The Truth About Winston Churchill - Andrew Roberts
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 53 minutes
Words per Minute
153.9648
Summary
Andrew Roberts, the author of many books, talks about the man who shaped the destiny of this country, Winston Churchill. He talks about his childhood, his early life, his education and how he went on to become the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Transcript
00:00:01.000
He was involved in three car crashes, two plane crashes.
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He went into no man's land in the First World War some 30 times.
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he could actually hear them speaking in their trenches.
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He once said that there's nothing so exhilarating in life
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and every single thing that he said turned out to be right
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and everything that they said turned out to be wrong.
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Andrew Roberts, such a delight to have you on the show.
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You are, of course, the author of many, many books,
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but the one we really want to talk to you about
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and continues to sell tens of thousands of copies every year,
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And we wanted to spend some time, a long time actually,
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talking to you about here in Westminster where we're sitting
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about a man who shaped the destiny of this country,
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You can get through your entire history syllabus
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and only learn about Winston Churchill for 14 seconds on a video.
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Yes. Well, we are going to counteract that by spending some time doing it.
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So I suppose the best place to start would be right at the beginning.
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I really want to spend some time with you talking about Churchill's life from the beginning to the end.
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Yes, it's a beautiful manor house in Kent, which he bought when he was about 60
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Yes. And when you go there, you suddenly realise, uneducated as I am,
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I mean, this guy, he lived about seven lives worth of lives in like one section of his life.
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What was the kind of beginnings of Churchill's life?
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Well, he was born in a much grander place even than Chartwell.
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He was born in Blenheim Palace, which is the grandest of all the ducal palaces.
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The Spencer Churchill's magnificent palace in Oxfordshire.
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And he was born there because his grandfather was the Duke of Marlborough.
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And his father was a very successful politician, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Randolph Churchill.
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And his mother was an American heiress called Jenny Jerome.
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And so, yes, he grew up as an upper class Victorian, essentially.
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But then he actually, having been educated, and my understanding is he wasn't a particularly successful student.
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Well, actually, he made out that he was less successful student than he was.
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In fact, he was pretty good at, he came in the top third of all his classes.
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He came top of history and English quite a lot in his classes.
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So when you read his school reports, they're an awful lot better than he made himself out to be.
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He wasn't going to go to Oxford or Cambridge, for example.
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Why did he paint himself as intellectually mediocre?
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Surely that's not the smartest play, particularly if you want to lead a country.
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His autobiography, and this is where he made himself out to be a bit thicker than he genuinely was, is the most beautifully written book.
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It's called My Early Life. It was published in 1930. I do recommend anybody read it.
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But you have to work out the bits where he's playing with the reader as opposed to just giving them the sort of word for word accuracy about his life.
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So he was good at school, but not great. And where did he go from there?
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Because in my understanding, he tried to go to, I think it's Sandhurst several times.
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It was the third attempt, wasn't it, that he got into Sandhurst?
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That's right. And he got in for the cavalry rather than the infantry.
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The cool kids went for the infantry. The ones who weren't so successful went for the cavalry.
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His father was angry with him about that because it was much more expensive to put a boy through as a cavalry officer.
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Of course, you had to buy the horse apart from myself.
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And he had this belief in himself, though, that drove him all the way through his life, this driving sense of personal destiny.
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His father wasn't kind to him. He never seems to have appreciated that there was anything special about young Winston.
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His mother loved him but saw virtually nothing of him in the way that Edwardian parents sometimes did, especially the aristocratic ones.
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She was having affairs with the Prince of Wales and the Austrian ambassador and so on, and saw very little of him and his younger brother, Jack.
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But nonetheless, he did do well at Sandhurst because he loves everything, absolutely everything to do with soldiering.
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And you talk about his parents, effectively, either not being present or not being kind to him.
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Did he have formative personalities in his life, people who guided him when he was younger, inspired him, drove him, challenged him?
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Very much he did, yes. The first of which actually was a woman called Elizabeth Everest, who was his nanny.
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And he loved and worshipped her and she was kind to him and showed him the love and affection that he wasn't, frankly, getting from his parents.
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And then there was a man who was a great orator, an American politician called Burt Cochran, who was one of his mother's lovers, who also became a sort of father figure to him after his own father, Lord Randolph, died in 1895 when his father was 45 and Winston was 20.
00:06:03.000
Hmm. And the other thing I wanted to pick up sort of going away from the story of his life for just one second, you mentioned that he was a Victorian.
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And there'll be a lot of young people who don't really know what that means exactly, because this was a society of people who different values and different viewpoints and different approaches to many things to what we have today.
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What does it mean for someone to be a Victorian?
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Well, to be an aristocratic Victorian in the period that he was growing up, which was essentially the 1880s and the 1890s, meant that you were a believer in the Empire.
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He was born in 1874 and he believed that the British Empire was a good thing for civilisation and the world in a way that obviously is not taught in any way today.
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To put it very mildly. And this had the very positive aspects of essentially he thought he was recreating a combination of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, where Britain was going to be able to teach the native peoples of the Empire development in many, many areas of human development.
00:07:08.000
And it had the negative side also, of course, of a belief that you were the very top, the apex of the sort of human condition, that you were racially superior to everybody else because you were white and you were also racially superior to every other white because you were British.
00:07:25.000
And this meant that there was a sense, you get it very much, of course, from Darwinism, Charles Darwin was still alive whilst Churchill was a boy, that there was a sort of a pinnacle.
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And that Key being upper class and British and white was at the absolute top of the pinnacle.
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Now, what this meant was that he had deep responsibilities to everybody else.
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This is something that's often misunderstood or ignored, that because he was at the top of the pinnacle, essentially, it was his duty to spend the rest of his life doing good things for everybody else.
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Privilege had a deep sense of responsibility attached to it, which sometimes we forget about that aspect of Victorian chivalry.
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And with that, coming back to the story now, by the way, we should say for our American and other viewers, Sandhurst is, of course, the military academy.
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You're going to get all the hate mail now from the very angry Americans who have guns.
00:08:30.000
But, so he goes to Sandhurst, and is that part of why he wants to go into a military career, because it is a career of service to your country?
00:08:40.000
It's the ethos of Sandhurst, like West Point, in fact, is this concept of giving back to society because of the privileges that you yourself have enjoyed in life.
00:08:52.000
And he did have huge privileges, as I mentioned earlier about his family.
00:08:57.000
However, actually, both his parents were terrible spendthrifts.
00:09:01.000
They spent his inheritance, certainly his mother did after his father died.
00:09:07.000
He wound up becoming the best paid war correspondent in the world when he fought in the Boer War in South Africa.
00:09:21.000
He was pretty much broke all his life until he wrote the war memoirs of the Second World War when he was in his early 70s.
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And you wouldn't think that by just a superficial glance at the man himself.
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No, but that's because he always bought the best of everything.
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And the reason was that he was always in debt and he could afford things because he was constantly getting into debt.
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There are two points in the 1930s where he nearly had to sell that beautiful house Chartwell that you visited because he was always broke.
00:09:56.000
And this is a good thing as far as historians like me are concerned, because what it meant was that he had to write 37 books and write over 800 articles.
00:10:06.000
And the way, of course, that's the best way to get into the mind of a man like Churchill is to read what he wrote.
00:10:12.000
And as a result, we have an awful lot of it, many millions of words.
00:10:16.000
He wrote more than Shakespeare and Dickens put together.
00:10:19.000
And what's his career in the military successful?
00:10:24.000
But the trouble was, of course, he did need to make money and be a war correspondent.
00:10:27.000
So the soldiers always thought of him as a journalist and the journalists always thought of him as a soldier.
00:10:33.000
And that meant he could never really get to the top in the British Army.
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The highest he got was to be a colonel in the First World War.
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But he fought on five campaigns on four continents.
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He took part in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire at the Battle of Onderman, where he charged with the 21st Lancers.
00:11:00.000
He went into no man's land in the First World War some 30 times and doing trench raids and so on.
00:11:12.000
And the people talk about his courage and they talk about his particularly when it comes to his military career and obviously afterwards.
00:11:19.000
How did that shape the way he viewed war and conflict?
00:11:26.000
He was accused all his life of being a warmonger.
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But because he'd come up close and personal to death, seen so many of his friends killed from the age of 21 onwards, he had seen his close friends die in war.
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He believed in deterring war by military strength.
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And so that was his immediate feeling about war.
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However, once war had started, he believed in winning it.
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And he was absolutely fascinated by every aspect of war.
00:12:01.000
He would go out of his way to use scientific knowledge to try to ensure that Britain was at the absolute forefront, the cutting edge of all the new war technologies.
00:12:13.000
Of course, in a sense, he's the godfather of the tank, which completely altered the whole nature of war and still has.
00:12:20.000
And Andrew, just flesh out the military career for us first.
00:12:28.000
And then he gets sent off to India, fights in the northwest frontier of India, where he fights against the various clans and tribes such as the Taliban, the grandparents essentially of the Taliban,
00:12:44.000
and the Afridi tribes that were attacking the Punjabi farmers.
00:12:52.000
So he defended the Punjabis up in the northwest frontier.
00:12:56.000
Then he went off to Cuba and fought on the side of the Spanish in Cuba, really more watching than fighting.
00:13:05.000
But nonetheless, on his 21st birthday, he heard bullets fired.
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He was tremendously lucky that he was never hit.
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He once said that there's nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot at without result.
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And he was shot at without result a great deal.
00:13:26.000
So he went back to northwest frontier, then the Sudanese campaign, what's called the River War in 1898, when he took part in this great cavalry charge.
00:13:35.000
And then he fought in the Boer War in 1899 and 1900.
00:13:42.000
So he had fought in all of those wars prior to, of course, later on fighting in the First World War.
