Perhaps no figure in British political history has been put on a pedestal as high as that assigned to Winston Churchill. Across most of the political spectrum, Britain’s wartime Conservative prime minister and former Liberal continues to enjoy the reputation of man of unimpeachable conviction, responsible, almost single-handedly, for the greatest achievement in the nation’s history: victory over fascism and the restoration of peace in Europe. This narrative could not be further from the truth, argues Tariq Ali, the British-Pakistani public intellectual, historian, and activist, in Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes.  

The image that Ali paints of the man who millions of Britons once voted as the greatest individual their nation has ever produced is that of a reactionary, even by the standards of his own time. Of women, he claimed that if we allow them “to vote it will mean the loss of social structure”; about Asians, he said, “I hate people with slit eye and pigtails. . . .  I don’t like the smell of them”; when it came to fascism, he managed to strike a slightly more empathetic tone, claiming that “if I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been wholeheartedly with Mussolini.”

But above all, Churchill was both a product of and a lifelong enthusiast for the British Empire. The book itself was inspired, in Ali’s words, by the student movements to decolonize universities and the media’s visceral reaction to Cambridge University’s discussion group The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill. Ali’s account provides a necessary corrective to what he has termed the “Churchill cult.”