***
The ‘Tragic Flaw in the Metal’
When David Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister, in December 1916, Winston Churchill was out of office and in disgrace. Almost everyone, Lloyd George included, blamed him for the tragedy of the Gallipoli campaign in which 132,000 British and allied troops had been killed or injured. Lloyd George, however, understood that although Churchill was down he was far from out. Recognising him as a politician of exceptional drive and ability, and potentially a dangerous opponent if he were excluded from office, he decided in July 1917 to bring Churchill into the government as Minister of Munitions. As he describes in his memoirs, it was a decision that provoked howls of protest:
For days I discussed with one or other of my colleagues Churchill, his gifts, his shortcomings, his mistakes, especially the latter. Some of them were more excited about his appointment than about the war. It was a serious crisis. It was interesting to observe in a concentrated form every phase of the distrust and trepidation with which mediocrity views genius at close quarters.
They admitted he was a man of dazzling talents, that he possessed a forceful and a fascinating personality. They recognised his courage and that he was an indefatigable worker. But they asked why, in spite of that, although he had more admirers, he had fewer followers than any prominent public man in Britain? ….Here was their explanation. His mind was a powerful machine, but there lay hidden in its material or its make-up some obscure defect which prevented it from always running true. When the mechanism went wrong, its very power made the action disastrous, not only to himself but to the causes in which he was engaged and the men with whom he was co-operating. That was why the latter were nervous in his partnership. He had in their opinion revealed some tragic flaw in the metal. They thought of him not as a contribution to the common stock of activities and ideas in the hour of danger, but as a further danger to be guarded against.’[i]
This notion of Churchill as a man of great brilliance with a tragic flaw predated the First World War. At the height of the Ulster crisis in 1914, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, the Clerk to the Privy Council, observed: ‘It is no disparagement of Winston’s extraordinary qualities to say that his judgement is not quite equal to his abilities, nor his abilities quite equal to his ambitions. His defect is that he sees everything through the magnifying glass of his self-confidence.’[ii] Gallipoli crystallised the idea that he was dangerously deficient in judgment, a verdict that became something of a cliché in the mouths of leading politicians and officials in the period between the two world wars. Paradoxically, it was often coupled with the recognition that he was a ‘genius’. As The Spectator put it in March 1916, at a time when he was commanding a battalion on the western front: ‘Colonel Churchill has always shown, in spite of his political genius for such it is, an amazing lack of judgment.’[iii]
Though Churchill inspired doubts and fears, he also inspired something very like a sense of awe in his contemporaries. According to Samuel Johnson the hallmark of genius was abundance, and no one was more abundant than Churchill. No one in public life could rival his literary achievements, nor – with the exception of Lloyd George – was there a more powerful orator and rhetorician. It also had to be admitted that he had substantial achievements to his name. In partnership with Lloyd George he shared the credit for the introduction of National Insurance. There was almost universal praise for his work in preparing the Navy for war in 1914. But whatever the items on the credit side, they were outweighed by the notion that sooner or later he would career off the rails and crash into a ditch. Such was the justification Baldwin and Chamberlain gave for excluding him from office during the 1930s. As Baldwin put it, in conversation with his sidekick Thomas Jones in May 1936: ‘When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability – and then came a fairy who said “No one person has a right to so many gifts”, picked him up and gave him such a shake and a twist that he was denied judgment and wisdom.’[iv]
Churchill, of course, always rejected the idea that he lacked judgment. He insisted that Gallipoli was a brilliant, war-winning conception that miscarried because of bad luck and human error, a thesis he developed at length in the second volume of The World Crisis (1923). Despite this, the stain on his reputation lingered. In his book The Tragedy of Winston Churchill (1931) Victor Wallace Germains predicted that ‘the ghosts of the Gallipoli dead will always rise up to damn him anew in times of national emergency…’[v] When George VI visited Canada in 1939 he repeated to the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, all the old accusations against Churchill over Gallipoli. He would, he said, never appoint Churchill to any office unless it was absolutely necessary in time of war.[vi] In May 1940 he was compelled to appoint him, and within a few weeks the terms of political discourse were turned more or less upside down. The notion that Churchill lacked judgment was superseded by the conviction that he had been right about Nazi Germany when almost everyone else had been wrong.
