warmongering? On the basis that he was warmongering, exactly. And every single thing that he said turned out to be right and everything that they said turned out to be wrong. And you see that long time from the accession of Adolf Hitler to becoming the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Then through obviously the anti-Semitic laws that he passes, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss of 1938, the Munich crisis, of course, over the Sudetenland in 1938,

and then the horrors of marching into Prague in the March of 1939. And by the end of 1939, after a whole decade of Churchill saying, this is what is going to happen, Finally, when he was proved right, on the 15th of March 1939, and everybody else was proved wrong, finally the British people did actually start listening to Winston Churchill. Andrew, I wanted to ask a question, which is, how many of those people were just incorrect and read the situation wrong, which we can all do? And how many of them were Nazi sympathisers? Not many Nazi sympathizers, frankly.

There were some, of course, the British Union and the fascists. was a party, but it was never an electoral force. It never got anybody elected to Parliament, you know, under its own steam. But a lot of people were good-natured, people who hoped for the best. They'd fought in the First World War and didn't want to see another war. Couldn't believe that the Germans would ever start another war. They were people who couldn't believe that Hitler could be so evil as to want another war. A lot of them were Christians who believed that the phrase appeasement was actually a positive thing.

There were people who thought that business was much more important and the Germans would never go to war and destroy the capitalist economy and so on. It was extraordinary, really. There were number of people who were willing to, just assume that the government was right and that Winston Churchill was an insane warmonger. Andrew, you alluded to it earlier, and I'm being someone who was born in the Soviet Union, I'm likely to bring this up naturally. But you mentioned Churchill's prescience about fascism and the threat of Nazism in Germany.

And you also earlier talked about his presence when it comes to the other terrible ideology that came out of the early 20th century. during the 30s, the true horror of the communist regime in Soviet Russia is starting to become difficult to ignore, let's put it like this. And Churchill is one of the people who is openly speaking about this at the time, is he not? Yeah. And again, there are quite a lot of people here in England and in the West more broadly who would quite like to ignore that. That's right, exactly. No, no. He was the leading voice of anti-communism in British politics in the 1930s.

Some of his greatest speeches were given about the horrors of what had been unleashed by Lenin and Trotsky, and he personally attacked Stalin and so on. And he was a great anti-communist. And of course, this continued all the way up until he recognised that the greater threat, the more immediate threat at least, was... from the more dangerous threat was from Hitler. And at that point, he was in favor of having an alliance with the Russians. But the trouble is that Poland was in between Russia and Germany. And so the only way in which the Russians could be brought to bear in an anti-Nazi envelopment,

essentially, was if the Poles agreed to it, which of course they would not do. They'd fought against the Russians in 1920 and 21. And they didn't want Russian troops. on their soil and understandably so when one sees the rest of European history. So it was an incredibly difficult situation at the time. But Churchill did foresee the Nazi Soviet pact of August 1939. And of course, when Hitler did invade Russia, Churchill was the first person to say we must immediately ally with Russia, even though he knew that Stalin had done the most appalling crimes, including, of course, killing the Polish officer corps at Kattin in 1940.

So he was very much a pragmatist? He had to be. In wartime, realpolitik, if you're to survive, is the only way to go forward. But to give him his due, of course, after the Second World War, he was also the first person to have the guts to actually say that what Stalin was doing in Eastern Europe was a threat to democracy there. And he was in his great Iron Curtain speech in four. Malton, Missouri on the 5th of March, 1946, the first person to actually warn against Stalin.

And let's just touch on Neville Chamberlain, because he's painted now as this, you know, weak, myopic, slightly pathetic figure. Is that unfair? Very unfair, yeah. He was a very tough and in his day, incredibly popular politician. He probably would have won a landslide victory at any time had he called a general election in 1939. or late 1938. He, as a domestic politician, had been a really tough minister in the government.

He'd been a senior minister for 20 years. He was the son of Joseph Chamberlain, one of the great Victorian politicians. So, yes, no, it's wrong to think of him as some kind of weak, vacillating character. It might have been better if he had been, by the way, because he might have been able to have been pushed off the policy of appeasement,

which he clung onto even after it became, that it wasn't working. When he came back from Munich and waved the piece of paper in the air, he truly believed that he had, personally, through his own diplomacy, managed to save peace for his time and told the cabinet as much. You know, he was a very vain man in that sense. And delusional as well? Well, ultimately, yes, because by the time of the the move into Prague in March 1939, he still had to be forced into giving the guarantee to Poland, which they gave on the 1st of April 1939, which of course was the trigger that started the Second World War.

So, Andrew, if he wasn't motivated by weakness, what was it the basis of the policy of appeasement? Well, first of all, it was the sense that we couldn't fight Italy, Japan and Germany all at the same time without. any allies. The Americans were in full on isolationist mode. The America First Movement was tremendously powerful at that time. Sounds familiar. The Russians at the time, of course, from the August of 1939 onwards, were allied to the Germans. The French didn't want to go to war at all. And so we saw the strategic danger of actually going to war against three. big powers right the way around the world from the far east to the channel, essentially with no allies.

And so that was one of the major reasons behind appeasement. The other one, and this we have to give Neville Chamberlain is due, was that major advances were being made in terms of radar and the latest types of hurricane and spitfire. And we needed to make as many as we possibly could before war broke out. And that period, the year between Munich and the outbreak of war, between the September of 1938 and the September of 1939, we did build enough hurricanes and spitfires to win the Battle of Britain in 1940. Now, we didn't know that that was going to happen, of course.

It was pure luck, frankly, but it was very much a plan to try to create as much as we could in terms of armaments. And it's worth pointing out, of course, that the Germans created much more in that year than we did. But nonetheless, that was an important aspect of it as well. So I have to say, I suddenly find myself rather persuaded by the argument for appeasement, particularly on the first point. If you've got a, yes, the British Empire, but as we've discussed, bankrupt and morally quite weakened, no allies. Well, no, the thing was that, of course, they should have got allies.

They should have done much more. the Chamberlain government was totally uninterested in trying to persuade the Americans. It was totally uninteresting in trying to get the Russians on board. Now, that would have been difficult because the Russians wanted the Baltic states. And we were in no position as a democracy to hand over the Baltic states in the way that Hitler obviously could do. But we should have been rearming so much earlier in the 1930s, getting all the latest cutting edge weaponry. and also obviously making much more of a forward movement in Europe itself. We didn't send any troops to the European continent until after the war were broken out.

