Andrew Roberts | The Importance of Churchill for Today

so now I get injuries andrew roberts we put we put it together he helped me he's has an excellent memory for dates better than i we think it was in 2003 when i add him and when I met him he gave a talk at the travelers Club at a Hillsdale College event over there and Doug Jeffrey found him and I didn't know who he was really and he started talking and he was this brilliant young man and the first thought I had was wow he's not crazy highly educated you know Keyes College Cambridge historian and he isn't nuts and he's gone on to great strengths he's written some important books he's written the history of the english-speaking people he's written two books that qualify him for his most recent book magnificently and one is he wrote a biography of of Edward Halifax Lord Irwin and then Lord Halifax who was very important in the life of Winston Churchill often opposed often in close cooperation and so Andrew knows that part you know Neville chant Edward Halifax is the man who sat in the room with Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain when they decided who would be prime minister in 1940 that's a significant connection and Andrews looked at all that from that side first and then Andrew has written a book called imminent true Chileans and it's a it's modeled after 1923 I think it is famous book called eminent Victorians and it's all about the people who are in the government and how they related to each other and what they did but also what they did in relation to each other their Diaries and their letters and their romances sometimes not inside the sanctity of matrimony and so he put all that together and it's it III come in the book too it's dazzling and I and I remember as I was reading it throughout saying how do you find out all that stuff and then he had this last great qualification to write about Churchill who's half American and that is his father was the franchisee of Kentucky Fried Chicken in United Kingdom and that means he understands that it was between regular and extra-crispy now you're ready to want to write about Churchill it's so hard to write about Churchill because he's you know it's just there isn't anything like him when I picked Churchill I was advised by a great teacher pick some great person in some great book and by the time you're done and be able to say you know as much about it as anybody alive and I was so ignorant I didn't understand that if you picked Churchill the volume in comparison to say Lincoln or Washington is just massively more and so you know here are mine old man now having more or less got through it but it's hard to do that right and so to write a biography of him to take all that and render it into a microcosm which is what has got to be the book is a thousand pages long and I promise you'll enjoy every page of it it's fun it's you know Churchill was exciting Hitler is exciting and that's how Hitler history is exciting Hitler is exciting why did I think I was about to say what about but it is true Hitler is exciting and therefore the fella who was responsible more than any other fellow for his downfall is exciting and those are great traumatic turning points event events that stand important in the whole history of the human race and how do you take all that about a man who wrote 50 books of his own roughly and render it into some kind of coherence and not lose the fun of it almost no one has ever done that I would say no one except that I used to work for Martin Gilbert didn't have a great loyalty to him but Andrew Roberts has done that bless him for it ladies and gentlemen it's a great honor to be invited to address you and thank you very much indeed Larry for those tremendously kind words and it's so wonderful see quite so many people here as well I once gave a speech at the Sevenoaks literary festival in Kent where fewer people turned up than there were oaks when when Larry invited me to to speak about the importance of Winston Churchill today it was six months ago and I don't think that even he could have spotted his own preference because in the last week or two weeks in fact Winston Churchill has been turned into a political football in my country and the deputy leader of the Labour Party John MacDonald who has always prided himself on his on his Marxism Leninism has acqui accused instant Churchill of being a villain and one can imagine therefore the the response quite a very pleased to say most of it negative but unfortunately some people including Mayor Sadiq Khan of the Mayor of London as has generally come out also highly critical of Churchill the week before that we had a 24-year old green MP from the Scottish Parliament called Winston Churchill a war criminal and a war monger why anybody was expecting any sense from a 24-year old green member of the Scottish Parliament anyhow I know it's ah but nonetheless and and in your country a little little over two months ago the astronaut scott kelly who is of course the UN ambassador to space only the United Nations ladies and gentlemen would want to have an ambassador somewhere that has no people and no government said that Churchill was also a I think that the phrase was was a racist war monger he didn't bother to educate himself he didn't bother to read any any books about Churchill or or to learn about Churchill learn the truth at all he just came out with that remark I really do feel that the spaceil to concentrating is the one between his ears so I think it's worthwhile just to go back just to remind ourselves why Winston Churchill does in fact still have contemporary relevant relevance today why he is important today and it's not because of course of the actual battles that he fought in British domestic politics frankly what happened in the tony pandey riot what happened in the with the Black and Tans what happened with the gold standard or the abdication crisis or even the even the Dardanelles expedition those are a hundred years old they are all in the past they are all long dead and buried however the reason that he still matters today is because of the truths that he told because of the leadership that he showed because of the personality that he was and above all because of the foresight that he showed the qualities that we still need in leaders just as much today as ever we have done in the past because of the elegance that he used to to make people listen to him who didn't want to and who didn't agree with him and