Andrew Roberts | Remarks on Winston Churchill

are we up for this are we exhausted and defeated are we ready to go okay Ron Larsen and I on the one hand and and Andrew Roberts on the other been having an argument Andrew does not like to be introduced as a brilliant speaker and so let me say that he's a miserable speaker I wouldn't expect much tonight so it's hard to write a biography of Churchill for all the reasons you know there's so much all the greatest things that ever happened in scale are all in his life and he was in the middle of them and so there's been one really great biography of Winston Churchill written and I told you last night it's 9,000 pages long and I used to say to an incredulous Martin Gilbert you know not many people are going to read this and he would say why not and I would say yeah right so who is written a good biography of Churchill in manageable scale one person a biography that can be relied on a biography that captures the parts of it and the parts of it are solemnity and fun ceremony and adventure aggressiveness and restraint consistency and change it's a drama it's a huge drama and of course if it spread over 9,000 pages you can see it one way and if it's spread over a tiny little book of only 1,000 pages then you can see it in a different way and I have waited my life to say when people walk up to me and say what should I read of Churchill I say the same thing Richard langworth says I say read my early life and then if you get hooked I'll tell you the next thing if they say what should I read about Churchill I struggle with that Martin Gilbert wrote a one-volume it's very good it's a rival for the best Andrews is like it bit shorter and more fun and that's such an achievement and I will tell you I've known a long time and I know that he's prepared his whole life to write this book although I'm not sure he always knew that's what he was doing he wrote about Halifax Churchill's sort of friend and enemy alike he wrote about imminent Churchill ian's and that's all the people of Churchill's time and what they said about each other and it's a it's patterned after a classic book from the 1920s I think called eminent Victorians and if you want to understand who knew who and what they were like and even who was sleeping with whom they weren't always of the same surname then he did bad and you have to dig to do that and and also not make it just phony he's written many fine books we're trying to remember when we met and it was we best I can tell sometime in the early 1990s when Doug Jeffrey got him to give a speech for where we used to work at the Claremont Institute and when he finished his speech I said to myself and depending I said one of these days that man is gonna write a great book about rinsing Churchill now he's done it Andrew Roberts [Applause] ladies and gentlemen it's a great honor to be invited to address you this evening and thank you very much indeed Larry for those tremendously kind words I will always remember being introduced as a miserable speaker last night at dinner Randolph Churchill said that the conclusion of the official biography after so many years and 15 point 1 million words was an achievement a monument not unlike the building of Blenheim Palace and a few people laughed and I don't think they should do because actually when you look at it there are many civilizations that have lost their buildings lost their architectures lost their their palaces but their literature has survived and that I think is going to be the case with Winston Churchill so I think it was a perfectly reasonable analogy to make in fact that what has been concluded here this year by Hillsdale and by Larry and by Richard langworth without whom by the way I could not have written my biography of Churchill and Soren Geiger and the rest of the team really is a monument that will last for the ages [Music] there are descriptions of there's the great Napoleon created the description of Egypt back in the 20s re back in the 19th century and that was 21 volumes Cambridge University brought out the science in China volumes 22 volumes in the 1950s Toronto University the letters of Disraeli which where they ran out of money and that never was never finished and I think therefore that what has been created here this this official biography with all of its companion volumes will be seen as the greatest publishing achievements of the 21st century the torch was handed on by the dying Martin Gilbert to Larry and he has now finally finished this fulfilled this this sacred task it must fill him with a sense of powerful catharsis which I think we noticed that a sense of very much in in Larry's speech yesterday and when you look scientists it's often said standing on the shoulders of giants and Stein standing on the shoulders of Newton and so on and if we Churchill writer every church an author and biographer is effectively standing on the church on the shoulders of Martin Gilbert's this great figure who dedicated his life to these volumes and now it can be said I think that every future Churchill historian is standing on the shoulders of Martin but also Larry and Richard and Soren and this and this incredible team and really we cannot do enough to thank you it will be it is indeed now a documents as well as of course of history it's also a documents for liberty and for those who love Liberty and will be used by future generations by people who love Liberty there's a sign at the front here that says pursuing truth defending Liberty since 1844 and as long as of course we can ignore the bit about 1844 which for an Englishman is yesterday basically the the rest of it though is entirely true because it is a question of pursuing truth and also of defending Liberty so there is a real sense I think that hills dales defining mission statements is intimately bound up with the creation of this this extraordinary 15 point 1 million word document and for that I think that future generations will salute you my book walking with destiny which by the way with regard to the title it's not true what a waggish friend of mine said to