Dead Loss

Broadcasting House can be tiresome, but it was very refreshing to hear a veteran of the Highland Division that remained in France explain that "Churchill was a dead loss" and that "Churchill's name was mud", as well as to hear the presenter suggest more attention for Singapore and Crete, and Sir Max Hastings call for a greater awareness of the Italian Campaign in which my father served.

The cult of Churchill really only began with his death a generation after the War, though immediately after his constituency association had deselected him as its parliamentary candidate. The electorate had turfed him out as Prime Minister while the War against Japan had still been going on, Labour had won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent had done strikingly well against him in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to contest it. What might have happened if either or both of those parties had done its democratic duty? We may guess the answer to that one from the fact that they declined to do so.

My father, as Tory as most Scots of his generation until he went to Saint Helena in 1968 and came back to Thatcher's Britain, could no more abide Churchill, whose newsreel image cinema audiences routinely booed and hissed until he was safely in the grave, than, having also served in Palestine, he could bear the sight of Yitzhak Shamir on the news. By contrast, he retained a very pronounced affection for the Italians.

Most politicians, including all Prime Ministers, seem to want to be Churchill. That is the trouble with them.