Winston churchill

Thursday

Clare Mulley

The lure of a well-tailored uniform

Anita Leslie knew how to tell a story. Arranging to sit for a portrait six months before she died, she planned to borrow a khaki shirt on which to pin her second world war decorations, the Africa Star and the Croix de Guerre. The portrait was never commissioned, but it is clear that Leslie — the only woman to have been awarded both these honours — wanted to be remembered as a war heroine, as well as a biographer, memoirist, witty and well-connected socialite, and cousin of Winston Churchill. Leslie’s war work certainly merits greater attention, so it is a shame that Penny Perrick’s Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives of

Thursday

Boris Johnson

Diary – 26 July 2018

Surely there is a bit of humbug in this outrage about the two remaining jihadi Beatles, Kotey and Elsheikh, and Sajid Javid’s difficult but correct decision to send them for trial in America. Suppose the grisly pair had been located a couple of years ago in Raqqa. And let’s suppose there was a Reaper drone overhead, and that British intelligence could help send a missile neatly through their windscreen. Would we provide the details — knowing that they would be killed without a chance for their lawyers to offer pleas in mitigation on account of their tough childhoods in west London? Would the British state, in these circumstances, have connived

Monday

Steerpike

Former Corbyn adviser: Don’t glorify Churchill

Here we go. Last night Gary Oldman came away victorious at the Oscars – picking up the best actor gong for his depiction of Winston Churchill in the Darkest Hour. The film follows the attempts within government in 1940 to make a peace treaty with Hitler and Churchill’s refusal to do so. Only not everyone was cheered by the news of Oldman’s success. Jeremy Corbyn’s former adviser Steve Howell complains that Churchill had many dark hours and so he will ‘pass on any film glorifying a man who British voters rejected at the first opportunity’. Setting aside the small issue of Churchill’s legacy (see what The Spectator said in 1965:

Sunday

Andrew Roberts

Churchill did not have an affair – so don’t fall for Channel 4’s spin

‘Revealed,’ blares the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Churchill’s secret affair and the painting that could have damaged his reputation.’ ‘Winston Churchill’s secret love Doris Castlerosse a blackmail risk,’ agrees The Sunday Times. At least the Daily Mail inserted a note of doubt in its headline – ‘Churchill may have cheated with society’s wildest woman’ – and included a question mark in its opening line: ‘Did Churchill cheat on Clemmie with Cara Delevingne’s great-aunt, who was 1930s society’s wildest and most ecstatically beautiful woman?’ The allegations that Winston Churchill was unfaithful while on holiday in the South of France in the mid-1930s have been knocking around for eighty years, with nothing substantial to back them

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

A tough act to follow

Gary Oldman has joined a long list of actors who have portrayed Winston Churchill — no fewer than 35 of them in movies and 28 on television. He is one of the best three. ‘I knew I didn’t look like him,’ Oldman has said. ‘I thought that with some work I could approximate the voice. The challenge in part was the physicality, because you’re playing someone whose silhouette is so iconic.’ We all have our own mind’s-eye view of what Churchill should look and sound like, and his personality was so strong and sui generis that it is almost impossible for an actor to impose himself on the role. He

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 7 December 2017

The Carlile report Sir: The Bishop of Bath and Wells tells us (Letters, 2 December) that nobody is holding up publication of the Carlile report into the Church of England’s hole-in-corner kangaroo condemnation of the late George Bell. Is it then just accidental that the church is still making excuses for not publishing it, and presumably for fiddling about with it, more than eight weeks after receiving it on 7 October? The church was swift to condemn George Bell on paltry evidence. It was swifter still to denounce those who stood up for him, falsely accusing them of attacking Bell’s accuser. Yet it is miserably slow to accept just criticism

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 30 November 2017

We are congratulating ourselves and the royal family on overcoming prejudice by welcoming Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry. But in fact this welcome is cost-free: Ms Markle’s combination of Hollywood, mixed ethnicity, divorced parents, being divorced herself and being older than her fiancé ticks almost every modern box. It was harder, surely, for Kate Middleton. She was simply middle-class, Home Counties, white, and with no marital past — all media negatives. Her mother was a former flight assistant. People made snobby jokes about ‘cabin doors to manual’. There was nothing ‘edgy’ about Kate that could be romanticised. Luckily, she is also beautiful, sensible and cheerful, and politely concealed her successful

Thursday

Peter Stanford

A poet in prose

Literary reputation can be a fickle old business. Those garlanded during their lifetimes are often quickly forgotten once dead. Yet there is a daily procession of visitors to Keats’s grave in the English cemetery in Rome, where the headstone reads, ‘Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water’, so sure was the poet that the neglect he had suffered up to his death would continue ever after. By any standards, C. Day-Lewis — he disliked Cecil, the name given to him by his Church of Ireland vicar father — was among the most glittering figures on the 20th-century British literary scene, celebrated, well-connected, a bestseller and Poet Laureate for

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Demonised by history

Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old man considered the matter gravely. ‘No,’ he replied at length. ‘That was Alfred the Great.’ In his hefty, hard-to-pick-up History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill expatiated on King Alfred’s foremost quality: it was his ‘sublime power to rise above the whole force of circumstances, to remain unbiased by the extremes of victory or defeat, to persevere in the teeth of disaster, to greet returning fortune with a cool eye, to have faith in men after repeated betrayals’. Remind you of anyone? But perhaps it isn’t surprising that Churchill should have

Thursday

Taki

High life | 24 August 2017

When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were unleashing on the human race. Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, New Soviet Man, as the Bolshies called it, someone who would overcome ‘the antinomies of subjective and objective, body and spirit, family and party’. Leave it to a horror like Lenin to design a new human being (although a certain Austrian tried to emulate him less than 20 years later) and you get Yakov Sverdlov, who ordered the murder of the Tsar and his family, and the hanging of their dogs.

