Churchill’s Shadow review – a ruthless critique of the legendary statesman
In this latest biography of Churchill, Geoffrey Wheatcroft deploys a distinguished prose style and compelling command of a formidable body of research. His greatest asset is an ability to capture the atmosphere and drama of certain historical moments, or links between different ages, such as recalling that, after she entered Parliament, Margaret Thatcher “sat near the aged Churchill for five years”. That image presents a slightly startling historical perspective.
Churchill’s Shadow is an extraordinary book, actually two books between one set of covers, as the subtitle betrays: “An Astonishing Life and a Dangerous Legacy”. The first part, comprising the more significant proportion of the text, is a biography. More precisely, it is a hatchet job, the most trenchant critique of Churchill so far published. Wheatcroft is disdainful of hagiography: he need be in no fear that critics will find that fault in his work.
That, of course, is fair game. The historian or biographer has every right, sometimes a duty, to reappraise or deconstruct the reputations of prominent historical figures. Even saints – and Churchill was far from belonging to that category – have a Devil’s Advocate. Wheatcroft, however, exceeds that remit, and he does so for a discernible purpose that goes far beyond a mere personal debunking of Churchill. It is evident that the main text, dealing with the “Astonishing Life”, is just a necessary preliminary to expounding the book’s real theme, the “Dangerous Legacy”.
In his declared intent to correct hagiographical accounts of Churchill’s life, the author, despite his familiarity with the entire Churchillian biographical canon, seems to underrate the extent to which exposing Churchill’s flaws has, for years, been a major literary industry. Robert Rhodes James published Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900-1939 in 1970, making the obvious point that if Churchill had died on the eve of the Second World War, he would have been known to history as a failure.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is more unsparing; if there was any tiny flaw in the great man he left unchronicled, it must be very obscure indeed. Sometimes his critical propensities lead him into unjust aspersions. Wheatcroft recounts that Churchill, while a prisoner of the Boers, made them an offer: “If I am released, I will give any parole that may be required not to serve against the Republican forces or to give any information affecting the military situation.”
His offer was rejected, and he was imprisoned in Pretoria, from whence he made his escape, thus launching his celebrity. Yet Wheatcroft speculates, without producing any evidence, whether he left behind two comrades with whom he had promised to share an escape, asking, “and did he not, in fact, break the parole or promise he had given the Boers?” Manifestly not, since the Boers had rejected his offer, predicated upon his release, and imprisoned him. That is a low blow.
All the familiar disasters in which Churchill was involved, from Gallipoli onwards, are rehearsed, as well as some lesser-known fiascos. The focus on Churchill’s views on race and empire is a modish, anachronistic imposition of modern preoccupations upon an historical character and events. It is the literary equivalent of daubing anti-racist slogans on the monument to the man who did more than any other individual to halt the true racists in their tracks. In the author’s grudging words: “Were we forced to choose, Churchill is preferable to Hitler…” Quite.
However, all the progressive discrediting of Churchill’s conduct, page by page, punctuated by occasional refutations of the more extravagant charges against him, to create an impression of balance, is a preparation for the ultimate purpose of the book: to deprecate the influence upon Britain of the Churchill myth.
Notice is given of this underlying agenda early on when Wheatcroft writes of Churchill: “He led the British nobly and heroically during one of the great crises of history, and has misled them ever since, sustaining the country with beguiling illusions of greatness, of standing unique and alone, while preventing the British from coming to terms with their true place in the world.”
There you have it. Churchill’s crime was not prodigality with Allied lives at Gallipoli, or intransigence over India, but his malign posthumous influence in preventing Britain from knowing her place, imbuing her with notions of independence and identity, of still having a role to play on the world stage. He putt grit into the machinery of managed decline and made Britons disinclined to go gentle into that good night of post-imperial oblivion.
That is the agenda of Britain’s self-hating elites. The country at first did the decent thing by submerging itself within the European Union – a subject on which Churchill repeatedly contradicted himself, though it is safe to say he would not for long have tolerated Brussels’ bullying – but Brexit represented a dismaying revival of British exceptionalism.
Bracketing the biographical text, the same opinion is repeated, almost verbatim but with an extended transatlantic application, on the penultimate page, claiming of Churchill: “Invocations of his name have again and again led to calamity, while in his own country, ‘Churchillism’ and the paralysing memory of the Finest Hour have deluded the British and prevented them from coming to terms with their true place in the world, and in America, the Churchill cult has had measurably sorry consequences.”
It is a pity the book went to press too early for Wheatcroft to attribute America’s debacle in Afghanistan to Churchill’s influence. The drumbeat repetition of Britain’s “true place in the world” is a Remainer’s lament (the author makes his anti-Brexit animus clear) over Britain’s stubborn refusal to abdicate all claims to significance and embrace its destiny in the geopolitical pecking order somewhere between El Salvador and Macedonia.
That is the real theme of the book. This is a Churchill biography that is only incidentally about Churchill. If Winston Churchill had never been born, presumably, Wheatcroft would have used Palmerston or Pitt the Younger for a similar purpose.
Though Geoffrey Wheatcroft does not seem to realise it, the British people have never had any illusions about Churchill’s flaws and limitations – they cast him into the political wilderness, in the moment of his greatest achievement, in 1945.
What this nation cannot forget is the man of 1940 (when the establishment, incredibly, was still hankering for Halifax as prime minister) whose iron will and inspired oratory strengthened the sinews and gave courage to a frightened country facing the greatest trial in its history. No hagiography can enlarge that greatness, nor detraction diminish it.
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