The appeal of the persuasive bulldog
Seventy-two years ago today, a doddery Prime Minister shuffled grudgingly over to a BBC microphone and told the British people they were at war with Germany. He had very little stomach for the fight: just how little we still don’t know, because his remaining attendances at the War Cabinet of Winston Churchill remain Top Secret. But Neville Chamberlain’s time had passed. This was war, and it required the mercurial inspiration of Churchill to win it….against all the odds.
One of the odds stacked against us was WSC himself, an astonishingly incompetent strategist with a trail of political disasters behind him, and not a few ahead. But Winnie had something probably no other democrat in Britain had at that time: the closely-aligned talents of being able to kick civil servants up the backside, exist on four hours sleep plus a brief post-lunch nap, and describe being British in a way that made even his most implacable opponents want to rush out and throttle the nearest Nazi.
To the military top brass, Churchill was a nightmare: anally interfering on the one hand, and strategically bonkers on the other, he wasted hours of valuable SHAEF time expounding dramatic invasions and parachuted pyrotechnics. But he was worth a hundred thousand men in a face-off, because he made a nation largely famous for apologising unnecessarily want to fight tooth and nail to the last. Although fully aware of the old cigar-chomper’s myriad shortcomings, he remains still my greatest hero.
Oddly, this hero-worship has nothing to do with jingoism, and everything to do with personal identification. For Winston Spencer Churchill was, above all else, four things: depressive, contrarian, funny – and determined that things could be better.
He was bi-polar depressive – a terrible affliction to have then, as the only medication available was alcohol. Being myself far more mildly depressive (and able to employ modern palliatives) I remain in awe of anyone who could face such a debilitating disease, and fight a war at the same time. In the 1930s, when everyone said Hitler was a guttersnipe who could be controlled, Churchill alone in British politics saw that the only way of stopping this nihilistic megalomaniac was by military confrontation. Surrounded by a coterie of no more than half a dozen admirers in the House of Commons, Winston consistently foretold what would happen. That sort of solitary stoicism from a mind crippled by chronic self-doubt is truly remarkable.
His wit is famous – and probably in come cases apocryphal. But much of it was real, including my own favourite as follows. Seated next to an early feminist bright young thing during the 1920s, Churchill listened as the woman said that, were she married to him, she would poison his wine. “My good lady,” he lisped, “if I were married to you, I’d drink it”.
But what many people fail to see in this great war leader was a man who wanted a better life for all at home. He was of course a Victorian, the son of an aristocrat, and violently opposed to all things Socialist: my grandfather, to his dying day, would only ever refer to Churchill as “a bloody strikebreaker”.
However, as we have all found to our cost since then, you can be anti-Socialist and still a radical with the benefit of all in mind. Churchill offered not just an enduring alliance with France in 1940, but joint British citizenship for all Frenchmen. He was an early exponent of a united Europe – but on the basis of a loose federation. He was avowedly anti Big State, and remained an admirer of American self-made men and women – his mother Jennie was American.
Winston Churchill’s Europeanism was born of a mixture of upper middle-class cosmopolitanism and fear of The Russian Bear: unlike De Gaulle, he saw the USA as only a friend. But his fear of all things Communist and Russian was legendary. How amazing, then, that this man could both embrace the Russians in 1941 – seeing clearly that the real enemy remained Nazism; and embrace the Welfare State in 1951 – having privately accepted that the Socialist Nye Bevan’s vision of an end to health anxiety was laudable.
Thus, although revisionists today would like to position him as such, in the context of his times Churchill wasn’t an extremist. His career is a catalogue of poor judgement and ill-thought-out statements he later regretted. But it is also a model of every person’s duty to see something of human benefit in the other person’s point of view.
The most difficult things we do are to risk being rejected by the pack – and to cooperate with those pack members who don’t share our views. For an ego as damaged as Churchill’s – and a need to belong so chronic in its intensity – to achieve both regularly throughout a long life is unique in the history of politics. It is achievement in the face of awful handicaps that makes Churchill special.
Two days ago, I posted about how that ability to see the other side of things is disappearing fast. Also almost absent now is the ability to persuade. Churchill used argument, passion and the power of language to convince others of the rightness of his cause. Unlike Hitler, however, he used an appeal to morality in so doing – not the insidious, creeping half-truths of bigotry.
On his behalf – and in defence of all of us born since – millions of men and women fought and died to retain what they believed Britain should be. It is a cliche to ask “I wonder how they’d feel now?”, and it is also unfair: none of them could imagine what idiotic perversions of common sense would come later….and those who have suffered under them can’t be blamed because they have only a hazy understanding of what happened back then.
So we don’t need another Churchill today: this is a different crisis in a previously unimaginable age. But we do need someone with the same integrity, courage and sense of purpose to wrestle us from our sleep.
The Slog 