Yes, I guess where I was going with my question is I can see why maybe some of Churchill's arguments were falling on deaf ears because the argument that we have no allies, we're one, yes, empire, but we've got all these changes. challenges we're going to have to fight off. It's much wiser to avoid a fight at any cost almost. It must have been quite difficult for Churchill to try and make inroads against that. It certainly was. And the key moment, of course, comes in Munich. Because had the Czechs fought in 1938 and the French and British invaded or attacked, at least, in the West, Firstly, there's a chance that Hitler might have fallen anyway. Some generals said they were going to overthrow him. Secondly, there's no certainly that he would have been able to have won that war, a 1938 war.

By 1939 and certainly by 1940, he had the entirety of the German Reich up to mobilisation point and, of course, was able to steamroller Poland and then in the May 1940 crush the British and French in the West. Andrew, I got told this and made this is completely wrong, but Hitler also had quite a favourable impression of the British. He quite liked us. He ideologically... I wouldn't brag about that, right? No, it's important.

There's a very important aspect of this. No, he didn't like us because he was jealous of our empire. But he was impressed by our empire and the way in which very, very small numbers of British troops managed to essentially run the Indian Empire. There was only a few thousand, tens of thousands, in an empire of 300 million people in India. So it was, in that sense, he was impressed.

He was also impressed by the sheer scale and size of the empire, which he would be because it was the largest empire the world had ever seen. But he didn't like the British, no. In fact, when he went on Rants, he would rant against, well, certainly Winston Churchill, as you can imagine, but also the British as a people. And so Neville Chamberlainer's pursued this policy of appeasement. It's becoming quite obvious to everybody that this isn't going to work. How does his political career end,

considering he's this tough, uncompromising character? Neville Chamberlain's career ended in a debate called the Norway debate over the defeat that the British and French had suffered in Norway. And it was held on the 7th and 8th of May 1940. And because so few conservatives and supporters, natural supporters of the government, actually turned up to vote for Chamberlain, even though he did win a 81-seat majority, usually the majority was much bigger than that. And so he was forced to resign on the morning of the 10th of May 1940. And Churchill became the prime minister on the 10th of May 1940.

He was called by King George VI to go to Buckingham Palace in the evening. And that was the same day that Adolf Hitler, purely by coincidence, invaded the low countries and Holland and Belgium, ultimately, obviously also to invade France. And he wasn't a young man, by the way, when he became leader of this country. Was he at that point? He was 65, which is the retirement age. And he said of that day, of that evening, that he felt as if he were walking with destiny and that all that his past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. And in a sense it was, you know, all of the things he'd done in the First World War,

all of the amazing jobs that he'd held up till that point. he held all but one of the great offices of state. His whole career up until that point had in a way been a preparation. And the extraordinary thing was that when he was only 16 years old as a schoolboy at Harrow, he told his best friend, Merlin Evans, there shall be great upheavals, great struggles in our lives, I shall be called upon to save England and save the empire. He said that when he was only 16 and then half a century later, exactly that happened.

So, I mean, what a story. I mean, it sounds like something out of a film, really, which is why so many people have made movies and TV series about him. So he's 65 years old. He assumes a mantle of leader. Britain, to be honest, it doesn't look like we're going to win. No, it looks very much like we're going to lose. In the first two weeks, we are pushed off the continent.

The German Blitzkrieg, a completely new form of warfare, in which their bombers and their tanks and their infantry all work together in a seamless hole to cut through the Ardennes and essentially get to the channeled ports by the 20th of May 1940 and force the British Expeditionary Force to re-enbarcourt at Dunkirk very near. captures the whole of the... Hitler could have captured the whole of the British expeditionary force if he hadn't executed his halt order of the 24th of May. And by the 4th of June, the British expeditionary force, minus 40,000 men who are captured, are back in Britain. Again, the Russians are allied to the Germans, the Americans aren't involved, the French have essentially been knocked out of the war. We look as though we've lost. And what sustained him, and I think I know the answer to this question through those incredibly dark moments when it looked like Britain was going to fall. His self-belief, his belief in destiny, not just his own personal destiny, but national

destiny as well. He believed that Britain was specifically going to see it through and to win. He had a belief in himself in his country that was not going to be essentially affected by the situation on the ground. He made speeches, giving the British people reason to hope. Frankly, they weren't great reasons when one looks at them logically and rationally. But it wasn't a logical and rational moment, frankly. It was one in which you had to have self-belief. And he did have that. And one of the things we haven't touched on so far, but I think it's the right moment to touch on is you've actually talked about him having different roles within government prior to this moment, in which he actually does very well.

So he's clearly a competent, not just leader who gives speeches and inspires people, but actually competent at administration and management and running departments. Why is that? Why is he so good? Well, absolutely. He'd run huge departments. The Ministry of Munitions

was the biggest government department in the world at the time of the number of people. It had well over one and a half million people working for it. he was a chancellor of the exchequer and therefore in charge of the entire British economy

for five years you know these are big areas the first lord of the admiralty at the time with the British Navy was easily the biggest navy in the world as well so he was good at these big things and the reason was

that he was a real micromanager he got down into the basics of everything he would visit the depots constantly he would meet people below the top level. So he actually knew what people on the shop floor were thinking and saying. He was somebody who was so energetic, you know, every morning bounced out of bed early in order to get the job done.

And this was partly obviously because of his ambition. He wanted to do well in each of his jobs and therefore get promoted. But also because he was a total perfectionist when it came to the duty of. that he was given. And was she a good people person? Oh, wonderful. Actually, wonderful. He had any number of sort of top tips for how to get on with people. He was immensely charming, very funny man, and so he was able to put people at their calm. He was very, very calm in crises as well, which people hugely appreciated, especially considering how many crises he was involved in in his life.

He was a very much, a people person is the exact right way of putting it. Yeah, he would, if he felt that people weren't connecting with each other, he would make sure that they turned up, he'd give parties, he would give them Swedish milk punch, which is a rather disgusting sounding drink, but nonetheless, it was something that he would. He would give them and he would make sure that people met other people important for them and so on. He was very, very good when it comes to everything to do with networking.