It would be hard to overstate the damage inflicted on the reputations of Baldwin, Chamberlain and the appeasers by the calamitous events of 1940, when France fell and Britain was threatened with invasion. They were vilified as the ‘Guilty Men’ who, deceived by Hitler and the Nazis, had failed to rearm in time. The Munich agreement of Septmber 1938 became a badge of shame. Churchill, meanwhile, was hailed as the prophet and hero of the hour, a verdict he sought to carve in stone in the six volumes of war memoirs published between 1948 and 1953. In the eyes of most of his contemporaries this was the definitive history of the war, authenticated by the inclusion of a cache of hitherto secret documents.
The historical debate over Churchill stemmed initially from the contradictions between these two competing narratives, the one rooted in the popular patriotism of the Second World War and Churchill’s egocentric version of events (‘the Churchill Myth’) the other in the scepticism of the pre-war Establishment, which began to bubble to the surface again after his death. Decades later there remains a spectrum of opinion on Churchill, with substantial differences between Churchillian loyalists (mainly in the United States) who see him as a paragon of leadership and statecraft, critical admirers (mainly in the United Kingdom) who see him as a great man with feet of clay, and iconoclasts (mainly in Ireland, India and Australia) who denigrate his record and character. Inconoclasts, as a general rule, detest him too much to weigh the merits of his ideas, but loyalists and critical admirers also have strong views on the subject. Loyalists think of him as exceptionally wise and perceptive, with a mind like a searchlight illuminating past, present and future. Critical admirers are more likely to agree with Clement Attlee, a man of few words: ‘Fifty per cent of Winston is genius, fifty per cent bloody fool.’[vii] One of the keys to the assessment of Churchill is therefore to understand, or at any rate to describe, how that exceptional mind worked.
***
Churchill’s Idea of Himself
At school Churchill was a persistent rule-breaker, insubordinate, self-centred, arrogant and conceited, a solitary boy unpopular with his peers. The idea that he was a dunce is mistaken. He excelled in English and History, subjects he enjoyed and put his mind to, but refused to to make an effort with subjects that bored him, notably Latin. As he matured into an adult, his intellect grew to reflect these egocentric traits and he began to detect in himself the promptings of genius. As he confided to Asquith’s daughter Violet, at a dinner party in 1906: ‘We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm’.[viii] He attributed his many narrow escapes from death on the battlefield to the fact that Providence was preserving him in order to fulfil some heroic destiny. One weekend, about 1910-11, Lloyd George and Churchill were motoring down to Lloyd George’s home in Brighton in the company of a civil servant, Ralph Hawtrey, when Churchill began to speak of the next war. As Hawtrey recalled: ‘He described how, at the climax, he himself, in command of the army, would win the decisive victory in the Middle East, and would return to England in triumph. Lloyd George quietly interposed, “And where do I come in?” [ix]
Ironically Churchill’s hopes of triumph were to be dashed, and his career all but wrecked by Gallipoli, while Lloyd George emerged as the great war leader. The middle-aged Churchill seems to have lost faith in his destiny, only to recover it as war drew near again in the late 1930s. In a famous passage in his war memoirs he wrote of his emotions on his appointment as Prime Minister on 10 May 1940: ‘I felt as though I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’[x] One evening during the blitz on London he was out for a stroll with his detective, Inspector Thompson, when a bomb dropped where they had been walking only twenty seconds before. That night Churchill took Thompson by the arm and confided in him: ‘There is somebody looking after me besides you, Thompson.’ Thompson asked whether he was referring to Sergeant Davies. ‘No Thompson,’ Churchill replied, pointing a finger upwards to heaven. ‘I have a mission to perform and That Person will see that it is performed.’[xi]
Churchill freely acknowledged that he was actuated by a thirst for fame and glory but he was never ashamed of the fact, nor did it contradict his belief that he was serving a higher purpose. In February 1908 he told his friend Charles Masterman that he felt called upon by Providence to come to the rescue of the poor. Masterman questioned his sincerity. ‘“You can’t deny that you enjoy it all immensely – the speeches and crowds, the sense of increasing power.” “Of course I do”, Churchill replied. “‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn’. That shall be my plea at the day of judgment.”’ It was a favourite biblical quotation, which he understood to mean that his more selfish motives were justified by the exceptional quality of the services he could render to his fellow-countrymen.[xii] It was like the claim of a great painter or composer to be granted, in recognition of the unique importance of art, a license for self-indulgence.