00:13:48.000
And the Boer War in particular, I think, is a moment when his courage really comes through because there is this incredible story about him having to work his way through without any...
00:14:06.000
He gets captured after taking part in the defense of a train which has been ambushed by the Boers, the Afrikaans, white South Africans.
00:14:15.000
And he gets put in a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria and then escapes and makes his way 300 miles through enemy territory.
00:14:30.000
And the candle gutters out that he was given and he could feel the rats scurrying over his face down in the depths of this mine.
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And he manages, at another point, he's actually followed by a vulture.
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And nonetheless, he manages to escape to freedom in Mozambique.
00:14:49.000
So this is the thing really that, A, tells him that he's got something special.
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He always thought he had anyhow, but this actually does give him the sense that he's special.
00:15:02.000
And also, of course, it makes him a hero of the British Empire because he has escaped.
00:15:06.000
And he did it in the same week as a series of disastrous defeats for the British Empire.
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It's called Black Week because there are three serious military defeats in one week.
00:15:18.000
And the only really good news at that time was Winston Churchill successfully escaping from prison.
00:15:25.000
Wow. So he almost became a celebrity of his time then, really?
00:15:28.000
Not almost. He was. He was the first great modern celebrity, war celebrity, as it were, yeah.
00:15:35.000
Oh, wow. So did that then help with his transition into becoming a politician?
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Precisely that, yes. He'd already stood for Parliament once for Oldham in Lancashire and failed to get elected.
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But now, when he came back after this extraordinary prison escape, his celebrity status did help him get elected with a decent majority.
00:16:01.000
So he was a politician and then he decided to enlist during the First World War?
00:16:09.000
Absolutely. But he'd already fought in the Boer War. So he came back in order to stand.
00:16:14.000
And he'd already stood for Parliament before he went out to the Boer War and had lost.
00:16:20.000
And then he went back having fought in the Boer War and won.
00:16:24.000
And then I guess what Francis is getting at is what happens when World War One breaks out.
00:16:31.000
Well, this is 15 years later, of course. So, yes, he's actually the First Lord of the Admiralty.
00:16:38.000
So, by this stage, he, in 1915, he'd become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911.
00:16:45.000
By the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he was still First Lord of the Admiralty.
00:16:51.000
And he managed to get the whole of the British Expeditionary Force, over 100,000 men, across to France without losing a single man from German U-boats or any other disaster.
00:17:04.000
So, he was very successful in that. He had the British Navy ready for the First World War.
00:17:10.000
And then the catastrophe of the Dardanelles struck.
00:17:15.000
And this was largely his fault. He was the person who believed that if you could get the British Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean from the Eastern Mediterranean up through the Dardanelles Straits
00:17:29.000
and anchor it off Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, you would be able, through the threat of shelling, to take the Turkish Empire out of the First World War.
00:17:46.440
And if that had happened, it would have been one of the greatest strategic victories of modern warfare.
00:17:51.720
But it didn't. And on the 18th of March 1915, the Anglo-French flotilla lost no fewer than six ships, either destroyed or sunk.
00:18:01.780
So, we had to pull back. And then they attacked five weeks later, on the 25th of April 1915, and got horribly stuck on the Gallipoli Peninsula, which is on the western side of the Straits.
00:18:17.440
And in the end, no fewer than 147,000 men were killed or wounded in that campaign.
00:18:24.240
And it completely wrecked Churchill's career, because it had been his idea.
00:18:28.580
And he decided that he was going to leave the government and fight in the trenches.
00:18:34.420
He didn't need to. He was 40 years old. We weren't calling up married 40-year-olds at that stage.
00:18:39.680
But he did, because he wanted a form of redemption. And that's why he went to join the army.
00:18:47.880
Can you imagine any politician doing that today?
00:18:50.860
No, is the blunt way of putting it. But also, as well, in many ways, that was facing certain death, because many men who went to fight in World War I didn't come back.
00:19:01.980
Officers in some stretches of the same front that he was fighting on had a six-week-long survival rate.
00:19:10.340
Their longevity for fighting the trenches was six weeks.
00:19:15.580
So when he went to fight, how long did that career last?
00:19:19.580
He was there for a year. He was fortunate. It was one of the quieter sides of the front.
00:19:27.960
However, as I mentioned, he went on 30 trench raids.
00:19:32.660
And he got so close to the German trenches, he could actually hear them speaking in their trenches.
00:19:40.100
There was one occasion when a German whiz-bang, high-explosive shell, came and hit his dugout and decapitated everyone inside it.
00:19:51.160
And he said on that occasion that he felt as if he could hear invisible wings beating over him, a real sense that he was being kept for something important in life.
00:20:08.240
This is why I called my book Walking with Destiny.
00:20:11.280
Because although he, of course, himself said that he felt as if he were walking with destiny and that all his past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial, all the way through his life he thought he was walking with destiny.
00:20:24.240
It wasn't just in May 1940 when Hitler invaded Europe.
00:20:28.740
He was born two months prematurely, which in Victorian England could be a death sentence.
00:20:39.760
He was involved in three car crashes, two plane crashes, nearly drowned in Lake Geneva, very nearly died in a house fire.
00:20:52.060
It's incredible how close he came to death on so many occasions and the event, including, of course, that time when he left the dugout and it got hit.
00:21:01.040
And the result was that he felt that he was being specially kept back for a great occasion.
00:21:10.220
And one of the things I was going to ask you, we've got past it now, but I can't imagine being somebody in charge of tens of thousands of men, ships, your country's war effort and making a cock up that costs men lives, that causes your country to suffer a defeat in a major war in public.
00:21:34.840
And then, you know, you're so gutted by that experience, you go into the trenches to fight.
00:21:40.920
I imagine that's a bit of a setback in terms of your self-image.
00:21:44.400
I imagine that's really difficult to preserve that sense of destiny in that moment.
00:21:51.700
His wife said it was the only time that he ever seriously considered committing suicide.
00:21:55.600
He took up painting, which helped, in fact, helped him emotionally and psychologically.
00:22:04.120
But yes, I mean, people would still, even in the 1930s, so 15 plus years later, would still shout, what about the Dardanelles at him when he was making speeches in public addresses?
00:22:16.420
And in one, in fact, funnily enough, he stood for Westminster, just here, this constituency, and people would shout at him, you know, what about the Dardanelles?
00:22:28.620
And so you do have a real sense that he was, that he understood this setback.
00:22:37.160
But one of the great things about Winston Churchill was that he learned from his mistakes, and never in the Second World War, when he was Prime Minister in the Second World War, never once did he overrule the chiefs of staff in the way that he had done in the First World War in order to pursue the Dardanelles expedition.
00:22:53.680
So he actually learned from that mistake, and it was a very important lesson to learn, of course.
00:23:00.100
Oh, sorry, go for it. I was going to say, he talked frequently, he gave it a term, which is depression was the black dog.
00:23:08.080
Was that, do you think that stemmed from the experience with the Dardanelles in Constantinople?
00:23:14.360
The only time he ever used that phrase black dog, he only used it once, was in a letter to his wife in July 1911, when he was talking about a particular moment of depression.
00:23:25.500
He was not a black dog depressive, as in, it didn't suddenly strike him for no reason.
00:23:32.560
He got depressed for the same reason that anybody would get depressed under those circumstances.
00:23:37.420
The classic examples being the fall of Tobruk in June 1942, the fall of Singapore in February 1942.
00:23:44.900
These are moments when anyone would have got depressed.
00:23:46.980
He wasn't somebody who had a sort of chemical imbalance.
00:23:49.860
And as we know with actual manic depression, which black dog is, a terrible, terrible disease, that you can't chair over 900 meetings of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet at all times of day or night if you are suffering from that kind of depression.
00:24:10.400
So, it's a misunderstanding to think that he was a manic depressive.
00:24:20.700
Which happened a lot in his life, of course, because his whole life was a total rollercoaster up and down the entire time.
00:24:27.300
And so, he fights in World War I, and World War I, many people have argued, Peter Hitchens, who's been on our show, you wrote a whole book about it, was really the moment when the British Empire starts to feel like it's on the downslope.
00:24:51.000
And, of course, it was in his great 1942 speech that was made at the Guildhall when he said, I did not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.
00:25:02.560
He was very, very aware that Britain was becoming weaker.
00:25:09.140
This was obviously clear with regard to the Quit India campaign of the Congress Party in India.
00:25:16.240
He was very much stood up against Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s.
00:25:21.920
He saw the way in which the United States was becoming richer and more powerful and was likely one day to take the place of the British Empire, and he didn't like it.
00:25:32.660
He preferred the Americans to take over from anyone else, the Germans or any fascist power.
00:25:39.740
But, nonetheless, he didn't like the idea of Britain's place in the sun being taken by anybody else.
00:25:46.840
This was a natural reaction, of course, of a British imperialist of his age and class and background.
00:25:53.680
And so he fights in World War I, and what happens then?
00:25:57.920
Is he, by the way, is he, from a public perception, you mentioned people continue to heckle him about the Dardanelles, etc.
00:26:03.620
But does his decision to go and fight rehabilitate him in the public consciousness in any way?
00:26:09.020
In a sense it does, and he does come back to become Minister of Munitions for the rest of the last part of the First World War.
00:26:20.580
And you look at the graphs of output of shells necessary and all the various other munitions necessary to win that war.
00:26:27.000
And they go straight, you know, off the charts, he worked so hard.
00:26:34.360
Then he became Minister of War and was in charge of demobilisation of the army.
00:26:40.860
But he also put his reputation, essentially damaged his reputation again,
00:26:46.840
because he was tremendously in favour of strangling, in his words,
00:26:52.580
and he had the most extraordinary mastery of the English language, as you can imagine,
00:27:00.500
He wanted to send the British army, or at least a proportion of the British army,
00:27:04.740
to help the white Russians try to destroy Bolshevism.