me the other day that I did it in order to try to sell as many copies transatlantic Lee owing to the fact the Americans love destiny and British people love walking is an attempt to to unpick to to look into this fabulous statement that Churchill made in the last paragraph of the first volume of his war memoirs The Gathering Storm in which he famously said that all my la my past life has been but a preparation for this hour and this trial but also a attempt to look at the beginning part of that sentence where he said I felt as if I were walking with destiny because Churchill's it strikes me as essentially in trying to understand Winston Churchill to appreciate that he had a sense of personal and private destiny which was something that drove him on he of course was only 16 years old when as a as a schoolboy at Harrow school Churchill was almost entirely self educated because he had to be because he went to Harrow not a joke I'd have made in front of Randolph Churchill yesterday but nonetheless is clearly true he said that that in his life he said this to there to his great friend Merlin Devens he said in our lives we shall see terrible upheavals great struggles and that I shall be called upon to save London and to save England and all of the things that happen to him as a as a young man indeed had already happened to him up until that point served to underline this sense of private destiny especially the extraordinary number the remarkable number of close brushes with death that he had he was of course born to prematurely that in itself in Victorian England was a close brush with death he was stabbed in the stomach by a school friend at the age of 10 clearly not a very close friend he at the age of 11 nearly died of pneumonia and on that occasion the doctors administered brandy to the eleven-year-old both orally and rectally you might have thought that they would have put you off brandy for life but didn't in Winston Churchill's case he very maybe died in a in a house fire he very nearly died in a terrible near accident in Lake Geneva he had two plane crashes she was involved in three car crashes on the front of my book with a wonderful picture of yosef cash in 1941 you can see this huge scarred and the center of his forehead which used to go red in meetings of the Chiefs of Staff of the Second World War and and that came of course as a result of nearly being killed in on Fifth Avenue and an 76th Street crossing the road he was an Englishman so he looked in the wrong direction as he as he crossed the road and so it's a and so those by the way ladies and gentlemen only the peacetime close brushes with death in wartime he took part in five campaigns on four continents took part of course in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire at the Battle of Omdurman where where 25 percent of his units the 21st Lancers were killed or wounded the following year he his armored train was ambushed by the burrs in the South African War where 34% of his unit were killed or wounded and then two months later after that he escaped from a prisoner of war camp in south africa and cross 300 miles of enemy territory at one point he had to hide down a mineshaft and when the candle guttered out he could feel rats scurrying over his face this is a man therefore Owen the First World War of course only five minutes after leaving his dugout in the front line he insisted on going into the front line he could have stayed back at battalion headquarters he was left tenant colonel of the 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers he could have stayed back if he'd wanted to at battalion headquarters but he never believed in in asking his men to do anything that he wouldn't do himself and five minutes after leaving a dugout in the front line it's scored a direct hit from a German whiz-bang high-explosive shell decapitating everyone inside and on that occasion he said that he felt he could feel the invisible wings beating above him he was there for somebody who did believe in the Almighty although actually theologically if you look into it carefully the sole duty of the Almighty seems to have been to take care of Winston Churchill and what this extraordinary sense of private destiny did for him was tool it was to give him a calmness a extraordinary sense of calm that was to allow him to make jokes even during the the great crises of the Second World War when in confidence motions in the House of Commons they're very rare by the way they seem to be cropping up a little bit more often now but under normal circumstances we don't have them very often and Winston Churchill had two of them in 1942 and in one of them he said that when the defects and the teething troubles of the a.22 tank became apparent to all it was appropriately rechristened the Churchill and the key line in that the key word really in that gag is appropriately because Churchill realize that he himself had made many blunders and many mistakes in his life he had got the Dardanelles wrong he had got the the gold-standard wrong and the abdication crisis the blackened hands and women suffrage and so on but the great thing about Churchill was that he learned from his mistakes and the way in which he learned from the Dardanelles which by the way was a brilliant concept brilliant idea to have tried to have got the Royal Navy from the eastern Mediterranean through the Straits of the Dardanelles and to have anchored it off Constantinople modern-day Istanbul had it come off it would have been one of the great strategic coos in the history of warfare because it would have taken the Ottoman Empire out of the Great War but it went wrong because of the implementation of it which had nothing to do with him he was back in London but if but what he learned from the appalling defeat in the Dardanelles because of course after the the break for the attempted breakthrough on the 18th of March 1915 five weeks later they then undertook a massive amphibious assault on the gut on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the west side of the Straits and ultimately we lost a hundred