No reason to pull down the statue

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The title of Gordon Corrigan’s book tells us it is not going to be a Churchillian panegyric, so it comes as almost a disappointment to find no new revelations needful for the dethroning of the former national hero. All we are given is an emphasised reminder that Churchill’s history, The Second World War, was biased, that he was prone to indulge in disastrous expeditions, notably, in the first war, Gallipoli and, in the second, Norway and that he unreasonably pestered his generals to mount offensives before they were ready to do so. But none of this, of course, is news and it certainly gives no ground for taking down the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square nor, indeed, for revising his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. It is, therefore, fortunate that there is more to Corrigan’s book than the establishment of the obvious.

He tells the story of how Britain threw away her arms in 1919, failed to replace them and consequently found herself in desperate straits when Hitler put his head over the parapet less than 20 years later.