Winston Churchill Was Not Your Friend
Winston Churchill has become all but deified in modern Britain. But in his own lifetime, Churchill was often recognized for who he really was: an unrepentant imperialist and racist, a foe of trade unions and women’s rights, and a defender of elite privilege.
Winston Churchill before his eighty-second birthday in 1956. (Keystone / Getty Images)
Winston Churchill has become a burnished icon whose cult has long been out of control. Interestingly, during his life, it was a relatively low-profile cult. Even at the height of the Blitz it was nothing like what it would later become in the hands of Tory politicians and a layer of conservative and liberal historians.
A brace of movies in 2017 was preceded by numerous biographies. There are currently more than sixteen hundred books on Churchill. Several shelves are devoted to him in the biography section of the London Library — even more in the British Library — and that is excluding his own prolific output.
Who and what was Churchill? Was he anything more than a plump carp happy to swim in the foulest of ponds as long as his own career and the needs of the Empire (in his own mind there was no difference between the two) were fulfilled? A little more, perhaps, but not too much. What accounts, then, for his elevation to a cult figure?
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