00:27:08.580
And he's been criticised an awful lot for that.
00:27:11.720
There's just a book last week that was published saying how terrible this was.
00:27:15.440
But frankly, I think it was a brave thing to do.
00:27:20.820
If you had managed to strangle Bolshevism and you hadn't had Soviet communism,
00:27:25.120
about 100 million people would be, their lives would have been saved,
00:27:30.820
who were murdered by communism of various types in the 20th century.
00:27:35.600
So actually, I think it was a very farsighted thing to have done.
00:27:38.560
But at the time, it was another thing that he was accused of having been disastrously wrong about.
00:27:47.260
When we look at his political career, he had a very interesting political career,
00:27:50.940
because there were many times he was actually criticised by both the Conservatives and Labour.
00:28:02.400
Well, he started off as a Conservative, like his father had been.
00:28:05.540
And then in 1904, over free trade, he became a Liberal.
00:28:09.100
And then in 1924, again over free trade, he went back to the Conservatives.
00:28:14.200
You know, he kept his belief, but the parties changed theirs, and he stuck to his beliefs.
00:28:21.480
But it looked very much as though he was just jumping ship,
00:28:24.580
because each time he jumped ship just before that party got into government.
00:28:28.700
And so he was thought of very often as being just an opportunist.
00:28:35.940
And he did make mistakes. That's the other thing.
00:28:38.260
He wrote to his wife when he was in the trenches.
00:28:40.140
He said, I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes.
00:28:45.380
We've already got the Russian Civil War, the Gallipoli campaign, which was the biggest of them.
00:28:51.700
But he was opposed to female suffrage at the beginning.
00:28:54.680
He was opposed to – he wanted to bring Britain into the gold standard at the wrong time,
00:29:03.420
He was in favour of the black and tans, trying to put down the Irish uprisings of the early 1920s as well,
00:29:15.620
And so all in all, you know, he did make mistakes.
00:29:18.080
But as I mentioned earlier, from each of those that I've mentioned, he learned his lesson.
00:29:22.020
So, from 1918, he returns after the First World War.
00:29:28.480
From being Minister of Munitions to the point that the First World War ended,
00:29:33.280
he then became Minister of War and Air as well.
00:29:38.820
So actually, the Royal Air Force was very much his idea.
00:29:42.600
And then after that, in 1924, he became the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
00:29:47.200
And he was not much of an economist, frankly, but nonetheless, he presided over the most difficult period
00:29:56.520
because it coincided with the outbreak of the general strike in 1926.
00:30:01.960
And he wanted to be as generous as possible to the mine workers who led that strike.
00:30:09.560
But nonetheless, it was a terribly difficult period.
00:30:16.920
The Conservatives had lost the subsequent general election.
00:30:20.800
And he fell out with the front bench, with the Conservative leadership over independence for India
00:30:31.340
And so let's go into that, because obviously that is, you know, that's a huge part of the story here.
00:30:36.680
Where did he lie when it came to this particular issue?
00:30:39.960
He very much thought that the British should not move towards what's called dominion status,
00:30:45.960
which is essentially self-government for India.
00:30:48.140
He thought that India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire,
00:30:52.100
that if you gave the majority Hindu population of India essentially the power over all Indians,
00:31:02.700
then it would be disastrous for the Indian princes, which ruled about a third of India at the time.
00:31:09.460
Also very bad for the Muslim minority in India, and also bad for the untouchables,
00:31:15.020
who he feared would be kept down even more than they were by Indian society at the time.
00:31:23.620
And so he opposed it and did everything he could to stop Indian self-government, but failed.
00:31:30.200
And the Indian Self-Government Act of 1935 passed against his opposition.
00:31:38.080
But were his fears actually realised, and obviously it was inevitable that India was going to self-government,
00:31:43.740
but were his fears actually correct as to what would happen?
00:31:46.960
Well, if you look at Mr Modi's way of ruling India at the moment,
00:31:51.800
and especially where the princes, where the Muslims and where the untouchables are in Indian society,
00:31:57.320
actually Churchill might have had a bit of a point, frankly.
00:32:00.340
And Andrew, it strikes me that this isn't strictly a Churchill question,
00:32:03.880
but I think it's important to flesh this out for all of us, including myself, to understand.
00:32:08.200
Francis said something which may or may not be true, but Indians and self-governance was inevitable,
00:32:14.440
which begs the question really, why was the British Empire at this point starting to essentially decline
00:32:22.320
decline and all of these conversations about self-governance here, independence there?
00:32:29.200
The major problem for the British Empire after the First World War was a financial one.
00:32:35.740
It had spent an enormous amount of money fighting that war.
00:32:40.320
And compared to countries like America, it had no resources.
00:32:45.300
It had sold off a lot of its assets during the war to continue fighting the war.
00:32:49.940
It was also morally demoralised because of the loss of an entire generation of essentially young men
00:32:58.700
who'd been killed, three quarters of a million of them, in the war.
00:33:03.840
It got bigger, actually, physically up until 1921, but it was hollowed out, essentially.
00:33:11.160
And then when the threats to India started, it seemed very much that the whole organisation
00:33:19.760
essentially was being run by, you know, more of a wilderness of mirrors, really,
00:33:25.940
than an empire of the kind that had been there 20 years previously.
00:33:31.300
Was there also a rising cynicism from the working classes to the upper classes
00:33:35.260
because of the debacle of the First World War, lions led by donkeys, etc.?
00:33:40.860
That was an important aspect, was that although the actual officers in the trenches themselves
00:33:48.120
had been incredibly brave, and the working classes admired their officers of their own units,
00:33:54.860
who died in greater proportion than the working classes did in that war,
00:34:00.520
also the high officers, the generals, who had come up with the grand strategy were not respected
00:34:10.060
because of the disastrous grand strategy that was adopted.
00:34:14.360
Now, there are a lot of historians, and to an extent I'm amongst them,
00:34:18.460
that tries to look at any other kind of grand strategy that could have won that war, frankly.
00:34:23.760
But nonetheless, yes, there was a sense that the officer class had let the working classes down,
00:34:34.120
but not the officer class in the trenches, but the ones back in the chateau.
00:34:38.300
So the empire is morally weakened, financially bankrupt, not bankrupt, but...
00:34:46.440
And also, one other aspect of it, which I didn't mention, also strategically outmaneuvered,
00:34:52.180
because you have Japan in the Far East, Italy in the Mediterranean, and Germany,
00:34:58.360
all coming up in the 1930s, and all, of course, joining with each other in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1937,
00:35:07.480
and posing three separate threats to the British Empire in three separate geographical areas.
00:35:13.860
So it's a very difficult position. Churchill is in the Conservative government, but he resigns over India.
00:35:22.520
1930. And this is just about Hitler and his Nazi party are about to take over in Germany.
00:35:30.560
So how does the next few years play out in the early 30s?
00:35:33.320
Well, the whole of the 1930s can be seen, really, as one decade of what he called the trawling tides of drift and surrender,
00:35:41.200
when the locusts ate. He was opposed to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
00:35:48.520
He made the most magnificent speeches, warning about exactly what was going to happen.
00:35:55.700
He tried to stop it from happening, and no one listened to him.
00:35:59.980
He was ridiculed. He was shouted down in the House of Commons.
00:36:03.260
He was attacked in the press. They tried to take away his seat. The Conservatives tried to deselect him for his parliamentary seat.
00:36:15.000
On the basis that he was warmongering, exactly.
00:36:17.520
And every single thing that he said turned out to be right, and everything that they said turned out to be wrong.
00:36:24.160
And you see that long time from the accession of Adolf Hitler to becoming the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933,
00:36:36.080
then through, obviously, the anti-Semitic laws that he passes, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936,
00:36:45.380
the Anschluss of 1938, the Munich crisis, of course, over the Sudetenland in 1938,
00:36:51.680
and then the horrors of marching into Prague in the March of 1939.
00:36:58.080
And by the end of 1939, after a whole decade of Churchill saying,
00:37:02.660
this is what is going to happen, finally, when he was proved right on the 15th of March 1939,
00:37:08.400
and everybody else was proved wrong, finally, the British people did actually start listening to Winston Churchill.
00:37:14.220
Andrew, I wanted to ask a question, which is, how many of those people were just incorrect and read the situation wrong,
00:37:23.500
which we can all do, and how many of them were Nazi sympathisers?
00:37:32.140
The British Union of Fascists was a party, but it was never an electoral force.
00:37:39.840
It never got anybody elected to Parliament, you know, under its own steam.
00:37:47.200
But a lot of people were good-natured people who hoped for the best.
00:37:53.040
They'd fought in the First World War and didn't want to see another war,
00:37:56.180
couldn't believe that the Germans would ever start another war.
00:38:00.000
They were people who couldn't believe that Hitler could be so evil as to want another war.
00:38:04.880
A lot of them were Christians who believed that the phrase appeasement was actually a positive thing.
00:38:12.720
There were people who thought that business was much more important
00:38:18.000
and the Germans would never go to war and destroy the capitalist economy and so on.
00:38:22.840
It was extraordinary, really, the number of people who were willing to just assume that the government was right
00:38:31.740
and that Winston Churchill was an insane warmonger.
00:38:36.460
Andrew, you alluded to it earlier, and being someone who was born in the Soviet Union,
00:38:42.480
I'm likely to bring this up naturally, but you mentioned Churchill's prescience about fascism
00:38:49.700
And you also earlier talked about his presence when it comes to the other terrible ideology
00:38:58.220
During the 30s, the true horror of the communist regime in Soviet Russia
00:39:03.000
is starting to become difficult to ignore, let's put it like this.