and forty seven thousand killed or wounded and people still shouted what about the Dardanelles at Churchill even into the 1930s in public meetings but what Churchill learned from the Dardanelles was that he was never to overrule the Chiefs of Staff at all in the Second World War and he was a politician who constantly learned from his mistakes I'm often asked why I should have written a book on Churchill considering that at moment there are 1009 biographies of Winston Churchill that's what what Ronald Cohen has as added up and and so why on earth should one try to present a one thousand and tenth to thee to the public and the answer is that since the last major biography of Churchill there have been a extraordinary avalanche of new information about him the Majesty the Queen allowed me to be the first Churchill biographer to use her father's Diaries and the King met Churchill every Tuesday of the Second World War to Buckingham Palace and Churchill trusted the King with all of the great secrets of the Second World War he told him about the nuclear secret he told him about the ultra decrypts from the enigma machines he told him which generals and admirals were going to be hard and fired under what circumstances he told in which countries were going to be invaded when so on and the King wrote everything down and there's no real reason why they should necessarily have got on with one another because of course the King had been a supporter of Neville Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement and Churchill had been a supporter of his elder brother King Edward the eighth during the abdication crisis but they did and they did immediately and certainly by the time of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain and so that's a wonderful new source in fact Churchill was the first judge was the only one of the Kings for prime ministers who to who the king referred to called by his Christian name and he calls him his friend in these in these Diaries so that's a wonderful new source another is the diaries of Ivan my ski the Soviet ambassador 1932 to 43 and and they're - they've just come out in Moscow over the last four or five years and those have been invaluable as were the 41 sets of papers that have been deposited at Churchill College archives in Cambridge since the last major biography of Churchill 41 including Mary Soames the Churchill's daughters Diaries from 1940 I was very fortunate also to be able to discover the verbatim accounts of the War Cabinet and those which which I've used and which have now been used in a in a Churchill biography for the first time and the Churchill family were tremendously generous in allowing me to have exclusive access to Tamela Harlan's love letters Pamela Harriman of course who was Winston Churchill's daughter-in-law and who led a very active romantic life during the Second World War I think it's fair to say as well as of course being married to Randolph Churchill and having a baby by him during the Second World War she also famously had an affair with Averell Harriman the FDR's envoi and jock Whitney and ed Murrow and the great great American journalist and general Kenneth Anderson and marshal of the Air Force of Charles Portal and someone we just know others Jerry anyhow the the Churchill was very fortunate that I had exclusive access to her papers although clearly nobody had exclusive access to her and sorry about that ladies gentleman what it tells you what these extraordinary new is avalanche of new informations cornucopia that has come out over the last six eight years or so still told you it on top of everything that we would know already from this from this magnificent official biography and it's and its companion volumes is that Churchill was not the buttoned up Victorian era Stoke rat of his age and class and background he was in fact an extraordinarily emotional man a man driven by his passions on some 50 occasions during the Second World War Winston Churchill burst into tears in public it would be very off-putting to see a prime minister burst into tears in public apart from it happening the week before last but but it's unusual otherwise to for it to to happen and we and and so but people were not surprised when Churchill did it own to the fact that they appreciated that he was a highly eccentric and finally unusual man who's driven as I say by his passions he was a throwback effectively to an earlier era he was a romantic Regency figure an aristocrat of the Regency period a time when people wore their hearts on their sleeves I think it's worth wondering why oh and by the way when we talk about his eccentricities of course he was broke almost all his life he only really got into in out of debt when he signed his contract for the the war memoirs his great Walmart when my woman was after the Second World War but up until that point he there were two occasions when he very nearly had to sell Chartwell his beloved beautiful manor house in Kent that I know you've all been to and so what he did was of course to write his 37 books and his over 800 articles and essays and so on and these were these allow us to have an insight into his mind that is not given to very many biographers and rather of other people and and Churchill in the 1930s would write by would write on articles about pretty much anything and so you get the situation that if an editor turned down an article by him he would do what a lot of us journalists too which is just keep the article and wait for a different editor and so by the time of the Second World War when of course any editor would publish anything that the British prime minister was had written he brought out a few a few ideas and you so you get the situation on the 7th of March 1942 a terrible time of course ladies and gentlemen in the in the history of the Second World War the Russian army was on the retreat through the Ukraine British army was on the retreat through the North African littoral the Japanese had taken one-eighth of the of the planet and this was the point at which the British Prime Minister published an article