That's very interesting. He was a connector. So how does he bring this to bear? Britain looks like it's about to lose. The British Expeditionary Force has been forced back to Britain, having lost tens of thousands of soldiers captured. No allies to speak of at the time. America is not involved in the war. Germany seems incredibly powerful with these new tactics. The Soviet Union is maybe not allied.

It is allied. Maybe non-aggressions. But anyway, it doesn't really matter too much. But it's supplying grain and oil and sorts of other things. Yes. What does social do? What do you do? I think one very important point to point out is, of course, that although we don't have

foreign allies, we do have the empire. So we have the millions of people who join the Indian army, which becomes the largest volunteer army in the history of mankind, still is to this day. We have the Australians who are superb fighters, as are the New Zealanders. The Canadians, a superb fighters, but also are able to ship huge amounts of grain and so on across the Atlantic to Britain, to keep feeding Britain. All three of those, sorry, four of those, and also troops from the Caribbean countries fight in North Africa and in various other parts of the world, Burma and so on. And finally also fight in Italy and Europe. So the empire is a huge, huge supporter of Britain in its hour of need in 1940 and 41 whilst Britain is fighting for its life.

And how willing are these, we've alluded to the fact that by this point the empire is starting to break down and it's inevitable that it will collapse eventually as it does. How willing are the Indians to go and sign up and fight in a war that... This is the amazing thing. They're incredibly willing. The New Zealanders, Canadians and Australians all declare clear war on the same day that the war breaks out, 3rd of September. The Maoris, for example, have their chiefs come together and declare war against Germany, even though they're on the other side of the world from Germany. The Indians, of course, it's via the viceroy, but, you know, nobody forces them to sign up, and they do so in their millions to fight. And this is 18 months

or so before the Japanese attack in Pearl Harbor. So, yes, it's a great imperial family, essentially, that comes together to try to fight the horrors of fascism. And how much of that was a loyalty to Britain, and how much of that was a look over what Germany were doing and going, this is an evil that needs to be defeated? Both, absolutely, yeah. And of course it would be both.

That makes perfect sense, doesn't it? It's if up until Munich, a lot of the rest of the empire wasn't interested in getting involved in a European war. But once it became clear from Munich onwards, and especially as I keep coming back, this idea of the remilitarization of Prague, that moment where he moves into Bohemia and Moravia and then takes the whole of the rest of Czechoslovakia in the March of 1939, That is the clear signal to the whole world that Hitler is not just interested in trying to get Germans back into the Reich as he had been claiming for years,

that all he wanted to do was rip up the Versailles Treaty. No, he was taking Slavs into the Reich as well. And so that was the moment at which the Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and so on all recognised that Hitler was exactly the kind of evil conqueror that Winston Churchill had been warning about. So they then started to fight the Germans. At what point did we see the Germans start to getting pushed back as if it looked like it was a more fair fight

and actually defeat didn't look inevitable? Well, the first moment, of course, was the victory in the Battle of Britain. On the 15th of September 1940, it became clear that the RAF had won the Battle of Lufth, against the Luftwaffe and that the invasion therefore wasn't going to take place. We didn't know it wasn't going to take place, really, until the June of 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia. But it became pretty clear because you can't invade across 22 miles of salt water unless you have air superiority.

We established that, obviously, in Operation Overlord in June 1944, going in the other direction. and they didn't have operational air superiority because they lost the Battle of Britain. That was the first point. But then it's not until the November of 1942, so a full two and a half years after the Battle of Britain, that the Germans start to get seriously defeated on land. And that happens in North Africa at the Battle of El Alamein at the end of 1942. And how much of that was because,

the Americans then got involved? A lot because we were very fortunate that the Americans gave us in a sense, essentially the Sherman tanks with which we fought the Battle of El Alamein. And also, of course, in the same month November 1942, the Americans also landed

a quarter of a million men in Northwest Africa in Morocco and elsewhere on the northwest coasts there. Oh, I don't know that, but America's not involved in the war as a combatant at this point, is it? In November 1942, it is. So, yes, it goes... Oh, of course, because by this point it's been attacked, yes.

Well, this is the amazing thing about America, is that although it wasn't attacked by Germany, yes. And Hitler didn't declare war against America until the 11th of December 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, The Roosevelt administration took the most incredibly statesman-like decision to put Germany first. It's called the Germany First Policy. And what they decided to do was to, even though they hadn't been attacked by Germany,

they'd only been attacked by Japan in the Pacific, they nonetheless had 70% of their resources concentrated on defeating Germany. And this is because of great state. by the Roosevelt administration by General Marshall, by General Eisenhower and others, who came up with what's called the Germany First Policy. And the fact is that under Klausovitz and the great military thinkers, if you're attacked by two enemies, you take out the strongest one first. And Hitler was much stronger than Japan.

Whenever I think about Pearl Harbor, I always see it as a ridiculous thing to do by the Japanese. You've got the Americans. They're not involved at this stage. They're a superpower. Why are you going to attack them? Because of the oil embargo. The fear was that Japan was essentially, the Japanese Empire was essentially just going to run out of oil.

And the way to smash that was to take on the Americans and steal the oil of the Netherlands, East Indies, Dutch East Indies. And the only way to do that, was to attack America. It was, of course, and ultimately incredibly stupid and suicidal thing to have done

because you can't invade America. America is an uninvadeable country. And that's also why it was so stupid and indeed literally suicidal for Adolf Hitler to declare war on America on the 11th of December 1941. But both of these countries did that and look what happened to them.