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

Coffee break

I gave up coffee a couple of weeks ago. I won’t pretend it was easy. The physical withdrawal began with a blinding headache accompanied by creeping nausea. My limbs turned rubbery, and I was reminded of when Winston Churchill cruelly compared Ramsay MacDonald to a Barnum’s Circus freak dubbed ‘The Boneless Wonder’. I felt just like The Boneless Wonder, but with my head trapped in a vice. This feeling lasted for more than a week. I could have fixed it with a single, swift flat white, but I chose not to. This time, coffee and I are over. I can’t remember exactly when I became so addicted to coffee. It

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

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

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Islamofascism and appeasement are the biggest dangers facing the West

The appeasers, apologists and ‘useful idiots’ have been out in force over the festive season, busily lighting candles, declaring ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ and proclaiming that the murderous attack on the Christmas market had nothing to do either with Islam or mass immigration. Thinking of them prompted me to pluck from my shelf one of my favourite books, a slim tome entitled ‘Ourselves and Germany’, written in the winter of 1937 by the Marquess of Londonderry. Otherwise known as Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, or ‘Charley’ to his pals, the Marquess could neither write well nor read men well, but his book is nonetheless riveting. It’s a timeless reminder of where an educated

Thursday

Nicholas Shakespeare

Divinely decadent

‘Oh the Mediterranean addiction, how we fall for it!’ So sighed Sybille Bedford, who spent the 1920s and 1930s in Sanary-sur-Mer. Aldous Huxley settled in the same fishing village in 1930, writing to his sister-in-law: ‘Here all is exquisitely lovely. Sun, roses, fruit, warmth. We bathe and bask.’ James Lees-Milne perched further along the coast at Roquebrune from 1950–61. In a reverie, he later recalled the smells of brioche, coffee, pine needles, ‘the senses heightened, expectant of lovely future days without end’.This illusion of limitless freedom had given to Bedford, too, a large sense of living rationally, sensuously, well, of pleasure on many levels: now and before us and for

Thursday

The Spectator

Churchill’s privilege

From ‘Mr Churchill’s misfire’, The Spectator, 2 September 1916: There is nothing that democracy so much hates as unfair privilege, and Mr Churchill has enjoyed and has utilised an unfair privilege in getting himself in and out of the Army at his arbitrary will… The public now fully understands that his influence on our political life is almost wholly bad because it is wholly dissociated from any motive except that of personal advancement. He would, indeed, now be powerless either for good or for evil, were it not for the fact — or what appears to be the fact — that he still retains useful friends within the Cabinet who afford to him

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 14 July 2016

When you are recovering from a stroke, you spend much of the time asleep. But when you are not sleeping, you are told that the most important thing you have to do is avoid stress. All doctors agree that stress is the main impediment to recovery. But how can you possibly protect yourself against it? The causes of stress can creep up on you from anywhere without warning, and there is nothing you can do about it; and lately I have been bombarded by shocks. I was one of the ignorant for whom the victory of Brexit in the referendum was itself a shock, but this also set in train

Thursday

Rose Prince

Woolton’s war

In wartime the housekeeping is a nightmare. While fighting Napoleon in Spain the Duke of Wellington sent an infuriated letter to the government in Whitehall. He complained that they had asked him to account for a petty cash deficit of one shilling and ninepence, and a ‘hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm…’. The Duke, more concerned with training soldiers to fight, would not have got on too well with Lord Woolton, the British government’s Minister of Food in the second world war, whose office had the most onerous catering job in history. Woolton, born Fred Marquis in

Thursday

Max Hastings

An age of broken promises

An intelligent middle-aged, middle-class woman told me the other day that she plans to vote Leave on 23 June because she no longer believes a word that David Cameron says. She cited his pre-election pledges on repatriation of powers from Brussels, repeal of human right legislation and — of course — immigration. I said that, should she get her Brexit, the Prime Minister is likely to be supplanted by Boris Johnson, who conducts one-night stands with truth only on alternate wet Wednesdays. She was unmoved. She has convinced herself that Johnson the outsider, the roly-poly bundle of fun, Mr Feelgood, should be judged by different rules. He is not one of ‘them’,

Thursday

The Spectator

Churchill’s return

From ‘Colonel Winston Churchill’, The Spectator, 13 May 1916: The return of Colonel Churchill to the House of Commons, which we are told is to be permanent, has set going a number of rumours as to the future of the most audacious and brilliant figure in our public life. Colonel Churchill, it is alleged, is to come back into the Cabinet, and to come back as Irish Secretary… What is wanted in the Ministry just now is a man who can he trusted. But who dare say that Colonel Churchill has the quality of political trustworthiness? Be his political genius what it may, he is above all things a mauvais coucheur.

Thursday

James Walton

That’s entertainment | 5 May 2016

The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in 1924. But rather than a shock comeback for Downton Abbey, this was — perhaps even more unexpectedly — Tommy Shelby’s new home in Peaky Blinders (BBC2, Thursday). Which explains why so many of the guests were carrying guns, and why the family matriarch was using the word ‘fuck’ a lot more than Lady Grantham ever did. When we last saw gang-leader Tommy (Cillian Murphy), he was still based in the Birmingham backstreets. He was also having a fairly tough time — what with juggling two women, trying not to get