00:39:07.840
And Churchill is one of the people who is openly speaking about this at the time, is he not?
00:39:12.080
And again, there are quite a lot of people here in England and in the West more broadly
00:39:20.840
He was the leading voice of anti-communism in British politics in the 1930s.
00:39:27.060
Some of his greatest speeches were given about the horrors of what had been unleashed by Lenin and Trotsky
00:39:47.060
And of course, this continued all the way up until he recognised that the greater threat,
00:39:54.920
the more immediate threat at least, was from, the more dangerous threat was from Hitler.
00:39:59.920
And at that point, he was in favour of having an alliance with the Russians.
00:40:04.780
But the trouble is that Poland was in between Russia and Germany.
00:40:10.300
And so the only way in which the Russians could be brought to bear in an anti-Nazi envelopment,
00:40:17.760
essentially, was if the Poles agreed to it, which of course they would not do.
00:40:22.240
They fought against the Russians in 1920 and 21.
00:40:24.500
And they didn't want Russian troops on their soil and understandably so when one sees the rest of European history.
00:40:31.840
So it was an incredibly difficult situation at the time.
00:40:35.860
But Churchill did foresee the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939.
00:40:42.460
And of course, when Hitler did invade Russia, Churchill was the first person to say,
00:40:48.640
we must immediately ally with Russia, even though he knew that Stalin had done the most appalling crimes,
00:40:56.460
including, of course, killing the Polish officer corps at Katyn in 1940.
00:41:03.880
He had to be. In wartime, realpolitik, if you're to survive, is the only way to go forward.
00:41:10.440
But to give him his due, of course, after the Second World War, he was also the first person to have the guts
00:41:16.100
to actually say that what Stalin was doing in Eastern Europe was a threat to democracy there.
00:41:23.260
And he was, in his great Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, on the 5th of March 1946,
00:41:29.340
the first person to actually warn against Stalin.
00:41:33.440
And let's just touch on Neville Chamberlain, because he's painted now as this, you know,
00:41:38.580
weak, myopic, slightly pathetic figure. Is that unfair?
00:41:42.500
Very unfair, yeah. He was a very tough and, in his day, incredibly popular politician.
00:41:48.900
He probably would have won a landslide victory at any time had he called a general election in 1939
00:41:55.660
or late 1938. He, as a domestic politician, had been a really tough minister in the government.
00:42:05.160
He'd been a senior minister for 20 years. He was the son of Joseph Chamberlain,
00:42:09.160
one of the great Victorian politicians. So, yes, no, it's wrong to think of him as some kind of weak,
00:42:15.240
vacillating character. He might have been better if he had been, by the way,
00:42:18.360
because he might have been able to have been pushed off the policy of appeasement,
00:42:22.640
which he clung on to even after it became obvious that it wasn't working.
00:42:29.180
When he came back from Munich and waved the piece of paper in the air,
00:42:34.960
he truly believed that he had personally, through his own diplomacy,
00:42:40.200
managed to save peace for his time and told the cabinet as much.
00:42:45.820
You know, he was a very vain man in that sense.
00:42:49.540
Well, ultimately, yes, because by the time of the move into Prague in March 1939,
00:43:00.020
he still had to be forced into giving the guarantee to Poland,
00:43:07.820
which, of course, was the trigger that started the Second World War.
00:43:11.180
So, Andrew, if he wasn't motivated by weakness,
00:43:14.180
what was at the basis of the policy of appeasement?
00:43:17.140
Well, first of all, it was the sense that we couldn't fight Italy, Japan and Germany
00:43:27.420
The Americans were in full-on isolationist mode.
00:43:32.120
The America First movement was tremendously powerful at that time.
00:43:37.220
The Russians at the time, of course, from the August of 1939 onwards,
00:43:49.920
And so we saw the strategic danger of actually going to war against three big powers
00:43:57.380
right the way around the world, from the Far East to the Channel,
00:44:04.340
And so that was one of the major reasons behind appeasement.
00:44:07.860
The other one, and this we have to give Neville Chamberlain his due,
00:44:11.960
was that major advances were being made in terms of radar
00:44:16.740
and the latest types of hurricane and spitfire.
00:44:23.060
And we needed to make as many as we possibly could before war broke out.
00:44:27.300
And that period, the year between Munich and the outbreak of war,
00:44:31.920
between the September of 1938 and the September of 1939,
00:44:35.060
we did build enough hurricanes and spitfires to win the Battle of Britain in 1940.
00:44:42.600
Now, we didn't know that that was going to happen, of course.
00:44:46.760
But it was very much a plan to try to create as much as we could in terms of armaments.
00:44:56.580
that the Germans created much more in that year than we did.
00:44:59.520
But nonetheless, that was an important aspect of it as well.
00:45:02.760
So I have to say, I suddenly find myself rather persuaded by the argument for appeasement,
00:45:09.740
If you've got a, yes, the British Empire, but as we've discussed,
00:45:12.720
bankrupt and morally quite weakened, no allies.
00:45:17.280
Well, no, the thing was that, of course, they should have got allies.
00:45:22.780
The Chamberlain government was totally uninterested in trying to persuade the Americans.
00:45:26.100
It was totally uninteresting in trying to get the Russians on board.
00:45:30.320
Now, that would have been difficult because the Russians wanted the Baltic states.
00:45:33.600
And we were in no position as a democracy to hand over the Baltic states
00:45:40.020
But we should have been rearming so much earlier in the 1930s,
00:45:49.320
and also obviously making much more of a forward movement in Europe itself.
00:45:58.700
And we didn't send any troops to the European continent
00:46:09.040
I can see why maybe some of Churchill's arguments were falling on deaf ears
00:46:16.080
we're one, yes, empire, but we've got all these challenges
00:46:20.900
It's much wiser to avoid a fight at any cost almost.
00:46:25.360
It must have been quite difficult for Churchill to try and make inroads against that.
00:46:37.480
and the French and British invaded or attacked, at least, in the West,
00:46:43.020
firstly, there's a chance that Hitler might have fallen anyway.
00:46:46.460
Some generals said they were going to overthrow him.
00:46:49.500
Secondly, there's no certainty that he would have been able to have won that war,
00:46:59.320
he had the entirety of the German Reich up to mobilisation point
00:47:07.740
and then in the May 1940, crush the British and French in the West.
00:47:12.820
Andrew, I got told this, and maybe this is completely wrong,
00:47:15.960
but Hitler also had quite a favourable impression of the British.
00:47:28.580
No, he didn't like us because he was jealous of our empire,
00:47:36.100
and the way in which very, very small numbers of British troops
00:47:44.740
There was only a few thousand, tens of thousands,
00:47:57.240
He was also impressed by the sheer scale and size of the empire,
00:48:00.960
which he would be because it was the largest empire the world had ever seen.
00:48:09.080
he would rant against, well, certainly Winston Churchill,
00:48:13.880
as you can imagine, but also the British as a people.
00:48:16.960
And so Neville Chamberlain's pursued this policy of appeasement.
00:48:22.520
It's becoming quite obvious to everybody that this isn't going to work.
00:48:28.700
considering he's this tough, uncompromising character?
00:48:36.600
over the defeat that the British and French had suffered in Norway.
00:48:39.800
And it was held on the 7th and 8th of May 1940.
00:48:45.560
And because so few Conservatives and supporters,
00:49:00.740
usually the majority was much bigger than that.
00:49:03.080
And so he was forced to resign on the morning of the 10th of May 1940.
00:49:11.220
And Churchill became the Prime Minister on the 10th of May 1940.
00:49:15.480
He was called by King George VI to go to Buckingham Palace in the evening.
00:49:23.680
purely by coincidence, invaded the Low Countries
00:49:35.180
when he became leader of this country, was he at that point?
00:49:48.600
that he felt as if he were walking with destiny
00:49:50.840
and that all of his past life had been but a preparation
00:49:56.740
All of the things he'd done in the First World War,
00:49:58.780
all of the amazing jobs that he'd held up till that point,
00:50:03.220
he held all but one of the great offices of state.
00:50:08.700
His whole career up until that point had, in a way, been a preparation.
00:50:16.560
And the extraordinary thing was that when he was only 16 years old
00:50:24.600
there shall be great upheavals, great struggles in our lives.
00:50:29.080
I shall be called upon to save England and save the empire.
00:50:34.640
And then half a century later, exactly that happened.
00:50:41.080
I mean, it sounds like something out of a film, really,
00:50:43.200
which is why so many people have made movies and TV series about him.
00:50:52.240
Britain, to be honest, it doesn't look like we're going to win.
00:50:56.800
No, it looks very much like we're going to lose.
00:50:58.680
In the first two weeks, we are pushed off the continent.
00:51:03.600
The German blitzkrieg, a completely new form of warfare,
00:51:07.420
in which their bombers and their tanks and their infantry
00:51:33.260
Hitler could have captured the whole of the British Expeditionary Force
00:51:35.960
if he hadn't executed his halt order of the 24th of May.
00:51:52.900
The French have essentially been knocked out of the war.
00:51:59.580
and I think I know the answer to this question,
00:52:15.140
was specifically going to see it through and to win.
00:52:30.860
He made speeches giving the British people reason to hope.
00:52:38.260
when one looks at them logically and rationally,
00:52:40.700
but it wasn't a logical and rational moment, frankly.
00:52:43.640
It was one in which you had to have self-belief.
00:52:48.400
And one of the things we haven't touched on so far,
00:53:02.160
not just leader who gives speeches and inspires people,
00:53:16.120
was the biggest government department in the world
00:53:22.280
It had well over one and a half million people working for it.
00:53:28.880
and therefore in charge of the entire British economy
00:53:37.860
was easily the biggest Navy in the world as well.