And Andrew, coming back to church, I imagine when he's taking over in 1940, the war looks like it's unwinnable at this point or close to. He's giving all these speeches. He's trying to marshal the defence of Britain. Number one at the top of his list, or certainly close to, would have been, how do I get the Americans to help us? That's right. And the Americans did help enormously. They sent over in the May and June of 1914, in the summer of 1940, huge numbers of rifles, millions of rounds of ammunition.

an enormous amount of military help. And then they passed the Lenn-Lies Act, which allowed us to buy enormous amounts of munitions from them as well. So the Americans did help. What they obviously didn't want to do at that time was to actually get involved in the hot war, in the fighting, because they hadn't been attacked. And yet, when Adolf Hitler did declare war on them, then they took this incredible decision, this Germany first decision, and they landed all those men, quarter of a million men in the Western theatre, as opposed to just concentrating on the Japanese. Of course, they did fight back very much against the Japanese. You have Guadalcanal, you have the Battle of Midway by 1942. But the lion's share of the American resources goes to.

to fighting Hitler in the West. So was Churchill happy with the situation where he was getting supplies, you've got Lendlis, or was he banging down the door trying to get the Americans to actually get kinetically involved? Churchill very much wanted the Americans to be kinetically involved, of course,

but he recognised that he couldn't affect internal American domestic political opinion beyond making speeches to the Americans, constantly getting his ambassador to try to encourage the Americans to give more help and making sure that Americans saw the war in the correct ideological terms, which was obviously with civilisation and democracy on one side against fascism and, frankly, evil on the other. When you tell this story about Churchill, he was 65 years old, the toll it must have taken on him, both physical and emotional, must have been so, it must have been almost unbearable.

Well, that's right. I mean, he was 65 years old when he became prime minister in 1940, so he was in his early 70s by the time of the end of the war. And he was extraordinarily brave during the Second World War. He'd go up onto the roofs of Whitehall. indeed a building that's just behind us there, the air ministry. He'd go up onto the roof during the Blitz. He undertook 110,000 miles of flights outside the United Kingdom, not just flights, also journeys by ship, outside the United Kingdom. Sometimes within the radius of the Luftwaffe, he had four separate bouts of pneumonia,

one of which very nearly killed him in Carthage in 1943. So he really was showing tremendous physical courage. But that is Winston Churchill, you see. This is the great thing. He showed as much physical courage as he had shown moral courage throughout his career. And let's touch on the things that people say about him, that he was an alcoholic and he was permanently drunk, etc. I can't believe that's true.

Well, no, you couldn't really have run the Second World War, frankly. And I haven't gone to all of these. led these meetings of the cabinet and the war cabinet if you were permanently drunk. He did drink a hell of a lot. That's one thing to remember. He had a rhinocerine capacity for alcohol. He would drink most lunch times and certainly most dinner times. He didn't get completely plastered, but he did have whiskeys and sodas that would start at about six o'clock in the evening and then go through on. But his private secretary, Anthony, Montague Brown told me that these were what he called mouthwash. So very, very little whiskey,

large amounts of soda. There was a friend of his called C.P. Scott who said that Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drunk that much. That's very interesting. I mean, I guess the obvious counterpoint to your argument that he couldn't have chaired all those meetings, etc. was that Hitler apparently was on all sorts of drugs the entire war. And also it was T-Total, of course. So Hitler was on the other end of the spectrum, as it were. Hitler would, it was very interesting the different ways that they acted. Hitler, at the beginning of meetings, would set out what he wanted the meeting to discuss. Then he would listen quite a lot. He was quite good listener, in fact, we know, from the Fura conferences, which were all taken down by the stenographers, every word.

the Wolfshunza in eastern Prussia. But then at the end, he would sum up and not change his mind at all. He would have listened to his generals, but then he would not have taken their point of view. With Churchill, it was very different. He didn't start off saying what he wanted. He would listen to what they have to say. And if the arguments were better than his arguments, he would change his mind. And that obviously is the much more democratic, much more grown up, frankly, and much more useful and much more successful way. of going about a meeting. Well, quite, you mentioned that one of the lessons he learned from his earlier mistakes was that his opinion wasn't always the right one and that he ought to listen to the professionals,

particularly when it comes to matters of war. How did that manifest itself during World War II? Oh, well, he would have some of the chiefs of staff sit across the table from him, again, not very far from here, just over there in the cabinet war rooms, and they would, General Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, would lean across and break pencils in half saying, no, I disagree with you, Prime Minister. But they would have these arguments. Sometimes they would be roused. Sometimes they would bang the table. Sometimes Winston Churchill would burst into tears if he didn't get his way. But if the chiefs of staff all stuck to their original beliefs, as they did oversee the Samatra plan of March, 1943 and various Norwegian plans as well.

and they refused to change their minds, then Churchill never overruled them. And this turned out to be the best thing, you know, because they did not make any huge errors. There were. Of course there were mistakes and defeats and problems and so on. But the Chiefs of Staff overall didn't make the kind of errors that they would have made if they had been putty in Churchill's hands. And as we moved towards the end of the war, when we saw the fireball, bombing of Dresden, how much was Churchill involved in those decisions? Well, he was one of the people, of course.

That was an RAF bomber command decision, which was essentially OKed by the Chiefs of Staff. The Dresden one in particular on the 13th and 14th of February 1945 was an easy decision for the Chiefs of Staff to take, because the Russians had asked bomber command to smash the railway nodes that were bringing German forces back from the west to shore up the defence of Nazi positions in the east. And so to attack the railway sidings, which is what they did in Dresden, was not a difficult decision to take. The reason that the losses were so high,

and by the way, they're nothing like as high as pro-Nazi historians have made out, They're much more like 20,000 rather than 200,000 people killed on those raids. The reason they were so high was because the Gowliders of Dresden had not prepared proper defences in Dresden. But nonetheless, I guess what Francis' question is getting at, and this is relevant to a more modern context when we see conflicts that are ongoing currently, where there's a constant discussion about civilian casualties and war and so on. In the last year and a half of the war, the Allies in Britain in particular dropped a hell of a lot of munitions on Nazi Germany. To what extent was there a moral debate within the British government and armed forces about that? Was it just seen as, look, we've got to win the war.

This is what you do when you were. There was a moral debate. The Church of England had several bishops who were opposed to it and who said so in debates in the House of Lords. This got very little traction amongst the public. The public, frankly, who had taken the Blitz, of course, back in 1940, 41, and in the V2 attacks in 1944 were taking it all over again. They were very much in favour of giving it back to the Germans. As it was, we lost over 50,000 killed civilians,

and the Germans lost half a million. So we gave it back 10 times. And that, tragically, is war. That's what happens in war when you start a war and you try to kill as many innocent civilians as possible. I mean, obviously there is a war going on at the moment in Gaza where much the same kind of thing is happening. Very many more civilians being killed than originally were killed by the aggressors. But it's absolutely essential to remember who were the aggressors. Well, quite, and it's one of the reasons I brought in the modern situation.