in The Illustrated Sunday Herald entitled are there men on the moon it's concluded that there probably were men on the moon and there were certainly such things as aliens and UFOs again were to resume to publish an article are there men on the moon in in the Sunday Times next weekend I think people be a little concerned but they weren't with Churchill because they realize that this Matt had this extraordinary sense of their of X interesting I want to try to kill to two myths that have been around for ages about him there are so many myths if anybody by the way wants to go through all of the myths about Churchill and to see the way in which they are crushed you should read Richard langworth book on on the myths of Winston Churchill it is utterly superb and an invaluable but there are two in particular I think that have been around for so long now that they really do need to be nailed the first is that he was a some kind of manic-depressive the only time in his entire career that he used the phrase Black Dog was in July 1911 when he was writing to his wife Clementine and at that time it was a well-known phrase used by Edwardian governesses and nannies to explain ill-tempered children he chaired over a thousands meetings of the war committee of the defense committee of the war cabinet and and I simply don't believe that he was somebody who suffered from manic depression or as I've seen in some books bipolar disease it's a it's a both of those diseases are debilitating illnesses and he was able to to chair these meetings until three o'clock in the morning the other was that he was an alcoholic I don't believe this either he was somebody clearly who was able to to deal with a tremendous amount of alcohol he had an iron Constitution for alcohol but it was as he said always his his servant and never his master there's only one occasion on the in the poll of the 2194 days of the second world or that Churchill was drunk and on that occasion it went on til 3 o'clock in the morning he'd been drinking whiskey and and what they did on that occasion was to hold the same meeting the next morning as though the earlier one hadn't happened it was CP Scott who said of Churchill that Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drunk that much and of course there's a very famous story about when after his retirement when he used to invite his invite people pretty much anyone to to come to Chartwell to see his wonderful collection of books there in his library and to see his study and then they wound up in the drawing room and at six o'clock he'd invite them for a drink and he did this to two American Mormons one of whom said to him that strong drink rage a--the and stingeth like a serpent and church were applied I've long been looking for a drink like that [Laughter] so how was it ladies lemon how was it that this extraordinary man this eccentric figure this romantic figure this this passionate figure was able to be not just the most important British politician to spot Hitler and the Nazis for what they really were but in many ways the only British major British politician in the 1930s to be able to do that and the answer was and by the way not of course it wasn't his only act of prescience he also before the First World War spotted the danger posed by Prussian militarism and after the Second World War that posed by Soviet Communism especially in Eastern Europe how was it that he had this extraordinary foresight for sites so important it strikes me because these are the three greatest threats of the 20th century he spotted them others didn't they were far more important than all the trivial business to do with with the gold standard all the abdication crisis the key moments he got right and others didn't and it strike me strikes me ladies and gentlemen that these things come his his prescience comes from three things the first was that he was a phyllo see might he liked Jews he'd grown up with Jews he appreciated them he admired their contribution to Western civilization he'd been a Zionist at the time of the Balfour Declaration and earlier he was somebody therefore who was able to place Hitler and the Nazis to see the threat that they posed to have an early warning system about that and and I think that's a vital in order to understand the way in which he spotted what was about to happen the second thing was that he was an historian and one of the things that makes me proud to be an historian is that Winston Churchill was one and he was able to place the danger in its long continuum of history certainly of British history of the threats hegemonist ik threats to the European balance of power so he was able to see it in terms of philip ii of spain and the spanish armada and louis xiv and the the great dangers have shown in the war of Spanish Succession which of course is own great ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough John Churchill had been instrumental in defeating and then Napoleon and then the Kaiser against who himself had fought and so he was able to see this threat in the panoply of dangerous historical dangers and the first thing was that he was somebody who had come up against fanaticism in his life on the northwest frontier of course and in the Sudan in that case both cases Islamic fundamentalists fanaticism but he saw the same tropes in the political fanaticism of the Nazis in a way that the other prime ministers of the 1930s men like Stanley Martin Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain were not able to do and so you have therefore somebody who has the who has the foresight he also has the extraordinary moral courage that goes with his physical carriages it's as great as his physical courage he was somebody who didn't employ speech writers ever who didn't employ spin doctors who didn't take notice of opinion polls this marvelous moment in the Second World War when he was told that that politicians should keep their ears to the ground and he said that he didn't believe that people would respect politicians who were caught in so ungainly a posture and and so he you knew what you got