Devastating tactics

I spent most of last Sunday evening yelling insults at my TV screen. ‘Berk!’ I shouted. ‘Twat!’ Then later, ‘Oily creep!’ ‘Traitor!’ ‘Tosser!’ The first person to draw my ire was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He hadn’t hitherto been that high on my list of historical hate figures — poor old dying polio bloke with his blanket over his knee, I used to think — but then I had not before seen part four of the excellent Warlords (Channel 4, Sunday).

This final episode dealt mainly with the embarrassing way that Roosevelt’s bien-pensant, patrician optimism allowed Stalin to run rings around him in the last years of the war, with disastrous consequences for almost everyone, but especially for Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe.

Here, straight from the horse’s mouth, was Roosevelt’s brilliant gameplan: ‘If I gave Stalin everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige he won’t try and annex anything, and will work with me for a world of peace and democracy.’