However, I'm just curious. And to think about the decision, was there a, you alluded to the fact that the general public, frankly, wanted to give it back to the Germans. Was there an element of the aerial bombardment of Germany that was about punishment? Not really, no. It was, that was there. Of course it was. But actually, when you look at the graphs of the increase in munitions productions, by the August of 1943, all of the graphs, they basically plateau off.

Because the Allied bombing campaign, it wasn't just the RAF, of course, it was also the US AAAF, are able to take out the factories necessary in so many cases that mean that, yes, the Germans continue to increase military production, but nothing like the same extent as in 1941, 1942 and the early part of 1943. So it really is an attempt to hit the wall-bearing factories, the oil refineries, the tank production factories, and they're very successful in that. Was it seen really as a way of just expediting the end of this conflict? Precisely. You try and shorten the war by any means possible. the RAF and the USAAAF believed that they could actually win the war just by smashing German cities.

And if you also, what was called, it's a rather horrible phrase, but nonetheless, sort of bloodless phrase, de-house, but if you also, at the same time as hitting the factories, de-house the civilian population, you make it much more difficult for them also to work in the factories to produce the necessary munitions for the Germans to carry on fighting. So it was just a very simple and effective way of bringing the country to its knees? Yes. And it did it extremely successfully. And if we had not done it, you could well have found that the Germans could have carried on fighting for many months, indeed, possibly even years longer.

And if that had happened, many more millions of people would have died. And at what point did they find out about the concentration camps? relatively late on the there were over flights of course where they were reconnaissance planes were able to take as we as we discovered after the war a very good photograph of the actual ramp at auschwitz there's a there's a photograph if you visited auschwitz today you see this uh this um allied photograph but at the time they didn't know what it was uh tragically um then there were some people in 1942 who actually came back, very brave polls that came back to explain what was going on. Certainly by 1944, by the time of the mass movement of Hungarians to Auschwitz, the Western allies had a pretty good idea that something truly monstrous was taking place. Winston Churchill said to Anthony Eden, you know, invoke me if necessary, but we need to bomb the railways are going from Hungary to Auschwitz. But the trouble is, the bombing a railway

is very difficult, as we've discovered at Dresden, apart from anything else. It's a really tricky thing to do because it's in a straight line. And so what happened essentially was that the Americans didn't want to undertake the daylight bombings, highly loss-producing, and the RAF used to bomb at night. So, And tragically, that was not done. And so we're going to the bombings of Dresden. Was that the one thing that really ended the Nazi regime? Or were there other factors involved as well?

Oh, no, no. The thing that ended the Nazi regime was D-Day in the West, where you have a million men by D-plus-30 landing on in Western Europe, and Operation Bagration in the East, where in the August of July and August of 1944, the Red Army kills, captures or wounds over half a million German soldiers, 510,000 German soldiers.

And then it smashes essentially Army Group Centre in Belarus and marches on to Berlin. The war was not won by the Combined Bomber Offensive, although that did help enormously. it was won by fighting on the ground in Europe, extirpating the Nazi regime in Germany. I'm glad you said there because my Soviet ancestors would not accept the telling of the story, France's attempts.

And in fact, there are historians who've argued that really Germany lost the war in the attempt to capture Moscow, which failed and stalled. Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting historical discussion. I go into this in my book, The Storm of War. Is it the failure to capture Moscow in the October and November of 1941? You could argue that it's Stalingrad, of course, between August 1942 and the fall in the February of 1943. Some would argue that Hitler's counterattack at Kursk, in the Kersk salient in the July of 1943, and the failure of that is the key moment.

the time of Operation Progratian, you know, the German army is very much wrong the retreat. But yeah, your Russian ancestors can take great pride because of the five, for every five Germans killed in combat, by which I don't mean bomb from the air, not that half a million that we meant figure we mentioned earlier, but the half a million, sorry, for every five Germans killed on a battlefield, four died on the Eastern Front. And it costs the Russian some 27 million people. Exactly. And the reason I bring it up is I imagine that for Churchill,

the pragmatic necessity of doing a deal with the devil, Joseph Stalin, would have been simultaneously a very difficult and a very simple decision at once. Is that fair to say? Yes, that is, actually. The moment that he heard of Hitler's invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa on the 22nd of June 141, he immediately went to the House of Commons and declared the alliance with the Soviet Union. I mean, it's an amazing thing for him to do this man who had been a powerful, the most powerful anti-communist advocate since 1917, since the Russian Revolution,

comes out and says, I would, in fact, he makes a joke of it, saying that he would make a positive reference to the devil in the House of Commons if the devil were to invade Russia. And he goes to the House of Commons and says that if Hitler invaded hell, then he would make a positive reference to Satan in the House of Commons. So he had very much this sense

that he puts his country's best interests first and swallows, essentially, for the remainder of the war, his hatred of communism, and is right to do so because, of course, the most important thing is to defeat Nazis. And the reason I bring that up is that I think most even people like us are not well educated in history will be familiar with towards the end of World War II, Germany is being enveloped from both sides and eventually succumbs, Hitler kills himself on the bottom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What's interesting to me is there must have been a calculation at some point

where Churchill and the Americans would have gone, we're going to win this war. And then we've got another problem, which is we've won this war with Joseph Stalin, with whom we've had to do a deal with the devil, and now the devil is in the heart of Europe. Well, that comes by the Yalta Conference, of course, of January and February 1945.

