At the beginning of the second world war, Winston Churchill seemed a most unlikely hero
Removed from banknotes, his statue sprayed with graffiti, blamed for Gaza, the Bengal famine, the deaths of millions, Churchill no longer sits comfortably aloft his ‘pinnacle of deathless glory’, as he wrote of Alfred the Great. In the parlance of the late Martin Amis, it’s as if our national hero’s trusted barber at Truefitt & Hill has given him a brutal rug-redo. A further clipping to his reputation is Simon Matthews’s study of his ‘poor record’ at the Admiralty between September 1939 and May 1940 – i.e. just before he becomes ‘Peak Churchill’. Viscount Stuart famously overheard Churchill reply to a questioner pressing for awkward details ‘Only history can relate the full story’, adding after the right pause: ‘And I shall write the history.