00:53:44.540
And the reason was that he was a real micromanager.
00:53:58.260
So he actually knew what people on the shop floor
00:54:08.560
you know, every morning bounced out of bed early
00:54:13.860
And this was partly, obviously, because of his ambition.
00:54:41.580
And so he was able to put people at their calm.
00:54:53.680
especially considering how many crises he was involved in
00:55:04.920
Yeah, he would, if he felt that people weren't connecting
00:55:08.740
with each other, he would make sure that they turned up.
00:55:17.180
But nonetheless, it was something that he would give them
00:55:21.380
and he would make sure that people met other people
00:55:28.020
He was very, very good when it comes to everything
00:55:38.560
The British Expeditionary Force has been forced back
00:55:41.100
to Britain having lost tens of thousands of soldiers captured.
00:55:51.400
Germany seems incredibly powerful with its new tactics.
00:56:04.420
But it's supplying grain and oil and all sorts of other things.
00:56:12.860
I think one very important point to point out is, of course,
00:56:21.700
So we have the millions of people who join the Indian Army,
00:56:27.300
which becomes the largest volunteer army in the history of mankind,
00:56:33.240
We have the Australians who are superb fighters,
00:56:43.320
but also are able to ship huge amounts of grain and so on
00:56:47.840
across the Atlantic to Britain to keep feeding Britain.
00:57:00.340
fight in North Africa and in various other parts of the world,
00:57:11.760
So the empire is a huge, huge supporter of Britain
00:57:28.280
and it's inevitable that it will collapse eventually,
00:57:32.060
And how willing are the Indians to go and sign up
00:57:49.600
The Maoris, for example, have their chiefs come together
00:57:54.440
even though they're on the other side of the world from Germany.
00:58:15.960
So, yes, it's a great imperial family, essentially,
00:58:20.940
that comes together to try to fight the horrors of fascism.
00:58:41.900
You know, that makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
00:58:51.580
wasn't interested in getting involved in a European war.
00:59:03.580
that moment where he moves into Bohemia and Moravia
00:59:06.640
and then takes the whole of the rest of Czechoslovakia
00:59:22.160
that all he wanted to do was rip up the Versailles Treaty.
00:59:25.240
No, he was taking Slavs into the Reich as well.
00:59:30.740
the Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and so on
00:59:33.340
all recognised that Hitler was exactly the kind of evil conqueror
00:59:39.520
that Winston Churchill had been mourning about.
00:59:48.580
At what point did we see the Germans start to get pushed back
01:00:05.040
it became clear that the RAF had won the battle against the Luftwaffe
01:00:09.720
and that the invasion, therefore, wasn't going to take place.
01:00:25.380
because you can't invade across 22 miles of salt water
01:00:38.300
And they didn't have operational air superiority
01:00:49.260
so a full two and a half years after the Battle of Britain
01:00:53.680
that the Germans start to get seriously defeated on land.
01:01:00.600
at the Battle of El Alamein at the end of 1942.
01:01:05.460
And how much of that was because the Americans then got involved?
01:01:25.140
And also, of course, in the same month, November 1942,
01:01:29.000
the Americans also landed a quarter of a million men
01:01:48.180
Oh, of course, because by this point it's been attacked.
01:01:53.740
is that although it wasn't attacked by Germany...
01:01:57.780
...and Hitler didn't declare war against America
01:02:05.840
the Roosevelt administration took the most incredibly
01:02:18.360
even though they hadn't been attacked by Germany,
01:02:21.760
they'd only been attacked by Japan in the Pacific,
01:02:40.940
who came up with what's called the Germany first policy.
01:02:59.080
I always see it as a ridiculous thing to do by the Japanese.
01:03:23.940
And the way to smash that was to take on the Americans
01:03:27.620
and steal the oil of the Netherlands East Indies,
01:03:34.220
And the only way to do that was to attack America.
01:03:36.900
It was, of course, an ultimately incredibly stupid
01:04:09.220
the war looks like it's unwinnable at this point
01:04:43.400
which allowed us to buy enormous amounts of munitions
01:04:50.340
What they obviously didn't want to do at that time
01:05:02.300
And yet, when Adolf Hitler did declare war on them,
01:05:17.840
as opposed to just concentrating on the Japanese.
01:05:21.080
Of course, they did fight back very much against the Japanese.
01:06:20.600
against fascism and, frankly, evil on the other.
01:07:21.160
However, he had four separate bouts of pneumonia,
01:07:25.600
one of which very nearly killed him in Carthage in 1943.
01:07:29.880
So he really was showing tremendous physical courage.
01:07:39.180
as he had shown moral courage throughout his career.
01:07:42.260
And let's touch on the things that people say about him,
01:08:01.940
and the war cabinet if you were permanently drunk.
01:08:21.720
that would start at about six o'clock in the evening
01:08:30.380
told me that these were what he called mouthwash.
01:08:43.340
because no alcoholic could have drunk that much.
01:08:53.980
was that Hitler apparently was on all sorts of drugs
01:09:00.120
So Hitler was on the other end of the spectrum,
01:09:14.360
would set out what he wanted the meeting to discuss.
01:09:22.860
which were all taken down by the stenographers,
01:09:31.360
he would sum up and not change his mind at all.
01:09:35.660
but then he would not have taken their point of view.
01:09:45.640
And if the arguments were better than his arguments,
01:09:49.120
And that obviously is the much more democratic,
01:09:59.480
You mentioned that one of the lessons he learned
01:10:03.760
was that his opinion wasn't always the right one
01:10:06.280
and that he ought to listen to the professionals,
01:10:10.360
How did that manifest itself during World War II?
01:10:12.920
Oh, well, he would have some of the chiefs of staff
01:10:28.760
saying, no, I disagree with you, Prime Minister.
01:10:36.740
Sometimes Winston Churchill would burst into tears
01:10:40.420
But if the chiefs of staff all stuck to their original beliefs,
01:10:45.400
as they did over, say, the Sumatra plan of March 1943
01:11:02.300
you know, because they did not make any huge errors.
01:11:05.580
Of course, there were mistakes and defeats and problems and so on.
01:11:10.700
But the chiefs of staff overall didn't make the kind of errors
01:11:14.160
that they would have made if they had been putty in Churchill's hands.
01:11:24.720
how much was Churchill involved in those decisions?
01:11:33.900
which was essentially okayed by the chiefs of staff.
01:11:39.180
The Dresden one in particular on the 13th and 14th of February 1945
01:11:45.080
was an easy decision for the chiefs of staff to take
01:11:53.040
to smash the railway nodes that were bringing German forces back
01:11:58.300
from the west to shore up the defence of Nazi positions in the east.
01:12:23.580
They're much more like 20,000 rather than 200,000 people killed
01:12:29.040
The reason they were so high was because the Gauleiters of Dresden
01:12:38.800
But nonetheless, I guess what France's question is getting at,
01:12:44.800
when we see conflicts that are ongoing currently
01:12:47.160
where there's a constant discussion about civilian casualties
01:12:57.260
dropped a hell of a lot of munitions on Nazi Germany.
01:13:05.960
within the British government and armed forces about that,
01:13:09.120
or was it just seen as, look, we've got to win the war,
01:13:13.920
The Church of England had several bishops who were opposed to it
01:13:17.680
and who said so in debates in the House of Lords.
01:13:21.680
This got very little traction amongst the public.
01:13:24.120
The public, frankly, who had taken the Blitz, of course,
01:13:35.060
They were very much in favour of giving it back to the Germans.
01:13:39.600
As it was, we lost over 50,000 killed civilians
01:13:52.400
That's what happens in war when you start a war
01:13:54.500
and you try to kill as many innocent civilians as possible.
01:14:00.880
I mean, obviously, there is a war going on at the moment in Gaza
01:14:04.080
where much the same kind of thing is happening.
01:14:13.400
But it's absolutely essential to remember who were the aggressors.
01:14:17.740
And it's one of the reasons I brought in the modern situation.
01:14:22.640
And to think about the decision, you alluded to the fact
01:14:29.480
that the general public, frankly, wanted to give it back to the Germans.
01:14:33.760
Was there an element of the aerial bombardment of Germany
01:14:45.140
But actually, when you look at the graphs of the increase in munitions productions,
01:14:51.660
by the August of 1943, all of the graphs come, they basically plateau off.
01:14:58.620
Because the Allied bombing campaign, it wasn't just the RAF, of course,
01:15:02.800
it was also the US AAF, are able to take out the factories necessary
01:15:10.440
in so many cases that mean that, yes, the Germans continue
01:15:15.000
to increase military production, but nothing like the same extent
01:15:24.720
So it really is an attempt to hit the wall-bearing factories,
01:15:29.060
the oil refineries, the tank production factories,
01:15:34.860
Was it seen really as a way of just expediting the end of this conflict?
01:15:41.920
You try and shorten the war by any means possible.
01:15:45.500
The RAF and the US AAF believe that they could actually win the war
01:15:51.760
And if you also, what was called, it's a rather horrible phrase,
01:15:55.340
but nonetheless, sort of bloodless phrase, de-house,
01:15:59.200
but if you also, at the same time as hitting the factories,
01:16:02.940
de-house the civilian population, you make it much more difficult
01:16:06.940
for them also to work in the factories to produce the necessary munitions
01:16:13.960
So it was just a very simple and effective way of bringing the country
01:16:20.720
And if we had not done it, you could well have found that the Germans
01:16:25.460
could have carried on fighting for many months, indeed possibly even years longer,
01:16:30.880
and if that had happened, many more millions of people would have died.
01:16:34.580
And at what point did they find out about the concentration camps?
01:16:42.800
There were overflights, of course, where reconnaissance planes were able to take,
01:16:50.160
as we discovered after the war, a very good photograph of the actual ramp at Auschwitz.