because of the moral and indeed the physical courage that he showed as well these are qualities ladies and gentlemen and of course Winston Churchill himself said of courage that it was rightly esteemed the first of all the qualities because it guarantees all the others and these are the qualities therefore that we have every right still to in a democracy to look for in our leaders and which therefore are just as important as ever they were before and perhaps more important now today than ever before I'd like to take you back to the evening of Friday the 10th of May 1940 when Winston Churchill was made prime minister by King George the 6th at Buckingham Palace and he of course and it was a it was the evening of the same day that Adolf Hitler had unleashed blitzkrieg on the West invading Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg shortly afterwards of course also to invade France and it was of that day that Winston Churchill famously wrote in his in his first volume the gathering storm of his autobiography of his of his war memoirs should I say I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life would been but a pressure preparation for this hour and for this trial and this was so true all of his past life the speeches that now cover 8,000 pages the jobs that he had as First Lord of the Admiralty of course before the First World War and and during the First World War and in the Second World War the being Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary and minister of munitions in charge of two and a half million people in the munitions factories these were indeed a preparation for his hour and his trial but what I also try to do in my book is to look at the beginning part of that sentence the bit about walking with destiny because there too you see something which is important for for Churchill and the way that we should look at him today because it is impossible to understand Churchill ladies and gentlemen unless you understand that he also had this sense this driving sense of personal destiny he was 16 years old when he told his best friend at Harrow Winston Churchill was almost entirely self educated owing to the fact that he had to be because he went to Harrow that there were going to be terrible struggles great upheavals in his life and in both of their lives in the life of the nation and that he was going to be called upon to save England and to save London and he said that at the age of 16 and everything that happened to him after that all the close brushes with death that he had the many close brushes with death underpin the sense of personal destiny and so when he was born prematurely two months prematurely a close brush with death in late Victorian England when he was stabbed at the age of 10 years old in the stomach by a school friend clearly not a very close friend when he nearly died at the age of 11 when he when he nearly died of pneumonia on which occasion by the way the doctors administered brandy to the eleven-year-old and both orally and rectally which he would have thought might have put you off brandy for life but didn't in Winston Churchill's gaze he was he was only a little bit older when he survived a near drowning on Lake Geneva he survived a house fire that burnt down the stately home that he was sleeping in at three o'clock in the morning he was involved in two plane crashes three car crashes in on the front of my book there is the wonderful Joseph Karsch photograph of him in 1941 and you could see this huge scar down the center of his of his head and his forehead and that came as a result of him trying to cross the road in Fifth Avenue in New York and being an Englishman looking in the wrong direction and those by the way ladies and gentlemen are only the peacetime clothes brushes with death in wartime he also took part in the greatest cavalry charge of being of the British Empire at the Battle of Omdurman where no fewer than 25% of his regiment the 21st Lancers were either killed or wounded and then the following year his armored train was attacked by the Boers in the South African War and on that occasion 34 percent of his unit were killed or wounded and then two months later he escaped from a prisoner of war camp and crossed 300 miles of enemy territory at one point he hid down a mineshaft and when the candle guttered out he could feel rats scurrying over his face and then in the First World War he entered no man land no man's land no fewer than thirty times now he didn't need to he was lieutenant the colonel of the 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers he could have stayed back at battalion headquarters if he'd wanted to but he didn't because he never believed that he should ever ask anybody in his regiment to do anything he wasn't willing personally to do himself and so he got so close to the German trenches he could actually hear them speaking in their trenches and then on one occasion of course he left his dugout in the front line and five minutes after he left left it a German whiz-bang high-explosive came and decapitated everybody in the dugout and on that occasion he said that he felt as if he could hear the beating of invisible wings over him invisible wings obviously taking care of him ensuring that he was going to survive in order to save London and to save England when you look actually at theologically at his belief in the Almighty he did believe in the Almighty when you look into his belief in the Almighty it seems primarily to is the duty of the Almighty was to take care of Winston Churchill the what this gave him what this is extraordinary sense of personal destiny gave him was a calmness an amazing calmness in the greatests and most terrifying most perilous moments of my country's history and he was able to make jokes in the House of Commons when he was being attacked during a confidence motion so theoretically the entire government was at stake and he made a joke when he was being attacked on the completely useless a 22 tank and he said that when the defects and the teething troubles of the a 22 tank were apparent to all it was appropriately rechristened the Churchill and the keyword in that of course is appropriately because Winston Churchill knew but he had teething troubles and defects he had got so many things wrong he'd got women's suffrage wrong he got the gold-standard wrong he got the abdication crisis wrong primarily of course he had got the Dardanelles expedition wrong a brilliant concept an