But No Cigar

Andrew Roberts has changed his mind. There is nothing wrong with that, but he ought to be asked about it. The American Old Right has never had much, if any, time for Winston Churchill, but nor did the British New Right when it was still New. Roberts devoted much of Eminent Churchillians to criticising Churchill’s Indian Summer Premiership of 1951 to 1955 as a period of betrayal on immigration and on relations with the trade unions, by a Government with scarcely a proper Tory in it, effectively a continuation of the Wartime Coalition. One may or may not agree with that view. But that was the view of the intellectual founders of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. Great Contemporaries was reissued last November.

In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime, over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. What do Churchill’s noisiest partisans think of that? It ranks with this September, when Konstantin Malofeev and Aleksandr Dugin played host to the Falange Española de las JONS, annual wreath-layers in memory of the Blue Legion.

Yet Roberts would use Churchill to make the case for continued support of the Ukraine of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Ukraine that in Ternopil  has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”.

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, for which Australians and New Zealanders have never forgiven Britain. The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War with Japan was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. Broken by the War, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, or the Red Army would have carried on marching in the summer of 1945. Still less was the USSR willing or able to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

The electorate was under no illusions while Churchill was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two, and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It comfortably won the subsequent General Election. We have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought. Churchill coined the nickname “Uncle Joe” for Stalin.

Churchill presided over the famine in Bengal. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues even in the Conservative Party of the 1950s. He wanted to transport the Jews to Palestine, since he saw them as not really British. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, he redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause. The Zionists later expressed their gratitude by plotting to kill him and by murdering his friend, Lord Moyne, as well as sending letter-bombs to the White House of his ally, Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. By contrast, before anyone brings him up, Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and of those for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In such circles, the great cause of the moment is withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet in May 1948, when the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights in The Hague, then it was Churchill who dubbed “the Voice of Europe” that assembly of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they. In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. It was written into British domestic law by Tony Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her own greatest achievement.

The famous dipping of the cranes for Churchill’s coffin occurred only because the London dockers, who despised him, had been paid to do it. Churchill’s cult seems to have begun only once he was dead, or at least so old as to have been politically as good as dead. It never translated into votes. But it is equally true that once the Attlee Government had a record on which to be judged, then it was barely reelected in 1950, and it although it did win the popular vote, it lost office in 1951. For 74 years and counting, the Labour Party has dined out on a mere six years that did not impress the electorate at the time. If Churchill and Attlee were the twin giants of the Golden Age, then that was lost on the voters who lived through it, and who did not think much of either of them.