The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

by Boris Johnson

When I was growing up there was no doubt about it. Churchill was quite the greatest statesman that Britain had ever produced.

The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.

Then there was Lord Halifax, the tall, cadaverous Foreign Secretary who had been born with a withered left hand that he concealed in a black glove.

don’t think many people of my generation – let alone my children’s generation – are fully conscious of how close we came to it; how Britain could have discreetly, and rationally, called it quits in 1940.

attempt.) To judge by the evidence of contemporary footage, Halifax spoke in a low and melodious sort of voice, though with the clipped enunciation of his time and class.

In fact the only reason Churchill had finally got the nod was because Halifax – following a ghastly two-minute silence after Chamberlain offered him the job – had ruled himself out of contention; not just because it would be hard to command the government from the unelected House of Lords, but as he explicitly said, because he didn’t see how he would be able to cope with Winston Churchill rolling around untethered on the quarterdeck.

In spite of Churchill’s clear opposition, Halifax now returned to the fray. What he offered was, with hindsight, shameful.

It makes one cringe, now, to read poor Halifax’s defeatism; and we need to understand and to forgive his wrong-headedness. He has been the object of character assassination ever since the July 1940 publication of the book Guilty Men, Michael Foot’s philippic against appeasement.

And I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

Churchill punningly nicknamed Halifax the ‘Holy Fox’, partly because he was churchy, and partly because he loved riding to hounds, but mainly because he had a mind of foxy subtlety. But if the fox knew many things, Churchill knew one big thing.

The Tories are jealous of their relation with Churchill. It is a question of badging, of political ownership. They think of him as the people of Parma think of the formaggio parmigiano.

We have to acknowledge that this reputation didn’t just come from nowhere. There was a reason he was thought to be arrogant and ‘unsound’, and that was because to a certain extent it was true: he did behave with a death-defying self-belief, and go farther out on a limb than anyone else might have thought wise. And why did he behave in this way?

And what kind of lesson did Randolph offer his son, about how to get on in Parliament? He displayed a shocking disloyalty to the Tories, and set up a group called the ‘Fourth Party’, whose mission was to bash Gladstone but also to wind up the Tory Party leadership, in the form of Sir Stafford Northcote.

And he gets it from Randolph. Randolph’s formula was called ‘Tory Democracy’. The idea was a bit vague (asked to define it, Randolph said it was ‘opportunism, mostly’). But Tory Democracy galvanised and invigorated the Tory Party in the 1880s, and the idea certainly invigorated the career of Randolph Churchill.

dig up this unhappy tale as evidence of that quality of Randolph’s that Winston certainly did inherit – and that is not the caddishness, but the recklessness, or rather, the willingness to take risks. It was loopy of Randolph to think he could stop the divorce of his brother by blackmailing the Prince of Wales.

In 1898, at Omdurman in the Sudan, he took part in the last full cavalry charge by the British army. Once again, Churchill was in the role of colonial suppressor, helping to put down a revolt by Sudanese Muslims who resented British rule and, among other grievances, the attempt by London to abolish the slavery of black Africans.

He has the unique distinction, as a Prime Minister, of having been shot at on four continents. By this stage the sensitive reader may be willing to accept this overwhelming evidence of Churchill’s bravery – but want to know more about the psychology behind it. Why was he like this?

Others – Attlee, Eden – had certainly fought in the war; but their reputations were not quite the same.

I know that I speak for many journalists – and many others – when I say that it is perfectly possible to write after lunch, even if, or particularly if, you have had a bottle of wine. It is simply not possible to do this after dinner; not after booze. I don’t know anybody else who is capable of knocking out first-class copy after a long day and a drunken dinner.

Yes, he was good at the verbal pyrotechnics: but where was the feeling, where was the truth, where was the authenticity? Lloyd George said in 1936 that Churchill was ‘a rhetorician and not an orator.

I think he doesn’t really know what he wants (a problem that was to become politically acute once the war was over), except a general sense of benignity and happiness and peace and the preservation of the world he grew up in.

He had what the Greeks called megalopsychia – greatness of soul. Churchill was not a practising Christian. He never believed in the more challenging metaphysics of the New Testament; and when some prelate benignly hailed him as a ‘pillar of the church’ he had the honesty instantly to demur. He was more of a ‘flying buttress’, he said.

His ethic was really pre-Christian, even Homeric.

Any biologist studying the romantic life of Winston Churchill might conclude that he makes the courtship of the giant panda look positively rash and impetuous.

