Winston churchill

Rather rashly, Boris Johnson published The Churchill factor: How one man made history last year. It was without historical merit, or intellectual insight, but Johnson did not intend readers to learn about Churchill. The biography was not a Churchill biography but a Johnson campaign biography, where we were invited to see our  hero as Winston redux. Both ignored party discipline and conventional routes of advancement, after all. Both were great company. Churchill stayed in the wilderness for years making a fortune from journalism, and so has Johnson. Churchill was a man of principle and so is… Hold on. That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all. For when we talk

At a large Tory breakfast meeting that David Cameron spoke to recently, the tables were named after all of the Conservative premiers of the past: the good, the bad and Ted Heath. So there were the Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher tables, for example. (I was delighted to be on the Winston Churchill table; the people on the Neville Chamberlain one looked suitably ill-favoured.) As Cameron — who was sat at the David Cameron table, appropriately enough — looked around the huge room that morning, he could be forgiven for wondering where he will wind up in the pantheon of past premiers. For as Cameron nears his tenth

Michael Gove may have left the Department for Education but he hasn’t lost his reforming zeal. In his Tory conference speech, the Justice Secretary revealed that his inspiration in pursuing criminal justice reforms is Winston Churchill — and not because of his role leading Britain through some of its darkest hours: ‘The man who was, perhaps, our greatest Prime Minister was also a truly great Home Secretary. He argued that there should be “a constant heart-searching by all charged with the duty of punishment, a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every

At a large Tory breakfast meeting that David Cameron spoke to recently, the tables were named after all of the Conservative premiers of the past: the good, the bad and Ted Heath. So there were the Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher tables, for example. (I was delighted to be on the Winston Churchill table; the people on the Neville Chamberlain one looked suitably ill-favoured.) As Cameron — who was sat at the David Cameron table, appropriately enough — looked around the huge room that morning, he could be forgiven for wondering where he will wind up in the pantheon of past premiers. For as Cameron nears his tenth

I have been wondering why nobody so far in this election seems to have made any mention of what most people recognise to be the biggest security problem facing this country. But then I discovered that the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, last week appeared at the Al Falah Islamic Education Centre in West London. He used the opportunity to express, er, ‘concern about the level of Islamophobia in the capital’ and to insist that ‘an alternative word needs to be found to describe extremists who claim to act in the name of Islam’. According to the Evening Standard: ‘Mr Johnson, whose great-grandfather was a Muslim, added that a “problem in

After Boris Johnson got his dates muddled while discussing his biography of Winston Churchill on LBC yesterday, it has come to Mr S’s attention that a selective memory could run in the family. Speaking at an Oldie literary lunch earlier this month, Boris’s father Stanley Johnson revealed to Steerpike that there is an embarrassing mistake in his second autobiography Stanley, I Resume regarding his wife Jenny: ‘If you get to page 21 of this book you will see it says “and Jenny and I were married October the 27th 1982 and we lived happily ever after”. Now, that’s 33 years ago but Jenny pointed out when she came to read it that I got the year wrong, and it

Boris was waxing lyrical about Winston Churchill during his weekly LBC phone-in earlier when it all went a little wrong. Discussing the ‘many different phases Churchill’ went through ‘in his life’, Boris recalled that ‘in 1908 I think you’ll remember, he was in favour of cutting defence spending when he was going around with Lloyd George campaigning on social affairs.’ So far, so good. However, he then said this: ‘So indeed, in 1922 when he was, sorry, 1920, in the twenties when he was Chancellor, he was accused later on by his enemies of having been a great cutter of defence expenditure and there was a certain amount of truth in that.’

Today marks fifty years since the funeral of Winston Churchill. In the 5 February 1965 edition of The Spectator, editor Iain Macleod wrote under the pen name Quoodle about the occasion.  There has never been such a funeral service I before. There will never be again. It was splendid and solemn, but it was also glorious and triumphant. There was nothing here for tears, for the noblest of all our countrymen had died full of years. Even in St. Paul’s it was a family service. As if the Churchill family had invited the larger families of Britain and the Commonwealth and the world to share their grief and their pride. The ceremonial was faultless.