Like other professional politicians Churchill sought office and power, and he relished the cut and thrust of the political game. His ambition, however, was not only to win power but to use it. His creed was action and he strove above all to perform great deeds for which he would be acclaimed in history. At a weekend house-party in January 1915, Margot Asquith heard him exclaim: ‘My God! This is living history. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling – it will be read by a thousand generations – think of that!’[xiii] According to Attlee, who was a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet from 1940 to 1945:
If there was one thing that marked him out from the comparable figures in history, it was his characteristic way of standing back and looking at himself – and his country – as he believed history would. He was always, in effect, asking himself, “How will I look if I do this or that?” And, “What must Britain do now so that the verdict of history will be favourable”[xiv]
It is hard to imagine what would have become of Churchill in an age of stability, peace and progress. He rejoiced in crises and conflicts and longed to be at the epicentre of events. As Attlee remarked, he was always searching for a finest hour, and inclined to manufacture one if none could be found.
Uniquely among the politicians of his day Churchill believed that he was endowed with the ability to command great armies in the field. As a cavalry subaltern he had fought in India, the Sudan and South Africa. Fascinated by war and steeped in military history, he had come to the conclusion that an intelligent civilian could run military operations as well or better than the generals. His two great heroes were his ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, and Napoleon, with whom he was often mockingly compared in the years before 1914. The journalist A.G. Gardiner, a radical commentator alarmed by his tendencies towards militarism, wrote in 1913:
He is always unconsciously playing a part – an heroic part. And he is himself his most astonished spectator. He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle – triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed with thunder, his legions looking to him for victory, and not looking in vain….it is not make-believe, it is not insincerity: it is that in that fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role….In the theatre of that mind it is always the hour of fate and the crack of doom
Gardiner also struck a warning note: ‘Remember, he is a soldier first, last and always. He will write his name big in our future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood.’[xv]
Although therefore Churchill was always a parliamentary politician, there were times, as in the Second World War, when the politician was all but superseded by the generalissimo.
In party politics Churchill was noriously unreliable. First elected to Parliament as a Tory in 1900, he changed parties from Tory to Liberal in 1904, and Liberal to Tory again in 1924. As Violet Bonham-Carter recalled in her memoirs, he was temperamentally neither a Tory not a Liberal. Too untrammelled by convention to be a true Tory, ‘he never shared the reluctance which inhibits Liberals from invoking force to solve a problem.’[xvi] He expected, in any case, to lead a party rather than follow it and resented the restrictions placed on the freedom of action of Cabinet ministers by party dogmas. This was probably the reason he so often favoured a Coalition government.
***
Working with Winston
Here then was a man of compulsive ambition, imperious independence of spirit, and ceaseless dyamism. He was sure to be a disruptive force in Whitehall and Westminster, and hence mistrusted. But if we are to understand the claim that he ‘lacked judgment’ we also need to observe him more closely, through the eyes of his contemporaries, in the throes of decision-making.
Our first witness, already mentioned, is Charles Masterman, a Liberal politician and friend of Churchill’s who worked closely with him at the Board of Trade (1908-10) and the Home Office (1910-11). Masterman was astonished by the sight of his mental processes at work:
In nearly every case an idea enters his head from outside. It then rolls round the hollow of his brain, collecting strength like a snowball. Then, after whirling winds of rhetoric, he becomes convinced that it is right, and denounces everyone who criticises it. He is in the Greek sense a Rhetorician, the slave of the words which his mind forms around ideas. He sets ideas to Rhetoric as musicians set theirs to music. And he can convince himself of almost every truth if it is once allowed thus to start on its wild career through his rhetorical machinery.[xvii]
Our second witness is Neville Chamberlain, writing in August 1928 to his friend Lord Irwin, later Lord Halifax. Baldwin was Prime Minister with Chamberlain as Minister of Health and Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Having collaborated with some difficulty over the expansion of social insurance they were now fighting a series of battles over Churchill’s plans for the derating of industry. Chamberlain wrote:
One doesn’t often come across a real man of genius or, perhaps, appreciate him when one does. Winston is such a man and he has les defauts de ses qualites…. Then as you know there is no subject on which he is not prepared to propound some novel theory and to sustain and illustrate his theory with cogent and convincing arguments. So quickly does his mind work in building up a case that it frequently carries him off his own feet.
