In a nationwide BBC poll, attracting more than a million voters, Winston Churchill was voted the greatest Briton of all time, ahead of Diana, Darwin, Shakespeare, Newton, Elizabeth I, and Cromwell.
Before 1940 that judgement would have astounded Britons. Until the moment he became Prime Minister, his reputation was precarious. To many, he was a mercurial adventurer, a bombastic showman, or a capitalist class warrior, whose political past was littered with disastrous errors, such as Gallipoli, and dangerous confrontations, such as during the General Strike.
Then, suddenly, he became the great war leader, the man who gave Britain the strength to stand alone against Hitler, whose resounding oratory inspired millions. Churchill – sitting alongside Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in 1945, three men bestriding the globe – served to give Britain the illusion of continued world power status, while in reality her power, and her Empire, were seeping away. In the ever-lengthening decades of ‘Post-War’ the nation has clung to Churchill as the last vestige of the illusion. His cult grows apace.
Whatever the vicissitudes of reputation, Churchill’s life was undoubtedly phenomenal. A Member of Parliament for sixty-four years, a cabinet minister by the age of thirty-four, still Prime Minister at the age of eighty, he served six monarchs from Victoria to Elizabeth II. Churchill took part in the last cavalry charge in British history and lived to authorise the hydrogen bomb. He was a soldier-hero in the Boer War, an author of gargantuan output, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man of prodigious wit and rhetorical power, whose vigour in old age was undiminished by decades of brandy and cigars. Politically a chameleon, he served in both Liberal and Conservative governments; he hated socialists, yet got the backing of the Labour Party in 1940. The grandson of a duke, he insisted on remaining ‘the great commoner’ and ‘the people’s Winston’. Half American by birth, he cherished the ‘Special Relationship’ with the United States, yet antagonized her by his defence of the British Empire.
Churchill’s vast, million-page archive at Churchill College, Cambridge, is the raw material for a torrent of books about him and for assessing his significance and legacy.
