Churchill did not have an affair - so don’t fall for Channel 4’s spin

‘Revealed,’ blares the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Churchill’s secret affair and the painting that could have damaged his reputation.’ ‘Winston Churchill’s secret love Doris Castlerosse a blackmail risk,’ agrees The Sunday Times. At least the Daily Mail inserted a note of doubt in its headline – ‘Churchill may have cheated with society’s wildest woman’ – and included a question mark in its opening line: ‘Did Churchill cheat on Clemmie with Cara Delevingne’s great-aunt, who was 1930s society’s wildest and most ecstatically beautiful woman?’

The allegations that Winston Churchill was unfaithful while on holiday in the South of France in the mid-1930s have been knocking around for eighty years, with nothing substantial to back them up besides some pictures that Churchill painted of his alleged lover, the Society beauty Lady Castlerosse, and a photograph of them sitting next to each other on some rocks. However a Channel 4 programme to be broadcast on Sunday night has some new evidence, in the shape of a tape-recorded statement by Sir John ‘Jock’ Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, in which he said that an affair did take place.