I have often watched him in Cabinet begin with a casual comment on what has been said, then as an image or simile comes into his mind proceed with great animation, when presently you see his whole face suffused with pink, his speech becomes more and more rapid and impetuous till in a few minutes he will not hear of the possibility of opposition to an idea which only occurred to him a few minutes ago.
In the consideration of affairs his decisions are never founded on exact knowledge, nor on careful and prolonged consideration of the pros and cons. He seeks instinctively for the large and preferably the novel idea such as is capable of representation by the broadest brush. Whether the idea is practicable or impracticable, good or bad, provided he can see himself recommending it plausibly and successfully to an enthusiastic audience, it commends itself to him. There is too deep a difference between our natures for me to feel at home with him or to regard him with affection. He is a brilliant wayward child who compels admiration but who wears out his guardians with the constant strain he puts upon them.[xviii]
Another member of Baldwin’s Cabinet, the First Lord of the Admiralty William Bridgeman, recorded his own impressions of Churchill, with whom he had clashed over the Chancellor’s attempts to cut the naval estimates:
The most indescribable & amazing character of all my colleagues. His fertile brain turned out ideas by the score on all subjects, very few of which bore the test of analysis, but that did not prevent the continuance of production. He laid eggs as rapidly as a partridge & if his nest was disturbed quickly started another, but the proportion of his eggs that came to maturity was small…The trouble of (sic) him as a colleague was his inconsistency. He is not in the least disturbed by your quoting his own words of a year or two ago to contradict what he is saying today. He lives entirely in the present & takes his colour entirely from the particular office he happens to be holding at the time. A big navy-ite at the Admiralty, & the reverse as Chancellor of the Exchequer.[xix]
Our next witness is Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who chaired the Chiefs of Staff Committee from March 1942 until the end of the war. One of the most notable omissions from Churchill’s war memoirs was any reference to the frequent rows between him and his military advisers, who spent much of the war resisting his proposals for military ‘sideshows’. Brooke believed that Churchill was indispensable as a popular leader but incapable of strategic planning. After a discussion between the Prime Minister and the Chiefs of Staff on strategy in the Far East, in May 1943, he noted:
A thoroughly unsatisfactory meeting at which he again showed that he cannot grasp the relation of various theatres of war to each other. He always gets carried away by the one he is examining and in prosecuting it is prepared to sacrifice most of the others. I have never in the 1½ years that I have worked with him succeeded in making him review the war as a whole and to relate the importance of various fronts to one each other. At 5.30 pm we had another meeting with the PM that lasted till close on 7pm. We were intended to discuss the Mediterranean strategy, but it was not long before we were drawn off again to his pet of the moment in the shape of an attack on Northern Sumatra or Penang!![xx]
Our final witness is Desmond Morton, a civil servant who supplied Churchill with secret intelligence about the German economy in the 1930s, and served in wartime as a liaison officer between the Prime Minister and the security services. Having fallen out of favour with his master he was a jaundiced witness but not necessarily a false one. Writing to the author R.W. Thompson in 1960 he suggested that:
…more might be made of W’s factual knowledge, which was astonishingly superficial and sketchy, even in matters in which he really thought himself something of an expert. He carried this off by a remarkable capacity for acquiring almost instantaneously the technical terms of the ‘science’ concerned, together with an ability to memorise effective phrases in papers or conversations with real experts. All this was part of his dialectic, beneath which real knowledge was a mere skin on the surface. The things on which only a supreme expert could challenge him, and even might be rash to do so, were the English language, English and American history and, less so, the history of Western Europe.[xxi]
Churchill was patently lacking in most of the qualities that marked a politician out as a sound administrator and a ‘safe pair of hands’. The question was whether or not the streak of genius in him compensated for the deficiency, or even perhaps eclipsed it altogether. Much depended on the skill of his advisers in managing him. In every office he held, Churchill’s fertile imagination gave rise to a stream of new ideas, some of them a great deal more practical than others. During the twenty-one months in which he was Home Secretary (1910-11) he won the admiration of the Permanent Secretary, Sir Edward Troup, and they made an effective team. As Troup recalled:
Once a week or perhaps oftener, Mr Churchill came down to the office bringing with him some adventurous and impossible projects: but after half an hour’s discussion something was evolved which was less adventurous but no longer impossible.[xxii]
One of the most ill-judged of Churchill’s decisions was the appointment in October 1914 of Admiral Sir John Fisher as First Sea Lord and principal naval adviser. ‘Jackie’ was as famous a public figure as Churchill himself, with an ego to match. ‘Volatile, emotional, duplicitous, secretive and inconsistent’[xxiii], he proved quite incapable of managing Churchill and more interested in intriguing against him. Fisher was no less responsible for Gallipoli than Churchill but his resignation in May 1915 ensured that it was Churchill who shouldered the blame. Fisher claimed that he was resigning in protest against a decision by Churchill to overrule him on an operational matter, which was technically true, and made Churchill’s position untenable. Churchill learned an enduring lesson. Though he often pressed the Chiefs of Staff hard in the Second World War, he never overruled them.
Unlike Fisher, who was pursuing an agenda of his own, most of Churchill’s Whitehall advisers were conscientious gatekeepers, blocking ideas they thought dangerous or unworkable, and encouraging him to practice the art of the possible. Chamberlain, as we have seen, wrote that ‘he wears out his guardians with the constant strain he puts upon them’, and Alanbrooke thought of himself as Churchill’s long-suffering nanny. Churchill has to be seen as part of a collective process of decision-making in the course of which many of his brainwaves were suppressed and others adapted for Whitehall consumption. Our assessment of him also has to allow for his own acceptance of the process. Although he often argued a point of view with passion, and anger when it was opposed, he had the common sense to abandon or revise it when confronted with a solid wall of opposition. There was always a sense in which he was trying out and testing ideas rather than seeking to impose them. Did he perhaps suspect that there was indeed something amiss with the hyperactive workings of his brain?
On the public stage Churchill presented himself as a bold and consistent statesman, expert in the issues he was dealing with and logical in the path he was pursuing. Behind the mask lay a more protean character, restless and changeable, who reached his decisions on the basis of impressionism and rhetoric. His long political life was punctuated by a series of intuitive leaps from one position to another. Neither he nor anyone else could predict the direction he would take next. He would first shift his ground, then rationalise the change by arming himself with the facts and the rhetoric needed to justify his new position. In 1930, when he broke into rebellion against the leaders of his party over India, he knew very little about the affairs of the sub-Continent. He sensed, however, that the promise of Dominion status for India would mark the end of the British Empire. He sensed also that Baldwin, the leader of the Conservative party, was vulnerable to attack. Only after these considerations had prompted him to rebel did he turn to old India hands for information about the ethnic, religious and constitutional problems of India,
The psychiatrist Anthony Storr identified Churchill as an ‘extraverted intuitive’, one of eight psychological types defined by Carl Jung in a seminal work of 1921. ‘The intuitive’, Jung wrote, ‘is never to be found in the world of accepted reality-values, but he has a keen nose for anything new and in the making. Because he is always seeking out new possibilities, stable conditions suffocate him. He seizes on new objects or situations with great intensity, sometimes with extraordinary enthusiasm, only to abandon them cold-bloodedly, without any compunction and apparently without remembering them, as soon as their range is known and no further developments can be divined…Neither reason nor feeling can restrain him or frighten him away from a new possibility, even though it goes against all his previous convictions. Thinking and feeling, the indispensable components of conviction, are his inferior functions, carrying no weight and hence incapable of effectively withstanding the power of intuition.’[xxiv]
When Jung described the extraverted intuitive as always seeking out new possibilities he might almost have been referring to Churchill, who was forever probing the ground ahead and exploring the shape of things to come. One of the recurrent features of his long political life was a vein of prophetic utterance, sometimes looking forward with optimism to the ‘broad sunlit uplands’, sometimes with foreboding to Armageddon. A passage in a speech delivered to the House of Commons in May 1901 still has the power to startle by its deadly accuracy:
I have frequently been astonished since I have been in this House to hear with what composure, and how glibly Members, and even Ministers, talk of a European war. I will not expatiate on the horrors of war, but there has been a great change which the House should not omit to notice. In former days, when wars arose from individual causes, from the policy of a Minister or the passion of a King, when they were fought by small regular armies of professional soldiers, and when their course was retarded by the difficulties of communication and supply, and often suspended by the winter season, it was possible to limit the liabilities of the combatants. But now, when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed – when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings.[xxv]
Until the Second World War Churchill was more likely to be written off as an alarmist than acclaimed for his foresight, but his warnings of the menace of Nazism in the 1930s established his enduring fame as a prophet. Rightly so, but it is salutary to recall that his judgments on defence policy and his predictions of the character of the next war were often wrong in detail.[xxvi] His campaign for ‘parity in the air’, fuelled by information secretly supplied to him in defiance of the Official Secrets Act by civil servants and officers in the RAF, was based on highly exaggerated estimates of the strength of the Luftwaffe. Churchill and his informants reduced the issue to a numbers game in which the only factor taken into the reckoning was the number of ‘front-line’ aircraft on each side and their respective capabilities were ignored. The numbers appeared to show that Britain lost ‘air parity’ in 1935 and failed to recover it before the outbreak of war. Richard Overy’s researches have shown, on the contrary, that between 1933 and 1937, nearly two-thirds of the aircraft produced for the Luftwaffe were non-combat. In principle Churchill was right about Hitler’s intention to build up a massive German air fleet, but until 1939 ‘the German air force was no real threat to Britain…’[xxvii]
Nor did secret intelligence enlighten him about the Luftwaffe’s strategic intentions. Like every one else in the British Establishment he assumed that Hitler was building up his air force with the intention of mounting a ‘knock-out blow’ against London. Speaking in the House of Commons in November 1934 he predicted that after a week to ten days of bombing, between 30,000 and 40,000 people would be killed or maimed. Continuous air attacks would drive three to four million people out of London into open country.[xxviii] The Luftwaffe, however, was designed to act in support of the Army and the Navy. There was no plan at any time in the 1930s for an air offensive against Britain or an all-out attack on London. It was only as a consequence of the defeat of the British and French on land in 1940, a disaster that took Churchill and almost everyone else by surprise, that the Luftwaffe was in a position to mount an air offensive against Britain. Nor was this the only earth-shattering development he failed to anticipate. Intensely preoccupied with the threat from Nazi Germany, he failed to spot the danger posed by Japan to the British Empire in the Far East. In a memorandum on seapower he sent to Chamberlain in March 1939 he wrote: ‘Consider how vain is the menace that Japan will send a fleet and army to conquer Singapore. It is as far from Japan as Southampton from New York…One can take it as quite certain that Japan would not run such a risk.’[xxix]
***
Judgment and Insight
Did Churchill lack ‘judgment’? The scientist and novelist C.P. Snow, himself a wartime civil servant, recognised both the truth of the claim and its limitations. In a shrewd survey of the problem he drew a distinction between the virtues of judgment and insight:
‘Judgement’, to people concerned with political decisions, means two things – one which most of us would think bad, one good. The bad thing is the ability to sense what everyone else is thinking, and to think like them. That Churchill never had, and would have despised himself for having. But the good thing in “judgment” is the ability to think of many matters at once, in their interdependence, their relative importance and their consequences. In this sense, I don’t think there is any burking the fact Churchill’s judgment was, on a great many occasions in his life, seriously defective….
Judgement is a fine thing: but it is not all that uncommon. Deep insight is much rarer. Churchill had flashes of that kind of insight, dug up from his own nature, independent of influences, owing nothing to anyone outside himself. Sometimes it was a better guide than judgement: in the ultimate crisis when he came to power, there were times when judgment itself could, though it did not need to, become a source of weakness.