from Winston Churchill was something that came straight from him but none of this ladies and gentlemen would have mattered none of this would have worked unless he had also had eloquence extraordinary rhetorical ability the capacity to make people listen to him to to persuade them to urge them to listen to him because of the quality of his rhetoric and his and his aura he was once asked by by Koval his private secretary what were the tricks of the trade what were the techniques that he used in order to infuse the nation and in the civilized world in 1942 41 and those great great wartime speeches morale-boosting speeches and he said really it came down to three things the first was to keep your sentences short each sentence should have one thought and one thought only that it's attempting to get over don't bother with all the sub clauses and so on the second was to keep your words short and don't don't show off by using long words use the short words the ones that that actually a right for the sentence and the third was if at all possible to use words that the english-speaking peoples use in their own common parlance and have done for a thousand years words that can be found in anglo-saxon and Old English and so when you look at the great pair Asian the last paragraph of the we shall fight on the beaches speech of 4th of June 1940 where he is telling the British people what they are going to do when when the Germans landed in southern England and he look at anyway he said of course we should fight on the beaches and on the landing grounds in the streets and in the hills fight with ever-growing confidence in the air ending of course with that line we shall never surrender when you look at the a hundred and forty one words of that peroration that last paragraph all but two of them come from Old English the only two exceptions being confidence which comes from the Latin and surrender which comes from the French so to say to conclude ladies and gentlemen you have asked an Englishman here to sweet to conclude ladies and gentlemen man who makes mistakes terrible blunders on occasion but learns from them somebody who has a moral courage equal to his physical courage somebody who has tremendous foresight extraordinary foresight driven very largely by his sense of history and somebody who has the eloquence to ask people to listen to him even though they don't agree with him and they don't want to hear what he has to say the warnings that he has to give the detailed warnings before the Second World War about the importance of high defence spending especially in the air and you put all of these things together and you have somebody who is capable of going even beyond what he had predicted for himself as a 16 year old school boy because he wasn't just able to save London and to save England but actually he saved civilization itself thank you very much indeed thank you so much let's thank you that's very kind of you take it thank you thank you very much indeed that's so kind of you now ladies and gentlemen we've got Superman time for questions and answers [Music] it's a great opportunity who would like to ask a question fighting the Boers Oh got a very good question Melissa and I think I think that it's very important to remember his in it when we think about his very early drive to remember his parentage and his background his father of course Lord Randolph Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Conservative government and have been the man who had annexed Burma to the crown in 1886 and his mother Jennie Jerome an American had had an important influence on him as well she didn't actually take much notice of him early on in his life well done thank you and he actually for the first first six months of 1884 when she was when he was nine years old she only saw him for six and a half hours in in those six months and what he did instead of that was to was to be interested in history especially British history was to be interested in military history and and he he really reckoned that the way that he was going to be able to continue his father's political legacy was to get into the House of Commons early they had no money and so the way he was going to do that was to join the army and and show tremendous courage on the field of battle which is what he did on five occasions in in on four continents and so he was somebody who had this tremendous sense of Destiny and I think to answer you he always believed that he was going to impose himself on history he was not somebody who fell for a moment for the wig or determinist or Marxist sense of his stree where the individual doesn't matter and everything about history is just driven by dark and personal forces as TS Eliot called them he had a great man view of history in which individuals really can stamp their personalities on the age and he intended from a very young girl either very young an early age to be one of those personalities gentle now no no he disagree with me all the time not to overrule them he had great clashes with them yes yes that's a good question no he he was constantly disagreeing with them and but what he didn't do was when all three of them agreed on on something he did not use his constitutional powers as Minister of Defense and of course as Prime Minister to overrule them he would argue with them he would debate with them he would he would bring in his his own Statistical Office he would use decrypts from the from the ultra boffins at Bletchley Park he would he would shout sometimes he would bang the table he would on occasionally burst into tears he would do anything to try and get them to change their minds but if he failed and very often he did fail because he was up against the six-foot-four flinty Ulsterman General Sir Alan Brooke later Field Marshal Lord Alan Breck who was a he was a extremely tough minded man who would sit across the the cabinet table from Churchill breaking pencils in half saying no I disagree with you prime minister but but and so the thing that he learnt was was that even if he wanted an invasion of northern Norway or northern