Paul Addison

Lord Randolph Churchill has many claims to fame and some to notoriety. His marriage to Jennie Jerome pioneered a series of matches between British aristocrats and American heiresses: the beginning of a special relationship of significance in the next century, if not in his own. He entered politics and rose to power between 1880 and 1885 as a master of opposition tactics both inside and outside the House of Commons. Waging a spectacular war on two fronts, he attacked the Gladstone Government and his own Front Bench with equal vigour. His barnstorming tours of the country and constant manipulation of the press marked him out as a new species of demagogue appealing to the mass electorate created by successive Reform Acts, and his career as an agitator reached its climax with his call to the Protestants of Ulster to resist Home Rule by force: ‘Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right.’ The reward was office and power, but not for long. Like a sudden flame his ministerial career burnt itself out within eighteen months, extinguished by a rash miscalculation while he was still only 37. Given a normal life-span he might well have restored his fortunes, but his fate was to perish slowly and humiliatingly of a disease that was almost certainly syphilis.

Churchill, like Disraeli, turned his political struggles into a romance. To read his writings and speeches is to be invited into a special world of technicolor spendour, the stage for an epic with the author as hero. But ought we to suspend disbelief? A division of opinion has long existed between romantics, who feel themselves seduced and compelled by Churchill’s vision of events, and the sceptics who treat it as a fabrication. Until 1940 the sceptics outnumbered the romantics by about a hundred to one. Politicians and civil servants generally recognised a kind of erratic genius in Churchill, but his rhetoric was dismissed as the transparent disguise of an adventurer on the make. If he spoke of the future of Liberalism, it would be assumed that he was plotting with Lloyd George. If he condemned the state of British defences, it would be argued that he was trying to overthrow Baldwin.

The great Churchill boom now in progress is a very instructive sign of the times. When Churchill died in 1965, we thought we were burying the past. Richard Crossman, a reluctant mourner at the funeral, wrote afterwards: ‘It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed to arrive? In spirit at least, Churchill has outlived them, taking his place again in British politics as one of the household gods of Mrs Thatcher. Once more his legend influences the future.

To people over a certain age, the politics of the 1940s are still a burning issue. Talk to them of Attlee, and the sparks of old controversies fly up as though Neil Kinnock were still in his celebrated pram. But to the present generation of students, Attlee might as well be Campbell-Bannerman, or Dr Mussadiq the Akond of Swat. To them, such matters are all a part of grandad’s world, a mysterious place where there was bread rationing, and patriotism was mixed up with pride in the welfare state.

The Second World War is no longer what it used to be. The populists of the New Right, aided and abetted by amateur historians of the mole-hunting variety, have been distorting it into a morality tale of the Cold War. Scholars may talk as they please, constructing complex patterns of interpretation for a minority audience: the popular ground has been won by the Chapman Pincher school of history, with its attendant band of novelists, journalists and politicians. The message they bear is a simple one: that the war against Hitler was merely a side-show in the truly decisive struggle of the 20th century – the battle between Freedom and Communism.