So they agree essentially to believe Stalin's lies about the integrity and independence of Poland. That's one of the things they need to do, essentially, if they're to keep the alliance together until the moment when the Germans are ultimately defeated in the May of 1945. It's a very difficult moment. You can argue, and historians do,

that they were being sort of deliberately naive, or they were just following Realpolitik, which is what I believe. You know, if you've got an alliance with somebody who is worse than the person you've got the alliance with, then you have to see that alliance through. Because I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is, I'm just curious as a historian,

what other options you think there may have been available, because if you look at it objectively, World War II was started in defense of Poland and Eastern Europe from being occupied by Hitler. All of that territory and way more ends up falling to a dictator who's almost most as bad. That's right. Yeah, that is the ultimate sort of irony of World War II. There are others, you know, he starts believing that the British Empire needs to be

protected and we wind up so poor and poverty-stricken and weak that the empire has to be given away. He is an anti-socialist and yet the whole of Eastern Europe is dominated by communism. There are lots of ironies of the Second World War, but the central one, which is that Adolf Hitler had to be stopped, Nazism had to be extirpated and destroyed. That's the one that I think Britain and the Western powers have a untarnishable glory in being the people who started from the first day of the war and went on to the last day of the war. And that's something that Canadians and Australians, New Zealanders and so on, Indians are able, I think, to take great pride along with the British people. Were there any other options at Yalta? Could they have done anything to say...

Well, yeah, there was this thing called Operation Unthinkable. This wasn't at Yalta. There was nothing you could do at Yalta because by that stage the Soviets had millions of boots on the ground in Poland and Eastern Europe. But by the time of Potsdam, of course, the United States had the nuclear bomb. But there was simply no way they could have threatened to use it against their Soviet allies who had lost 27 million fighting against the million human beings fighting against the Russians and against the Germans Uncle Joe Stalin was very popular in the West of course there was simply no way that that the nuclear bomb could have been threatened against the against the Russians and of course you you still had to win the war in the East against Japan.

And the Russians promised to go to war three months to the day after the end of the war in Europe, and they carried out that promise. So, no, the opportunities were non-existent, frankly. And moving over to the war in the East, some of the most brutal and horrific fighting was in countries like Burma when we suffered horrific losses. how much was Churchill involved in the discussions about dropping the nuclear bombs on Japan? Oh, very closely involved. It was an Anglo-American decision. Absolutely. He was as much in favour of it as Truman.

He had signed the original agreements with FDR about the joint decision-making. A lot of British scientists were of course involved in what was going on. in New Mexico, in creating the bomb. And it wasn't until after the war, in the March of 1946, that the Americans moved to essentially make the nuclear bomb an American thing and cut the British out of the decision-making process. So he thought it was a necessary evil to get rid, to bring Japan, essentially humiliate them and decimate them? Well, to defeat them, essentially. He wasn't that worried about humiliation and decimation so much as their surrender. And it did take place, of course, within days of the Nagasaki bomb being dropped.

And before we move on and we talk about other things, what was Churchill's impression of Hitler? Was this someone that he actually, despite obviously the awful atrocities a man committed, was this someone that he had a grudging amount of respect for? No, no, he thought of Hitler as being completely useless as a strategist. He thought of the very beginning of the war when Hitler was doing extremely well, that maybe he did have a sort of sixth sense. He worried that he did, but it soon became very clear when he made mistake after mistake, especially in North Africa, the timing of the invasion of Russia and then one mistake after another in Russia,

that actually he was a pretty useless strategist. And he made lots of jokes about Corporal Shucklegruber and what a bad strategist he was. And in fact, when in July 19, the 20th of July 1944, the Germans tried to kill Hitler and blow him up and Churchill went on the radio and said, well, we can be pleased that they failed because of all the strategic mistakes

that Corporal Shickle Gruber is making. So no, he didn't. didn't have a high respect for him. He thought of him as a common gutter snipe, he called him at one point, caucus boss. He has some absolutely magnificent phraseology for Hitler, which he unleashed. Even better phraseology for Mussolini actually as well. And was his criticisms, were his criticisms of Hitler accurate? Yes. Overall, they certainly were because Hitler, as I mentioned, didn't listen. to many of his top generals.

He had people like Gerd von Rundstedt and Erwin Rommel, Eric von Manstein, Heinzgerian, these generals who were far better strategists than he, people who had gone to Staff College, who had been officers in the Great War, and who were very significant and impressive commanders in the field. And they would go and talk to Hitler, as I say, we have every word spoken in the fewer conferences, and Hitler would just stick to his original ideas about what he wanted.

He also became a terrible micromanager, much, much worse than Churchill. Churchill came back as the war progressed and was able to see things in the round, whereas Hitler would concentrate on where individual regiments were trying to capture individual villages. deep in Russia, which was, of course, a ridiculous way to fight a war. So when one looks at the different ways that the two men dealt with decision-making, they're very, very different. And do you think part of it as well why Churchill was a far more competent leader is the fact that he was much more emotionally stable than Hitler?

No, it wasn't just that. And by the way, he was a very emotional man. He burst into tears some 50 times during the Second World War. You would get very emotional. He wasn't in that sense a stiff-up-a-lipped Victorian. He was a much more sort of regency aristocratic figure who wore his heart on his sleeve. No, what it was was that he was far more intelligent than Hitler. And he had spent a lifetime thinking about grand strategy ever since he had been taught it when he was at Sandhurst.

He had, of course, in the First World War, been thinking about and been involved in grand strategy, not always successfully as we discover from the Dardanelles, but nonetheless that he was also involved in very successful parts of it. And he was a person who wrote a lot of history. One of the reasons I'm proud to be an historian was that Winston Churchill was an historian, and he was able to look at the problems of the day through the lens of history.

And he also was somebody who would listen to his strategists and take their advice and not overrule them. So he had all of these enormous advantages that Hitler chose to throw away. And what did he make of Stalin? Well, interestingly, Stalin actually came round to the Western way of making war, the deliberative way, the interactive way,

rather than the way he started off. At the time of Operation Barbarossa, he had something akin to a mental breakdown and went back to his dacha and couldn't be heard from at all until the Politburo went to him. And by the way, just to add something, when they arrived, he thought they were there to arrest him. Yeah, absolutely, and to liquidate him. Exactly. And so he was surprised and presently, very pleasantly surprised when they turned to him and said, you know, you're our leader and you've got to save us. And what he then did was to listen. I mean, he was a dictator, of course. But nonetheless, he listened to men like Zhukov and Rokosovsky and Ivan Konyev and the great Russian marshals.