Sumatra as he did on two occasions in the second well he was not going to impose his will against the collected will of the of the Chiefs of Staff which makes a the the Western Way the Democratic way of fighting wars so much more superior because you also get of course that as a disagreement between Franklin Roosevelt's and Georgia C Marshall about about ground strategy as well and so much superior and those had to be fought out and argued in in in gentlemanly but tough arguments so much superior to what was going on eighteen hundred miles behind the Russian German front in in the Vosges answer where the Fuhrer would listen to his to his generals people who had far better experience of warfare and of Staff College than than ever he had men like Erich Manstein and Goethe instead and Heinz Guderian and so on Erwin Rommel of course and and he'd listened to them for up to an hour and then and then go back to doing precisely what he'd originally intended to do at the beginning of the meeting so and you see very much also with Stalin the way in which Stalin at the beginning acted as you'd expect a totalitarian dictator to act and actually after Operation Barbarossa and the great in German invasion of Russia he fairly quickly adopted the much more collegiate approach where he would listen to marshals like Kanye of all Zhukov or Rokossovsky and would allow his mind to be to be changed by them so he yes his father as I mentioned was a was a very serious and significant politician but he was a he was a sustaining 'full he was a brilliant politician in many ways and a great speaker but he was a distinct disdainful man who wrote letters that no father should ever write to any son full of contempt and instead of allowing this to to affect him in fact Winston Churchill he did the opposite and when his father died at the age of 45 in 1895 when Churchill was 20 he sought out his father's friends to talk to them about his father he wrote a thousand page 2 volume biography of his father he adopted his father's political stance the Tory democracy stance of Benjamin Disraeli he adopted his father speaking stance he quoted him endlessly in speeches he called his own son Randolph and then in 1947 he had a very weird moment where he believed that he had met his father's ghost and actually this that you can read the entire story in a book called the dream which was edited brilliantly again by Richard langworth and I do recommend it because it's a very interesting sort of psychodrama between between the son and the father because at no point during this long conversation they had did he tell his father that he had been instrumental in helping win the second world war and so you have this at the same time as his mother who as I mentioned earlier saw very little of him and and indeed really didn't show him terribly much interest until he became a signatory on her trust fund at which point he did she did so to the interest in him but also he didn't allow that to affect his his love for his mother and in my early life which Larry is so right saying is the first it's the first port of call for anybody interested in in Churchill and you should really read it just before you read mine he he said of his mother Jennie Jerome she shone for me like the evening star brilliance but at a distance and so you can very much see the the drives in the man from the from the parents so another question Johnnie Sullivan there and I'm going to finish by the way with a with a couple of Churchill gags if that's all right when belong I promise the angel of light that century I think well obviously Hitler but but also Churchill very much so Lenin and Trotsky as being as being driving agents of darkness Trotsky in particular he had a animus for and and one one of the things that's problem slightly problematical about Churchill is that he did personally get on with Stalin in one sort of hopes that he wouldn't but but in a sense he had to because when one looks just at the shift statistics of the Second World War and realized that for every German five Germans killed in combat by which I mean soldiers killed on a battlefield as opposed to Germans being killed by the combined bomber offensive from the air killed in combat for every five of them four died on the Eastern Front and so we were killing we the Americans British Canadians and so on were killing the fifth German at all intents and purposes so of course the British Prime Minister needed to get on with Stalin but as soon as he could break free at his great speech in in Fulton Missouri on the 5th March 1946 the iron curtain speech he did denounce denounced Stalin so so I think yes the those are the those are the sort of troika of monsters now I know you won't need to all get to bed however I'm going to tell you two Churchill anecdotes just simply because they amuse me at the moment he in this book there are about two hundred of Churchill's Jags and that so my favorite ones changed constantly that there are two that I particularly love one which in his killjoy way Richard will tell me Churchill probably didn't say nonetheless it's it's kids just sound so much like even though you really hope that he did and that is the time that he met yo Kim von Ribbentrop the Nazi foreign minister but at that time German ambassador to London who threatened him and at a reception and said that in the next war Italy will be on the side of the Third Reich and Churchill replied well it seems any fair we had to have them last time don't shake your head I think I'm going down in my in his estimation there even having told that Jake it's just too good not to but finally one that we know he did say which was when his private secretary John Koval who I mentioned earlier told him that there Cooke had been made pregnant as the result of a nocturnal assignation with a man in the street in Verona and Churchill replied obviously not one of the two gentlemen thank you very much indeed you

Channel: Hillsdale College

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Length: 48min 54sec (2934 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019