01:16:56.260
There's a photograph, if you visited Auschwitz today, you see this Allied photograph.
01:17:03.960
But at the time, they didn't know what it was, tragically.
01:17:06.920
Then there were some people in 1942 who actually came back, very, very brave Poles
01:17:16.380
Certainly by 1944, by the time of the mass movement of Hungarians to Auschwitz,
01:17:24.340
the Western Allies had a pretty good idea that something truly monstrous was taking place.
01:17:31.120
Winston Churchill said to Anthony Eden, you know, invoke me if necessary,
01:17:35.740
but we need to bomb the railways going from Hungary to Auschwitz.
01:17:40.880
But the trouble is that bombing a railway is very difficult,
01:17:43.780
as we've discovered at Dresden, apart from anything else.
01:17:47.040
It's a really tricky thing to do because it's in a straight line.
01:17:52.800
And so what happened essentially was that the Americans didn't want to undertake
01:17:58.760
the daylight bombings, highly loss-producing, and the RAF used to bomb at night.
01:18:14.140
Was that the one thing that really ended the Nazi regime,
01:18:20.800
No, no, no, no. The thing that ended the Nazi regime was D-Day in the West,
01:18:26.360
where you have a million men by D plus 30 landing on in Western Europe,
01:18:32.580
and Operation Bagration in the East, where in July and August of 1944,
01:18:40.940
the Red Army kills, captures or wounds over half a million German soldiers,
01:18:47.400
510,000 German soldiers. And then it smashes essentially Army Group Center
01:18:53.060
in Belarus and marches on to Berlin. The war was not won by the combined bomber offensive,
01:19:02.820
although that did help enormously. It was won by fighting on the ground in Europe,
01:19:11.340
Well, I'm glad you said that because my Soviet ancestors would not accept
01:19:14.440
the telling of the story of France's attempts. And in fact, there are historians who've argued
01:19:18.700
that really Germany lost the war in the attempt to capture Moscow, which failed and stalled.
01:19:25.580
Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting historical discussion. I go into this in my book,
01:19:31.440
The Storm of War. Is it the failure to capture Moscow in the October and November of 1941?
01:19:39.860
You could argue that it's Stalingrad, of course, between August 1942 and the fall in the February
01:19:48.460
of 1943. Some would argue that Hitler's counterattack at Kursk in the Kursk salient in the July of 1943,
01:19:58.860
and the failure of that, is the key moment. By the time of Operation Bagration,
01:20:03.920
you know, the German armies very much are on the retreat. But yeah, your Russian ancestors can take
01:20:11.960
great pride because of the five, for every five Germans killed in combat, by which I don't mean
01:20:18.900
bomb from the air, not that half a million figure we mentioned earlier, but the half a million,
01:20:24.880
sorry, for every five Germans killed on a battlefield, four died on the Eastern Front.
01:20:30.400
And it cost the Russians some 27 million people.
01:20:33.600
Exactly. And the reason I bring it up is, I imagine that for Churchill, the pragmatic necessity
01:20:41.080
of doing a deal with the devil, Joseph Stalin, would have been simultaneously a very difficult
01:20:47.900
and a very simple decision at once. Is that fair to say?
01:20:50.940
Yes, that is actually. The moment that he heard of Hitler's invasion of Russia,
01:20:56.600
Operation Barbarossa on the 22nd of June 1941, he immediately went to the House of Commons
01:21:03.180
and declared the alliance with the Soviet Union. I mean, it's an amazing thing for him to do.
01:21:10.200
This man who had been a powerful, the most powerful anti-communist advocate since 1917,
01:21:17.360
since the Russian Revolution, comes out and says, I would, in fact, he makes a joke of it,
01:21:22.260
saying that he would make a positive reference to the devil in the House of Commons if the devil were
01:21:29.680
to invade Russia. And he goes to the House of Commons and says that if Hitler invaded hell,
01:21:38.520
then he would make a positive reference to Satan in the House of Commons. So he had this very much
01:21:46.160
this sense that he puts his country's best interests first and swallows essentially for the remainder of
01:21:56.180
the war his hatred of communism and is right to do so because, of course, the most important thing
01:22:04.360
And the reason I bring that up is that I think most even people like us who are not well educated in
01:22:10.640
history will be familiar with towards the end of World War II, Germany's being enveloped from both
01:22:17.160
sides and eventually succumbs, Hitler kills himself on the bone, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:22:20.700
What's interesting to me is there must have been a calculation at some point where Churchill and
01:22:26.600
the Americans would have gone, we're going to win this war. And then we've got another problem,
01:22:33.100
which is we've won this war with Joseph Stalin, with whom we've had to do a deal with the devil,
01:22:40.780
Well, that comes by the Yalta Conference, of course, of January and February 1945. So they
01:22:48.680
agree essentially to believe Stalin's lies about the integrity and independence of Poland. That's one
01:22:58.540
of the things they need to do essentially if they're to keep the alliance together until the moment when
01:23:05.240
the Germans are ultimately defeated in May of 1945. It's a very difficult moment. You can argue,
01:23:14.560
and historians do, that they were being sort of deliberately naive, or they were just following
01:23:21.960
realpolitik, which is what I believe. You know, if you've got an alliance with somebody who is worse
01:23:28.400
than the person you've got the alliance with, then you have to see that alliance through.
01:23:32.780
Because I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is, I'm just curious, as a historian, what other
01:23:37.760
options you think there may have been available? Because if you look at it objectively, World War II was
01:23:43.520
started in defence of Poland and Eastern Europe from being occupied by Hitler. All of that territory,
01:23:48.840
and way more, ends up falling to a dictator who's almost as bad.
01:23:53.300
That's right. Yeah, that is the ultimate sort of irony of World War II. There are others, you know,
01:24:01.880
he starts believing that the British Empire needs to be protected, and we wind up so poor and poverty
01:24:11.320
stricken and weak that the Empire has to be given away. He is an anti-socialist, and yet the whole of
01:24:20.440
Eastern Europe is dominated by communism. There are lots of ironies of the Second World War. But the
01:24:26.440
central one, which is that Adolf Hitler had to be stopped, Nazism had to be extirpated and destroyed,
01:24:34.280
that's the one that I think Britain and the Western powers have an untarnishable glory in being the
01:24:45.400
people who started from the first day of the war and went on to the last day of the war. And that's
01:24:51.160
something that Canadians and Australians, New Zealanders and so on, Indians, are able, I think,
01:24:57.160
to take great pride along with the British for.
01:25:00.120
Were there any other options at Yalta? Could they have done anything to save Western Europe?
01:25:03.720
Well, yeah, there was this thing called Operation Unthinkable. This wasn't at Yalta.
01:25:10.120
There was nothing you could do at Yalta because by that stage the Soviets had millions of boots on
01:25:14.840
the ground in Poland and Eastern Europe. But by the time of Potsdam, of course, the United States had
01:25:21.800
the nuclear bomb, but there was simply no way they could have threatened to use it against their Soviet
01:25:27.000
allies who had lost 27 million, a million human beings, and against the Germans.
01:25:39.320
Uncle Joe Stalin was very popular in the West, of course. There was simply no way that the nuclear
01:25:46.280
bomb could have been threatened against the Russians. And of course, you still had to win the war in the
01:25:54.280
East against Japan. And the Russians promised to go to war three months to the day after the end
01:26:01.960
of the war in Europe, and they carried out that promise. So, no, the opportunities were non-existent, frankly.
01:26:11.160
And moving over to the war in the East, some of the most brutal and horrific fighting was in
01:26:16.120
countries like Burma, where we suffered horrific losses. How much was Churchill involved in the
01:26:23.560
discussions about dropping the nuclear bombs on Japan?
01:26:26.440
Oh, very closely involved. It was an Anglo-American decision. Absolutely. He was as much in favor of it as
01:26:33.720
Truman. He had signed the original agreements with FDR about the joint decision making. A lot of British
01:26:45.000
scientists were, of course, involved in what was going on in New Mexico in creating the bomb. And it wasn't until
01:26:57.400
after the war, in the March of 1946, that the Americans moved to essentially make the nuclear bomb an
01:27:05.640
American thing and cut the British out of the decision making process.
01:27:09.400
So, he thought it was a necessary evil to bring Japan, essentially humiliate them and decimate them?
01:27:19.000
Well, to defeat them, essentially. He wasn't that worried about humiliation and decimation so much as
01:27:24.920
their surrender. And it did take place, of course, within days of the Nagasaki bomb being dropped.
01:27:31.480
And before we move on and we talk about other things, what was Churchill's impression of Hitler?
01:27:38.120
Was this someone that he actually, despite, obviously, the awful atrocities the man committed,
01:27:43.000
was this someone that he had a grudging amount of respect for?
01:27:46.120
No, no. He thought of Hitler as being completely useless as a strategist. He thought at the very
01:27:52.520
beginning of the war, when Hitler was doing extremely well, that maybe he did have a sixth sense.
01:27:59.080
He worried that he did. But it soon became very clear when he made mistake after mistake, especially
01:28:06.120
in North Africa, the timing of the invasion of Russia, and then one mistake after another in Russia,
01:28:14.360
that actually he was a pretty useless strategist. And he made lots of jokes about Corporal Schickel
01:28:20.200
Gruber and what a bad strategist he was. And in fact, when in July 19, the 20th of July 1944,
01:28:28.280
the Germans tried to kill Hitler and blow him up. And Churchill went on the radio and said,
01:28:35.080
well, we can be pleased that they failed because of all the strategic mistakes that Corporal Schickel
01:28:41.000
Gruber is making. So no, he didn't have a high respect for him. He thought of him as a common
01:28:47.320
gutter snipe. He called him at one point, caucus boss. He has some absolutely magnificent phraseology
01:28:54.840
for Hitler, which he unleashed. Even better phraseology for Mussolini, actually, as well.