And when the great battles that we mentioned earlier of Stalingrad and Moscow and Kersk and so on and the Battle of Berlin were fought, they were fought by the marshals interacting in a rational and logical way with Stalin. And he didn't go down the Hitler route, which he perfectly easily could have, of course, because he was a paranoid dictator. But just on the Stalin thing, Churchill and Stalin met on several occasions of these conferences. Do we know what Churchill made of Stalin? I'm afraid he liked him. It's, you know, as you can tell, I'm in a borough of Winston Churchill, and I'm sorry to say that he got on very well with the most evil man. apart from Hitler. He had a bit of a drinking competition with him at the Kremlin, the first

time they met in the August of 1942. Then he got on very well with him again in the October of 1944. He visited Moscow both times, of course. They also met at Tehran and Yalta and Potsdam. And there was one moment where Stalin said that he was going to shoot 50,000 German the officers out of hand as soon as they were captured. And Churchill got up from the table and marched out and refused to interact. But other than that, I'm afraid they got on well. He believed he could out drink Stalin in vodka. Very interesting.

Well, Andrew, it's been such an interesting discussion of the biography of Winston Churchill. And we wanted to bring it a little bit into a conversation about his legacy and how people talk about him now. we've obviously seen an attempt to change the narrative, let's put it like this, or to perhaps drag his legacy out of the historical context in which it exists. And as you well know, his statute just down the road here in Parliament Square was defaced with the words Churchill was a racist and all of this. And by the way, based on what you were saying earlier, I think by the standards of the modern day, a kind of Victorian racial superiority by.

by our standards, it would be absolutely considered that. Absolutely. No, no. Today's, in today's, um, um, today's world, his views are obscene and absurd, of course, also. But, but what he didn't know was the scientific underpinning that we have, whereby we know that, um, that racism, biological racism is obscene and absurd. And they, they believed in a Darwinian form of scientific racism, which, uh, is despicable to us today, of course. But I think to blacken his memory because of something that was considered a scientific fact at the time that he was living is pretty strange.

It's a sort of unhistorical way, a historical way, really, of approaching people in the past. Well, this is quite what I was going to ask you, which is I don't know what you make as a historian of the fact that people seem to have. forgotten that there was a different time in which values were different, scientific understanding were different. I wonder whether they do genuinely think that or whether or not it's just a political thing, where they impose ideological stances and they know perfectly well that actually they don't really make much sense logically, but they don't care because they want to grandstand, want to, you know, use a spray can to make a political point, essentially. And they know that it is infuriating and hurtful, really, to a generation of people,

our grandparents and parents' generation who remember the Second World War. It's also, of course, very stupid in a way, because the people who had Hitler won the war, Had Churchill not been there to ensure that we fought on in 1940, had the Germans successfully invaded, had they managed to establish the Third Reich in Britain and elsewhere, you know, the people that would have come off worst were not the whites. They ultimately would have had a terrible, terrible time, of course, white British people. But compared to their ghastly time, the... what would have happened to non-white people in a Nazi world would have been far worse. And I think this is such an important point because people seem to miss this when they denigrate Churchill and they say that he was this evil man. And you go, really? What was the alternative?

The alternative was truly horrific. When one thinks of the way that the Nazis treated every non-nors, Iranian people. And not just the Nazis, you know, the Japanese killed some 17% of the Filipinos. For example, you know, if that had happened in India with the 300 million people in India, that would have led to the deaths of 50 million Indians. But fortunately, the British Empire and the Indian forces of the British Empire held the Japanese back in North East India and they didn't match it. managed to get into India. It would have been for all of the subject peoples, the native peoples,

you call them what you like, of the British Empire, much, much worse if Nazism had prevailed. And one of the reasons it didn't prevail was Winston Churchill. And what can we learn from this man, this incredible figure in history? Oh, so much, so much. I mean, his wit, his charm, his intelligence, his quotation. the things he said about the things that matter, about politics and about freedom and liberty in the world, those are the most important things. Then there's a lot of things about life, actually, and about resilience and the need for courage. He said of courage that it was the most important of all the human values because it underpins all the rest.

And you see him again and again showing his moral courage as well as his physical courage. And he gives an example in his own life. He is somebody who is willing to explain all the time what he's doing. You know, he never hid his light under a bushel. He wrote these 37 books, which are all of them. still worth reading, all of them, which is an incredible thing considering he started writing in the 19th century. And he was somebody who had this extraordinary foresight. Not only was he able to tell before the First World War that the Germans were going to cause a great threat to the hegemony of, sorry, the balance of power in Europe,

but before the Second World War and after the Second World War, he warned against Nazism and Soviet Communism, the sort of two twin totalitarian threats of the 20th century. So there is so much still to learn from him. And the good thing is that when you write about him, in the book that I wrote about him, it's just such fun. Because about every four or five pages or so, he comes up with a witticism or an apper su, or some kind of insight that your jaw drops.

And he was also very intelligent with the way that he dealt with Germany post-war as well. They didn't make the same mistakes as they made in 1918. Exactly. Well, they did split Germany, of course, which they hadn't done in 1918. They split Germany into two. But they made sure that the western half of Germany was democratic. And when Stalin tried to suck Berlin into the Soviet more in 1948, the British and Americans stopped them from doing that.

and eventually as a direct result of that, NATO was created in the April of 1949. Andrew, I want to ask you a question that's less about Churchill and more about what you see as a historian, because as we've been talking, one of the things that struck me when we were talking about a weakening empire, demoralization, it sort of all sounds quite familiar to me as I look around and I look at the Western world today. Are there are parallels to be drawn between the period maybe before World War II and today's world? I think there are, yes, absolutely. And we're speaking, of course, today on the day that Alexei Navalny has essentially been murdered by a despot.

Adolf Hitler murdered a lot of people even before the Second World War broke out. The way in which Ukraine has fought back against Putin's Russia is an interesting example of how free people can fight back, especially if they've got their help, of course, of the free world. And I do see overlaps between Zelensky and Winston Churchill. He's been called Winston Churchill with an iPhone because he does have this command of the language and this tremendous bravery. He, like Churchill, refusing to leave London in the Blitz, stayed in Kiev in those key moments

immediately after the Russian invasion. So, yes, there are overlaps, but one doesn't want to ever really ever put too much emphasis of the 1930s onto present day. I know that there are echoes and there are shadows, but it's by no means exact. No, actually, I understand why you answered the question the way that you did, because a lot of people have made the parallel.