Like some hyper-gravitational astral body, it is Churchill who magically claims the joke – when it turns out he never cracked it at all. Which has led some to wonder – mistakenly, in my view – whether he was really as fertile in humour as all that.

When he saw Stafford Cripps – the austere Labour figure who had briefly and incredibly been touted as his wartime rival – he said, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes God.’

There is a sense in which eccentricity and humour helped to express what Britain was fighting for – what it was all about. With his ludicrous hats and rompers and cigars and excess alcohol, he contrived physically to represent the central idea of his own political philosophy: the inalienable right of British people to live their lives in freedom, to do their own thing.

One of the reasons he was able to appeal both to right and left was that he had begun his career as a social reformer, a politician who could certainly claim to have done great things for working people.

He was both a reactionary and a liberal because he was essentially a buccaneering Victorian Whig. He believed in the greatness of Britain, in the empire, and the preservation of roughly the established order of the country in which he grew up.

But surely in the mix we must add the wisdom and foresight of the young Winston Churchill and his friend Lloyd George; in seeing that it was time to allay discontent; to abate the anger of the dispossessed; to help stave off revolt by providing the first state-financed response to the manifest social injustice that he saw.

‘in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill’.

In the history of British breakthroughs, the tank is unusual. It is not just that some of the key ideas were British – that is quite common. The development was British and the practical application was British, in the sense that by 1917 Britain was producing hundreds of them – more than any other belligerent nation.

Of all the politicians of his generation, Churchill was not just the best speaker, the best writer, the best joke-maker, the bravest, the boldest and the most original. It was crucial to the Churchill Factor that he was also the biggest policy wonk you ever saw.

No other politician has taken so many apparently risky positions; no other politician had been involved in so many cock-ups – not only living to tell the tale, but flourishing in spite of them.

September 1922 a crisis blew up because the armies of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) were threatening the British and French garrisons on the Gallipoli peninsula. These were stationed at Chanak, or Canakkale – the town nearest to the ancient site of Troy.

He wanted to succeed Stanley Baldwin as leader of the Tories; he needed to curry favour with the right wing of the party – who did not think much of this floor-crossing ex-Liberal. India was the perfect issue on which to demonstrate his reactionary credentials.

helped that he was so extrovert, so naturally self- expressive. He did not internalise his defeats, and with the exception of Gallipoli he did not gnaw his innards with self-reproach.

and it is a comment on the natural laziness of human beings that other people tend to judge you mainly according to your own judgement of yourself.

He went again in 1929, when he saw the Wall Street Crash (in which a man hurled himself from a skyscraper before his eyes) and was understandably appalled by Prohibition. As one American temperance campaigner told him, ‘Strong drink rageth and stingeth like a serpent’. To which Churchill replied, ‘I have been looking for a drink like that all my life.’

He later described how on the night of Pearl Harbor, ‘saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’.

In my innocent youth I believed that Britain had ‘won the war’ not just through Russian sacrifice and American money, but thanks also to the heroism of the British fighting man.

By Hastings’ account, none of the generals appears to have been much cop. Not even Monty deserves a place in the ranks of ‘history’s great captains’. When they were not simply dim, they were too often idle and complacent.

As Clementine put it, ‘It may well be a blessing in disguise.’ ‘At the moment,’ replied Churchill, ‘it seems quite effectively disguised.’

At Westminster, Tory drips such as Butler (the old appeaser) and Peter Thorneycroft, later Tory Party chairman, used the kerfuffle as an excuse to start briefing against Churchill.

The story of Churchill’s last years in office is not of some giant red sun, heat gone, sinking slowly out of sight. He is no volcano puttering himself to extinction. He is Tennyson’s Ulysses – always struggling, striving, seeking: always convinced that some deed of note may yet be done.

That is an idea that remains in some ways exceedingly controversial today; and so is the question of what Churchill really meant by a united Europe, what he intended to happen, and what role he thought Britain would play.

The trouble is that he is claimed by both sides. Europhiles and Euro-sceptics: both factions believe in

To see the origins of the feud, we need to probe the mind of the man himself, and to understand what he meant by European integration, what he wanted from it – and what role he saw for Britain.

Many people might say that the story of Churchill’s life was in part the translatio imperii – the passing of one global empire to another.

That is because the story of Churchill is bigger and more inspiring than a mere political creed. It is about the indomitability of the human spirit.