01:29:07.800
Yes. Overall, they certainly were. Because Hitler, as I mentioned, didn't listen to many of his top
01:29:16.440
generals. He had people like Gerd von Rundstedt and Erwin Rommel, Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian. These
01:29:26.360
generals who were far better strategists than he, people who had gone to staff college, who had been
01:29:33.960
officers in the Great War, and who were, you know, very significant and impressive commanders in the
01:29:41.640
field. And they would go and talk to Hitler. As I say, we have every word spoken in the Führer
01:29:47.800
conferences. And Hitler would just stick to his original ideas about what he wanted. He also
01:29:56.120
became a terrible micromanager, much, much worse than Churchill. Churchill came back as the war
01:30:01.880
progressed and was able to see things in the round. Whereas Hitler would concentrate on where individual
01:30:08.680
regiments were trying to capture individual villages deep in Russia, which was, of course,
01:30:14.680
a ridiculous way to fight a war. So when one looks at the different ways that the two men
01:30:23.880
dealt with decision-making, they're very, very different.
01:30:26.280
And do you think part of it as well, why Churchill was a far more competent leader,
01:30:31.000
is the fact that he was much more emotionally stable than Hitler?
01:30:34.200
No, it wasn't just that. And by the way, he was a very emotional man. He burst into tears some 50 times
01:30:40.200
during the Second World War. You would get very emotional. He wasn't, in that sense,
01:30:44.200
a stiff upper-lipped Victorian. He was a much more sort of Regency aristocratic figure who wore his
01:30:50.920
heart on his sleeve. No, what it was was that he was far more intelligent than Hitler. And he had spent
01:30:58.120
a lifetime thinking about grand strategy ever since he had been taught it when he was at Sandhurst. He had,
01:31:06.280
of course, in the First World War, been thinking about and been involved in grand strategy. Not always
01:31:11.240
successfully, as we discover from the Dardanelles. But nonetheless, he was also involved in very
01:31:17.240
successful parts of it. And he was a person who wrote a lot of history. One of the reasons I'm
01:31:24.200
proud to be an historian was that Winston Churchill was an historian. He was able to look at the problems
01:31:30.280
of the day through the lens of history. And he also was somebody who would listen to his strategists
01:31:39.000
and take their advice and not overrule them. So he had all of these enormous advantages that Hitler
01:31:46.360
chose to throw away. And what did he make of Stalin?
01:31:48.920
Well, interestingly, Stalin actually came round to the Western way of making war, the deliberative
01:31:56.920
way, the interactive way, rather than the way he started off. At the time of Operation Barbarossa,
01:32:05.400
he had something akin to a mental breakdown and went back to his dacha and couldn't be heard from at
01:32:13.800
And by the way, just to add something, when they arrived, he thought they were there to arrest him.
01:32:19.160
Yeah, absolutely. And to liquidate him. Exactly. And so he was surprised and very pleasantly surprised
01:32:27.240
when they turned to him and said, you know, you are our leader and you've got to save us.
01:32:33.080
And what he then did was to listen. I mean, he was a dictator, of course. But nonetheless,
01:32:38.520
he listened to men like Zhukov and Rokosovsky and Ivan Konev and the great Russian marshals.
01:32:46.360
And when the great battles that we mentioned earlier of Stalingrad and Moscow and Kursk and so on,
01:32:52.680
and the Battle of Berlin were fought, they were fought by the marshals interacting in a rational
01:33:04.120
and logical way with Stalin. And he didn't go down the Hitler route, which he perfectly easily could
01:33:09.960
have, of course, because he was a paranoid dictator. But just on the Stalin thing, Churchill and Stalin
01:33:17.560
met on several occasions at these conferences. Do we know what Churchill made of Stalin?
01:33:22.920
I'm afraid he liked him. As you can tell, I'm an admirer of Winston Churchill. And I'm sorry to say
01:33:33.480
that he got on very well with the most evil man apart from Hitler. He had a bit of a drinking
01:33:40.920
competition with him at the Kremlin, the first time they met in the August of 1942. Then he got on very
01:33:48.600
well with him again in the October of 1944. He visited Moscow both times, of course. They also
01:33:55.320
met at Tehran and Yalta and Potsdam. And there was one moment where Stalin said that he was going to
01:34:04.440
shoot 50,000 German officers out of hand as soon as they were captured. And Churchill got up from the
01:34:10.120
table and marched out and refused to interact. But other than that, I'm afraid they got on well. He
01:34:17.880
believed he could out drink Stalin in vodka. Very interesting. Well, Andrew, it's been such an
01:34:25.640
interesting discussion of the biography of Winston Churchill. And we wanted to bring it a little bit
01:34:30.280
into a conversation about his legacy and how people talk about him. Now, we've obviously seen an attempt
01:34:38.040
to change the narrative, let's put it like this, or to perhaps drag his legacy out of the historical
01:34:45.240
context in which it exists. And as you well know, his statue just down the road here in Parliament
01:34:50.360
Square was defaced with the words Churchill was a racist and all of this. And by the way, based on
01:34:55.720
what you were saying earlier, I think by the standards of the modern day, a kind of Victorian
01:35:03.080
racial superiority by our standards today would be absolutely considered that way. Absolutely. No, no,
01:35:09.000
in today's world, his views are obscene and absurd, of course, also. But what he didn't know was the
01:35:20.440
scientific underpinning that we have, whereby we know that racism, biological racism is obscene and
01:35:28.360
absurd. They believed in a Darwinian form of scientific racism, which is despicable to us today, of course.
01:35:38.120
But I think to blacken his memory because of something that was considered a scientific fact
01:35:46.840
at the time that he was living is pretty strange. It's a sort of unhistorical way, ahistorical way,
01:35:54.840
really, of approaching people in the past. Well, this is quite what I was going to ask you,
01:36:00.360
which is, I don't know what you make as a historian of the fact that people seem to have forgotten that
01:36:05.960
there was a different time in which values were different, scientific understanding.
01:36:11.080
You see, I wonder whether they do genuinely think that, or whether or not it's just a political
01:36:17.800
thing, where they impose ideological stances. And they know perfectly well that actually they
01:36:25.560
don't really make much sense logically. But they don't care because they want a grandstand, want to,
01:36:30.840
you know, use a spray can to make a political point, essentially. And they know that it is infuriating
01:36:42.520
and hurtful, really, to a generation of people, our grandparents and parents' generation, who remember
01:36:48.760
the Second World War. It's also, of course, very stupid in a way, because the people who had Hitler
01:36:58.120
won the war, had Churchill not been there to ensure that we fought on in 1940, had the Germans
01:37:05.960
successfully invaded, had they managed to establish the Third Reich in Britain and elsewhere, you know,
01:37:13.000
the people that would have come off worst were not the whites. And they ultimately would have had a
01:37:19.800
terrible, terrible time, of course, white British people. But compared to their ghastly time, what
01:37:29.560
would have happened to non-white people in a Nazi world would have been far worse.
01:37:35.000
And I think this is such an important point because people seem to miss this when they denigrate
01:37:41.000
Churchill and they say that he was this evil man. And you go, really? What was the alternative?
01:37:49.800
The alternative was truly horrific. When one thinks of the way that the Nazis treated every
01:37:57.480
non-Aryan people. And not just the Nazis, you know, the Japanese killed some 17% of the Filipinos,
01:38:09.880
for example. You know, if that had happened in India, with the 300 million people in India,
01:38:14.760
that would have led to the deaths of 50 million Indians. But fortunately, the British Empire and the
01:38:21.240
Indian forces of the British Empire held the Japanese back in North East India and they didn't manage to
01:38:29.640
get into India. You know, it would have been for all of the subject peoples, the native peoples,
01:38:37.640
you call them what you like, of the British Empire, much, much worse if Nazism had prevailed. And one of
01:38:45.080
the reasons it didn't prevail was Winston Churchill.
01:38:48.520
And what can we learn from this man, this incredible figure in history?
01:38:52.120
Oh, so much, so much. I mean, his wit, his charm, his intelligence, his quotations,
01:38:59.240
the things he said about the things that matter, about politics and about freedom and liberty in
01:39:06.680
the world. Those are the most important things. Then there's a lot of things about life, actually,
01:39:12.280
and about resilience and about resilience and the need for courage. He said of courage that it was
01:39:19.560
the most important of all the human values because it underpins all the rest. And you see him again and
01:39:26.600
again and again showing his moral courage as well as his physical courage. And he gives an example in his
01:39:37.320
own life. He is somebody who is willing to explain all the time what he's doing. He never hid his
01:39:49.320
light under a bushel. He wrote these 37 books, which are all of them still worth reading, all of them,
01:39:56.040
which is an incredible thing considering he started writing in the 19th century. And he was somebody who
01:40:03.960
had this extraordinary foresight. Not only was he able to tell before the First World War that the
01:40:09.400
Germans were going to cause a great threat to the balance of power in Europe, but before the Second
01:40:18.920
World War and after the Second World War, he warned against Nazism and Soviet communism, the sort of
01:40:25.400
two twin totalitarian threats of the 20th century. So there is so much still to learn from him. And the
01:40:32.120
good thing is that when you write about him in the book that I wrote about him, it's just such fun,
01:40:37.080
because every four or five pages or so, he comes up with a witticism or an aperçu or some kind of insight
01:40:44.280
that your jaw drops. And he was also very intelligent with the way that he dealt with
01:40:51.400
Germany post-war as well. They didn't make the same mistakes as they made in 1918.
01:40:57.080
Exactly. Well, they did split Germany, of course, which they hadn't done in 1918. They split Germany into two.