I wasn't suggesting that we are on the path to another world war, actually. What I meant is more that there is a kind of, I don't remember the phrase that Churchill used that you quote, earlier, but there's a kind of loss of self-confidence. Drawling tides of drift and surrender. Quite. It sort of feels, and it comes back very much to the cultural conversation we were having a few moments ago about the denigration of statues, the denigration of history, the complete lack of teaching of history. And Orwell warned about this that the way to demoralize a people is to take away from them their history.

Do you feel that, you know, there is a kind of decay that's happening in the West? Oh, yes, I certainly do. I think the way in which, especially in the United States, the pulling down of statues and even statues of people who are obvious heroes, you know, people who fought against slavery in the 19th century, mid-19th century. And even actually pulling down the statues of the founding fathers, moving Thomas Jefferson statue out of the out of the New York Chamber, for example, council chamber. I mean, this is an extraordinary form of national suicide. It's moral suicide. I mean, these people, yes, of course they're not great with regard to slavery. But these people were in the latter part of the 18th century.

You have to see them in their own terms. And what they did was immensely brave in standing up against the British Empire, which I've been speaking in favour of recently, but they stood against the British Empire and created a great nation based on a document of genius, which has lasted for a quarter of a millennium. And the idea you pull down these people's statues, as I say, I think it's a form of national suicide.

And touching on the British Empire, how do you think we have this discussion and the way that we frame it and the way that we talk about it? Is it completely a historical? No, not completely. it's taught a lot, obviously, in schools. I hope that people will read books like Nigel Bigger's latest book on colonialism,

a moral reckoning, where he tries to put it into its proper historical context and not just have a complete knee-jerk reaction built, essentially, on present-day identity politics. if we're much more sensible about it and actually listen to the voices of the past and try and work out what Lord Curzon was trying to do when he went out to be vice-boy of India. The idea of treating these people as evil

is a very short-sighted and ignorant, I think, way of going about it. And I fully agree with you, because the reality is, is that no one could withstand the scrutiny that these people are subjected to. Even Gandhi, people will say, you know, he was a whole awful person because he did this and he did that. Long young children in his bed, man.

Exactly, yeah. And he was a racist. And you go, what about the things that he achieved? Well, precisely, precisely. You've got to see people. I think, by the way, this is one of the reasons that Churchill's probably more popular in America than he is here in England, because people in America are able to see the wood for the trees.

They're not obsessed about, I don't know, Tony Pandy and the striking miners of 1911. They're much more interested in the big picture, in the person who helped create the grand strategy that helped win the, at least the Western Allied grand strategy that helped win Second World War. And so you have an ability in America really to look at the most important aspects. But you're right, not only would nobody but nobody be able to be looked on as a hero if you constantly look solely at their feet of clay. But also in our own time, our great-grandchildren are going to pull down our statues

for reasons that we have not the first clue about, things that we think are scientifically proven facts. We're going to have our statues pull down because, I don't know, we allow our children to use mobile phones. And at the moment, that sounds weird, but in a hundred years' time, that's what will happen. But unless we learn the lesson, which is, of course, that you have to see people in their own time. Andrew, what haven't we asked you about Churchill that we should have done? I think you haven't asked me one question which I am very interested in, which I'd like to answer, which is how was it that he was the person who was able to spot Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?

Yes, yeah. That's a great question. Thank you. That's kind of me. Thank you. What was it about him? What was the sort of alchemy, the special alchemy about him, that allowed him to be not only the first person, but for many years in the 1930s, the only person who could see what Hitler and the Nazis were all about? and therefore worn against them.

And the answer is, I think, threefold. The first was that he was a phylo-semit. He liked Jews. He'd grown up with Jews. His father had liked Jews. He'd been on holiday with Jews. He recognized the contribution that Jews had made to Judeo-Christian civilization. He was a supporter of the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

He was somebody who, therefore, had an early warning system about his Hitler and the Nazis that was not vouchsafed to many of the other upper-class English people of his age and class and generation, many of whom were anti-Semitic. That's the first thing. The second thing, and of course that's something that we should think about now more than any time before in our lifetimes because anti-Semitism is now on the rise in a way that it hasn't been at any other stage in our lives. So standing by Jews as the forefront of civilization, essentially, That is one thing about Winston Churchill. The next thing is that he was an historian and he was able to place the threat, the he

Germanic threat that Nazi Germany posed in the context of the long continuum of British history. The threat of the Spanish Armada of 1588 of Louis the 14th at the time of the World War of Spanish succession, which of course his own great ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Morbara, was instrumental in defeating, and then the threat of Napoleon, of the First World War that he fought in the trenches. And so he was able to see these four great threats before in history and slip Hitler into the position of the fifth great threat, which of course he was. Indeed, he was greater threat than any of those ones before because of the bomb. And the last thing was that he had seen true fundamentalism, fanaticism in his life.

He'd fought on the northwest frontier. He'd fought in Sudan. He had seen, in this case, Islamic fundamentalism, and he saw the same tropes in the Nazis that he had seen before, this hatred of democracy, this complete ability to turn reality. on its head. And because he was able to do that in a way that the other prime ministers of the 1930s, men like Ramsey MacDonald and Neville Chamberl and Stanley Baldwin, who'd never seen fanatics before in their lives at all, none of them, he was able to spot this special thing about Hitler and the Nazis and to warn and warn and to warn and just because people didn't listen to him, he didn't change his

message. Most politicians, especially today, would change their message. because of what the opinion polls were saying. He took no notice of opinion polls. He didn't listen to what the editorials were saying in the newspapers. He said what he believed, and he carried on saying it until he was proved right. You've made a really profound point there when you compare it to the present-day politicians who all they do is go from school to university to then doing an internship, to then working in politics. And the reality is these people, both Labour and Conservative and Liberal Democrat,

have no experience of the real world. But when you compare that with Winston Churchill, who experienced everything the world had to offer, and as a result of that, was a magnificent leader. I completely agree with every word here. Andrew, fantastic. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second, so follow us over to locals where we'll do that.

I seem to remember him saying the words to the effect of, we are with Europe, but not of Europe. Churchill was more international rather than regional imperialist. So what would he make today of our politics with the European Union?