Jaipur Notebook

Did Winston Churchill, like Donald Trump, also like to ‘grab them by the pussy?’ Last week at the Jaipur Literary Festival, I was on a panel discussion entitled ‘Churchill: Hero or Villain?’, where the Indian biographer Shrabani Basu told a large crowd that at a suffragettes’ demonstration outside Parliament in November 1910, Churchill, then home secretary, had ‘given instructions for police that they can batter the women and assault the women and sexually assault them as well’. He allegedly told policemen to ‘put their hands up their thighs, they can grope them and press their breasts’. ‘Can I just point out that that is completely untrue?’ I intervened. ‘He at no stage ever OK’d the sexual assault of any woman ever. It would be monstrous were it to be true, but there’s no evidence for it.’ To which Ms Basu replied: ‘It’s your word against mine.’ Welcome to post-truth history.