When Hitler came to power, Churchill did not use judgement, but one of his deep insights. This was absolute danger, there was no easy way round… Not many men in conservative England had such insight. Churchill had.[xxx]
It was Churchill’s intuitive qualities that transformed him, in the summer of 1940, into a great war leader. Never had the need for inspirational egotism been greater. At a time when unity was imperative, Churchill was a politician who transcended party, and a sublime orator with the skill to express the will of the people. His burning passion for war was reinforced by the conviction that he was uniquely qualified to direct it. He believed that he was acting with divine help and guidance. His war aims were the defeat of Nazi Germany, the liberation of the occupied nations and the preservation of the British Empire. How victory could be won he did not know, but intuition told him that it could be, and his imagination strode ahead of reality in seven-league boots. Perhaps it was Churchill’s ‘lack of judgment’ that saved the nation.
[i] David Lloyd George, The War Memoirs of David Lloyd George Vol III, pps 1070-1
[ii] Quoted in Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018), p 176
[iii] The Spectator 11 March 1916, p7
[iv] Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (1991), p 556
[v] Victor Wallace Germains, The Tragedy of Winston Churchill (1931) p 278
[vi] Paul Addison, Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (2005) p154
[vii] Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The struggle for survival 1940-1965 (1966), p777
[viii] Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1965), p16
[ix] Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey (1994), p175
[x] Winston S Churchill, The Second World War Vol I: The Gathering Storm (1948), p 527
[xi] Tom Hickman, Churchill’s Bodyguard (2005), p106
[xii] Lucy Masterman, C.F.G. Masterman: A Biography (1939), pps 97-8; Churchill discussed the meaning of the phrase with Violet Bonham Carter when they were cruising aboard the Admiralty yacht Enchantress in the eastern Mediterran in 1912. See Violet Bonham Carter, pps 266-7. The quotation first appears in Deuteronomy 25:4 and was twice cited by St Paul in Corinthians 9:9 and Timothy 5:18.
[xiii] Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, p 294
[xiv] Lord Attlee, ‘Churchill: the Man I Knew’, The Observer, 31 January 1965
[xv] A. G. Gardiner, Pillars of Society (1913), pps 57-8, 68
[xvi] Violet Bonham-Carter, p 197
[xvii] Quoted in Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure 1900-1939 (1973 edition), pps 33-4. Rhodes James does not give the source of the quotation, which I have not been able to find elsewhere.
[xviii] Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Vol V Part 1 The Exchequer Years 1922-1929 (1979), pps 1328-9, Chamberlain to Halifax 12 August 1928.
[xix] Philip Williamson (ed), The Modernisation of Conservative Politics: The Diaries and Letters of William Bridgeman 1904-1935 (1988), pps 233-4
[xx] Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939-1945, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (2001), p 401, diary for 10 May 1943.
[xxi] R.W. Thompson, Churchill and Morton (1976), pps 71-2, Morton to Thompson 16 August 1960.
[xxii] Lucy Masterman, C.F.G. Masterman, p 135
[xxiii] Christopher Bell, Churchill and the Dardanelles (Oxford) 2017, p 9. Bell has written what much surely rank as the definitive account of Churchill’s role in the Gallipoli campaign. Searchingly analytical it concludes that he was neither the hero or the villain of the affair: the truth is more complicated.
[xxiv] Anthony Storr, ‘The Man’ in A.J.P. Taylor et al, Churchill: Four Faces and the Man (1973), p 213; C.G. Jung and John Beebe, Psychological Types (2017 edition), pps 340-1. The book was originally published in German in Zurich in 1921. According to Oxford Dictionaries online, ‘intuition’ can be defined as ‘the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.’
[xxv] Robert Rhodes James (ed), Winston S Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 Volume I: 1897-1908 (1974), p82, speech of 13 May 1901, House of Commons.
[xxvi] David Cameron Watt, ‘Churchill and Appeasement’ in Robert Blake and William Roger Louis (ed) (1993), pps 199-214
[xxvii] Richard Overy, ‘German Air Strength 1933 to 1939: A Note’, Historical Journal vol 27 no 2 (1984), p 469
[xxviii] Robert Rhodes James (ed), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches Vol V 1928-35, p5441, speech of 28 November 1934,
[xxix] Martin Gilbert (ed), Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume V Part 3 The Coming of War 1936-1939 (1982), p 1415, Memorandum on Sea Power, 1939, 27 March 1939
[xxx] C.P. Snow, Variety of Men (1969 edition), pps 136-8