absolutely brilliant idea to get the Royal Navy from the eastern Mediterranean through the Dardanelles straits into the Sea of Marmara and to have anchored it off Istanbul then called Constantinople and by the threat of shelling to have taken the Ottoman Empire out of the Central Powers in the First World War had it come off ladies and gentlemen it would have been one of the greatest coos in the history of warfare as it happened because of the implementation of it not by him but by the Admirals he was back in London we actually lost the Allies lost six ships on that day the 18th of March 1915 and then it was that the the they doubled down on the on the defeat as it were and undertook a huge invasion and fibia so salt on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the western side of the Straits which was ultimately over the next eight months to cost the Allies a hundred and forty-seven thousand and wounded and this was entirely blamed on Winston Churchill even though he was not the only person in favor of it but he was certainly the primary scapegoat of it people shouted at him what about the Dardanelles well into the 1930s but one of the wonderful things about Winston Churchill and one of the reasons that he is so relevant still today is that he learned from his mistakes he learned from each of his mistakes the the lesson he learned of course from the Dardanelles was never to overrule the chiefs of staff during the Second World War if all three of the chiefs of staff agreed on something he did not overrule them even though he had every constitutional right to do so he was the Minister of Defense as well as the Prime Minister and so you have therefore somebody who a politician who learns from his mistakes he didn't have an early an easy childhood his father the aloof disdainful mercurial but brilliant Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Randolph Churchill was somebody who never spotted any brilliance in his son and was and was harsh to him in fact in my book there there are letters that he wrote to his son that no father should ever write to any son and yet Winston Churchill especially when his father died at the age of 45 when Churchill was 20 he he adored his father he wrote his father's two-volume biography he was able to name his son Randolph he quoted his father endlessly in speeches he sought out his father's friends he adopted his father's political views the Tory democracy of Benjamin Disraeli in 1947 he actually believed that he'd met his father's ghost and they talked and in the course of their long conversation he never let on to his father that he had been instrumental in helping win the Second World War so you can see in that a a sense that Winston Churchill's career was bound up with attempting to impress the shade of his long dead father his mother too was was almost unamerican in the way that she said born of course in in Brooklyn but almost an American in the way that she showed no interest in her son and in 1884 in the first six months of 1884 when Churchill was nine years old she only saw him for about six and a half hours and there to Churchill refused to allow that to be a debilitating factor in his life just like with his relationship with his father and he loved his mother and he said in the in my early life his autobiography that she shone for me like the evening star brilliant but at a distance he was almost entirely broke all his life this was partly his own fault of course partly because his parents were spendthrift but also because he was always satisfied as his friend great friend Fe Smith said with the best of everything and he and but when he he for the first moment in his life that he ever made any money when he was in his early seventies and the thing he did and this was of course as a result of signing the contract to his to his war memoirs the first thing he did was to buy the first of 37 racehorses which he and and he put his his jockeys into his father's racing colors and the key thing to remember I think in all of this is that he was not therefore to be seen you should never see Winston Churchill as the buttons up victorian-era Socrative his age and class and background he was not that he was instead a throwback to an earlier era he was a Regency figure a romantic figure somebody he was willing to wear his heart on his sleeve in the course of the Second World War there were no fewer than 50 opportunities for sorry 50 times when he burst into tears in public 50 I sometimes think that it's a reason may who by the way has every right to burst into tears were to were to burst into tears in public how on earth that would that would affect us but with Churchill people didn't mind because they recognized that he was a he was a different kind of figure and a true Regency figure I don't believe for a moment that he was a depressive as has been made out he chaired the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet no fewer than a thousand times during the Second World War it is a depression is a debilitating illness but the only time that he ever used the phrase Black Dog it was in July 1911 when he was writing to his wife Clementine at a time when that phrase was used by Edwardian matrons and governesses to explain their ill-tempered children I don't believe that he had that or indeed manic depression or as I've seen in some in some biographies bipolar disease neither do I think that he was an alcoholic he certainly drank an enormous amount there's no doubt about that but he had this iron Constitution for alcohol only once in the whole 2194 days of the Second World War was Churchill drunk and in a meeting that went on until 3 o'clock in the morning on the 7th of March 1944 and on 1 on that occasion what they did was to just hold the meeting again the next morning pretending that the last one hadn't happened his friend CP Scott said of said of Churchill that Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drunk that much there was a wonderful moment where after the war and indeed after his in after his retirement Churchill used to invite people to chart all to come and see the library in the study and the and the drawing-room they get to the drawing room at the end and Churchill would invite his guests to have a drink and to American Mormons were invited and he invited them to have a drink and one of them said to him strong drink rejith and stingeth like a serpent and Winston Churchill replied I've long been looking for a drink like