01:41:03.240
But they made sure that the western half of Germany was democratic. And when Stalin tried to
01:41:10.840
to suck Berlin into the Soviet more in 1948, the British and Americans stopped them from doing that.
01:41:23.320
And eventually, as a direct result of that, NATO was created in the April of 1949.
01:41:28.840
Andrew, I want to ask you a question that's less about Churchill and more about
01:41:34.200
what you see as a historian. Because as we've been talking, one of the things that struck me when we were
01:41:39.560
talking about a weakening empire, demoralisation, it sort of all sounds quite familiar to me as I
01:41:47.720
look around and I look at the western world today. Are there parallels to be drawn between the period
01:41:53.160
maybe before World War II and today's world? I think there are. Yes, absolutely. And we're speaking,
01:41:59.240
of course, today on the day that Alexei Navalny has essentially been murdered by a despot.
01:42:10.520
Adolf Hitler murdered a lot of people even before the Second World War broke out.
01:42:24.520
fought back against Putin's Russia is an interesting example of how free people can fight back,
01:42:34.840
especially if they've got their help, of course, of the free world. And I do see overlaps between
01:42:43.400
Zelensky and Winston Churchill. He's been called Winston Churchill with an iPhone
01:42:48.280
because he does have this command of the language and this tremendous bravery. He, like Churchill refusing to
01:42:55.320
leave London in the Blitz, stayed in Kyiv in those key moments immediately after the Russian invasion. So,
01:43:03.960
yes, there are overlaps, but one doesn't want to ever really put too much emphasis of the 1930s on to
01:43:17.720
present day. I know that there are echoes and there are shadows, but it's by no means exact.
01:43:25.240
No, actually, I understand why you answered the question the way that you did, because a lot of
01:43:30.440
people have made the parallel. I wasn't suggesting that we are on the path to another world war,
01:43:36.840
actually. What I meant is more that there is a kind of, I don't remember the phrase that Churchill
01:43:43.720
used that you quoted earlier, but there's a kind of loss of self-confidence.
01:43:47.400
Drawing tides of drift and surrender. Quite. It sort of feels, and it comes back very much to the
01:43:53.800
cultural conversation we were having a few moments ago about the denigration of statues, the denigration
01:43:59.160
of history, the complete lack of teaching of history, and Orwell warned about this, that the way to
01:44:05.000
demoralize a people is to take away from them their history. Do you feel that, you know, there is a
01:44:11.800
kind of decay that's happening in the West? Oh, yes, I certainly do. I think the way in which
01:44:17.960
especially in the United States, the pulling down of statues, and even statues of people who are
01:44:26.600
obvious heroes, you know, people who fought against slavery in the 19th century, mid 19th century,
01:44:34.840
and even actually pulling down the statues of the founding fathers, moving Thomas Jefferson's
01:44:42.360
statue out of the New York chamber, for example, council chamber. I mean, this is an extraordinary
01:44:49.640
form of national suicide. It's moral suicide. I mean, these people, yes, of course, they're not
01:44:57.080
great with regard to slavery. But these people were in the latter part of the 18th century. You have to
01:45:06.600
see them in their own terms. And what they did was immensely brave in standing up against the British
01:45:11.960
Empire, which I've been speaking in favour of recently. But they stood against the British Empire,
01:45:16.760
and created a great nation based on a document of genius, which has lasted for a quarter of a
01:45:24.280
millennium. And the idea you pull down these people's statues, as I say, I think it's a form of national
01:45:29.160
suicide. And touching on the British Empire, how do you think we have this discussion,
01:45:36.520
and the way that we frame it and the way that we talk about it? Is it completely ahistorical?
01:45:41.320
No, not completely. It's taught a lot, obviously, in schools. I hope that people will read books like
01:45:49.640
Nigel Bigger's latest book on colonialism, A Moral Reckoning, where he tries to put it into its proper
01:45:59.080
historical context, and not just have a complete knee-jerk reaction built, essentially, on present
01:46:07.560
day identity politics. If we're much more sensible about it, and actually listen to the voices of the
01:46:15.480
past, and try and work out what Lord Curzon was trying to do when he went out to be vice-boy of India,
01:46:22.040
you know. The idea of treating these people as evil is a very short-sighted and ignorant,
01:46:35.160
I think, way of going about it. And I fully agree with you, because the reality is that no one can
01:46:41.080
withstand the scrutiny that these people are subjected to. Even Gandhi. People will say,
01:46:48.360
you know, he was a whole awful person because he did this and he did that. Like young children
01:46:52.920
in his bed, mate. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And he was a racist. And you go,
01:46:59.480
what about the things that he achieved? Well, precisely, precisely. You've got to see people.
01:47:05.880
I think, by the way, this is one of the reasons that Churchill's probably more popular in America
01:47:10.040
than he is here in England, because people in America are able to see the wood for the trees.
01:47:15.000
They're not obsessed about, I don't know, Tony Pandy and the striking miners of 1911.
01:47:22.600
They're much more interested in the big picture, in the person who helped create the grand strategy
01:47:30.120
that helped win at least the Western Allied grand strategy that helped win the Second World War.
01:47:36.840
And so you have an ability in America, really, to look at the most important aspects. But you're
01:47:42.280
right. Not only would nobody, but nobody, be able to be looked on as a hero if you constantly look
01:47:50.840
solely at their feet of clay. But also, in our own time, our great-grandchildren are going to pull
01:47:58.760
down our statues for reasons that we have not the first clue about, things that we think are
01:48:04.280
scientifically proven facts. We're going to have our statues pulled down because, I don't know,
01:48:10.920
we allow our children to use mobile phones. And at the moment, that sounds weird. But in 100 years'
01:48:17.640
time, that's what will happen. But unless we learn the lesson, which is, of course,
01:48:25.720
Andrew, what haven't we asked you about Churchill that we should have done?
01:48:30.840
I think you haven't asked me one question, which I am very interested in, and which I'd like to
01:48:37.240
answer, which is, how was it that he was the person who was able to spot Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?
01:48:45.880
Yes. That's a great question. Thank you. That's kind of you. Thank you. What was it about him? What
01:48:53.240
was the sort of alchemy, the special alchemy about him that allowed him to be not only the first person,
01:48:59.960
but for many years in the 1930s, the only person who could see what Hitler and the Nazis were all about,
01:49:06.760
and therefore all against them? And the answer is, I think, threefold. The first was that he was a
01:49:12.360
Philo-Semite. He liked Jews. He'd grown up with Jews. His father had liked Jews. He'd been on holiday
01:49:18.440
with Jews. He recognised the contribution that Jews had made to Judeo-Christian civilisation. He was a
01:49:27.480
supporter of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. He was somebody who therefore had an early warning system
01:49:35.480
about Hitler and the Nazis that was not vouchsafed to many of the other upper-class English
01:49:42.200
people of his age and class and generation, many of whom were anti-Semitic. That's the first thing.
01:49:48.680
The second thing, and of course that's something that we should think about now more than any time
01:49:53.880
before in our lifetimes, because anti-Semitism is now on the rise in a way that it hasn't been at
01:49:58.840
any other stage in our lives. So standing by Jews as the forefront of civilisation, essentially,
01:50:06.120
that is one thing about Winston Churchill. The next thing is that he was an historian,
01:50:13.400
and he was able to place the threat, the hegemonic threat that Nazi Germany posed in the context of the
01:50:24.840
long continuum of British history. The threat of the Spanish Armada of 1588, of Louis XIV at the time of the
01:50:35.640
wars of Spanish succession, which of course his own great ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough,
01:50:40.920
was instrumental in defeating. And then the threat of Napoleon, of the First World War that he fought
01:50:49.240
in the trenches. And so he was able to see these four great threats before in history and slip Hitler
01:50:57.560
into the position of the fifth great threat, which of course he was. Indeed, he was a greater threat than
01:51:02.600
any of those ones before, because of the bomber. And the last thing was that he had seen true
01:51:13.240
fundamentalism, fanaticism in his life. He had fought on the northwest frontier, he fought in Sudan,
01:51:21.080
he had seen in this case Islamic fundamentalism, and he saw the same tropes in the Nazis that he had seen
01:51:30.040
before, this hatred of democracy, this complete ability to turn reality on its head.
01:51:37.240
And because he was able to do that in a way that the other prime ministers of the 1930s,
01:51:42.920
men like Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, who'd never seen fanatics before
01:51:47.720
in their lives at all, none of them. He was able to spot this special thing about Hitler and the Nazis,
01:51:55.640
and to warn and warn and warn. Just because people didn't listen to him, he didn't change his message.
01:52:03.160
Most politicians, especially today, would change their message because of what the opinion polls
01:52:07.720
were saying. He took no notice of opinion polls. He didn't listen to what the editorials were saying
01:52:13.080
in the newspapers. He said what he believed, and he carried on saying it until he was proved right.
01:52:18.120
You've made a really profound point there, when you compare it to the present day politicians,
01:52:22.920
who all they do is go from school to university, to then doing an internship, to then working in
01:52:29.240
politics. And the reality is these people, both Labour and Conservative and Liberal Democrat,
01:52:34.440
have no experience of the real world. But when you compare that with Winston Churchill,
01:52:39.000
who experienced everything the world had to offer, and as a result of that, was a magnificent leader.
01:52:44.680
I completely agree with every word here. Andrew, fantastic. We're going to ask you some
01:52:50.200
questions from our supporters in a second, so follow us over to Locals where we'll do that.
01:52:56.520
I seem to remember him saying the words to the effect of, we are with Europe, but not of Europe.
01:53:00.920
Churchill was more international rather than regional and imperialist.
01:53:04.360
So what would he make today of our politics with the European Union?