Jaw Jaw

Following earlier posts, a couple more points for now. First, Churchill’s constituency association deselected him as its parliamentary candidate a generation after the War, so his mythic status doesn’t seem to have been established even by then, and really would appear to have begun only with his death very soon thereafter.

Secondly, Churchill presumably didn’t mind too much what his constituency association thought, since he openly regarded himself as above party, and that party returned the compliment, eventually and within Churchill’s lifetime giving its Leadership to Alec Douglas-Home, Chamberlain’s old PPS, who had abstained rather than support Churchill’s wartime plans for the political geography of post-War Europe.

And thirdly, the failure of Germany to invade Britain even on the eve of the American intervention, when conquest of this utterly exhausted country would have been easy, strongly suggests that, all rhetoric aside, there was never any such intention, in line with both the known geopolitical ambitions and the known cultural tastes of the Nazi leaders to the very end.

We had to defeat people who were dropping bombs on our towns and cities, who were sinking our ships, who were shooting at our soldiers in several parts of the world, and who were occupying the Channel Islands for strategic reasons within that conflict. But that does not in itself prove that they wanted to invade and subjugate us. Handed that opportunity on a plate, they strikingly failed to take it.