Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard and is an excellent writer. In trying to persuade us that Churchill favoured Britain joining a federal Europe, however, he comes up against several immovable obstacles.
The most serious of these is that in the four years that Churchill was prime minister, between 1951 and 1955, he personally, regularly and decisively blocked all movement towards Britain joining any of the European federal institutions that existed. However engaging Klos may be, and however well written his book, he is utterly wrong in his central thesis.
At the time of the European Union referendum last year, Klos brought out a pamphlet that stated:
I am in no doubt that Churchill wanted an ever closer union of European states. More than that, I argue, he wanted Britain to play a leading part. Churchill came to the conclusion that Britain’s future lay ‘in’ Europe.
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