Churchill. No disrespect to Andrew Roberts’s more recent work, but I set out to look up a point about drink in Roy Jenkins’s biography and ended up rereading it. I think that it is Roy’s best book and extremely well written. There are also passages where he slips in points from his own experience of high office: never excessive, always illuminating.
Although Churchill was rarely drunk, he was equally rarely sober
I did not need to be reminded what an extraordinary figure Churchill was: the drama was so vivid. After the ‘fight on the beaches’ oration, Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour MP, said that it was the speech of a thousand years. Britain was menaced as never before; France was about to surrender. Despite Churchill’s entreaties, the US seemed set on remaining thousands of miles of cold ocean away from Europe’s agonies. In early June 1940, the UK’s position was desperate. As Churchill spoke, more troops than we dared hope for were making it back from Dunkirk but as the new PM was to remind the nation, evacuations do not win wars.
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