that [Laughter] so huh so how was it how was it ladies and gentlemen that he was the person and this goes back again to the kind of leadership that that is just as relevant today as ever it was before how was it that he was able to show such extraordinary foresight not just foresight before the second world war which we all know about the the foresight to spot Hitler and the Nazis for what they were but also before the First World War when he was able to spot Prussian militarism for the danger it posed and also after the Second World War when his in his great speech in the the iron curtain speech in Fulton Missouri in March 1946 he also warned the world about Stalin and the threats of Soviet imperialism to Eastern Europe I think it comes very much from three things especially the with regard to Hitler and the Nazis the first was that he was a file OSI might he liked Jews he admired them he had marred them for their contribution to the ethics of Western civilization he'd grown up with him his father had like Jews he'd been on holiday with him he represented them in his in one of his constituencies and he therefore had an early warning system that was not vouchsafed to many of the other people of his age and class and background on the conservative benches many of whom were anti-semitic the second thing was that he was in historian one of the reasons that I'm proud to be an historian is that Winston Churchill was one and he was able to put the threat made by the Nazis and Hitler into the long continuum of British history the dangers the hegemonist ik threat to the balance of power in Europe was something that we had seen before and he knew that we'd seen it with philip ii of spain and the spanish armada we'd seen it with louis xiv of france and the war of austrian succession which of course his own great ancestor John Churchill first you could more Brown had been instrumental in defeating we'd seen it with Napoleon who he admired for his ambition and he maude for his sense of destiny but who he also appreciated closed-in hegemonist ik threat and then of course the Kaiser who had fought against himself and then Hitler and the third thing ladies and gentlemen is that he had seen fanaticism in his life he had come up close and personal to the kind of fanaticism on the northwest frontier in India and in the Sudan which was of course in this case religious Islamic fundamentalist fanaticism but was the same thing as the religious fanaticism of the Nazis in so many ways and that also was not something that had ever affected people like the prime ministers of the 1930s like Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain they had never seen fanaticism in their life and so you have these things together the three things together coming together and and allowing Winston Churchill to have this extraordinary prescience and he also because he had this prescience and because he had this background and because he have this self belief and this sense of of destiny he also was able to ignore opinion polls to not hire a spin doctor or a speech writer in his life to take no notice of focus groups to actually what you got from Winston Churchill you knew you had straight from him and on top of all of these things the ability to learn from his mistakes this extraordinary physical courage a moral courage also that he was able to be shouted down in the House of Commons his seat nearly taken away from him by the Conservative Party after the Munich Agreement lambasted and attacked and ridiculed by the press and he did not change his message his message that we needed to rearm especially in the air and that that kind of leadership ladies and gentlemen needed only one more in order to make it unbelievably powerful and that was of course his eloquence and he got his eloquence by hard work by practice by reading McCauley and reading Gibbon and knowing Shakespeare back to France his marvellous moments in the Second World War where he has a competition with Field Marshal Smuts about who knows Shakespeare them all and after about a quarter of an hour Smart's had to give up and then a little bit later on he realized that actually Churchill was making it up yeah can you imagine try to make up them I am big pant amateurs but because of this extraordinary work that he had put into it work he had put into it when his brother officers were relaxing in the heat of the of the of the Sun in in India at Bangalore in the late 1890s but he was reading reading reading he managed therefore to create phrases that will live as long as our tongue survives he was once asked during the war by his private secretary how it was what were the tricks of the trade what were the techniques that you use in order to create these extraordinary morale-boosting speeches he said well there were four things the first was that each sentence needs to convey one idea and one idea only don't be bogged down with sub clauses and so on what he called that noble thing the English sentence and the second thing was therefore keep sentences as short as possible keep words as long as possible if you're not attempting to to show off that you know a long word use the right word and it's often the shortest word and also he said try and use anglo-saxon words Old English words words that the english-speaking peoples feel comfortable with and know instinctively because they've been using them for a thousand years and if you therefore look at the peroration that paragraph of the great we shall fight on the beaches speech of the 4th of June 1940 about when he was telling the British people what they were going to do when the paratroopers started landing and when the ship started landing in southern England and he told the British people that they were going to fight on the beaches and the landing Graff landing grounds and in the hills and the streets and fight with growing confidence in the air and that they were never going to surrender when you look at that peroration paragraph of a hundred and forty-one words all but two of them are in Old English they are they come from the dictionary of Old English the only two exceptions being the word confidence which comes from the Latin and surrender which comes from the French you you did ask an Englishman here ladies and gentlemen so to say to conclude a man of extraordinary physical courage and indeed that didn't stop of course in the Second World War either he traveled Winston Churchill traveled a hundred and ten thousand miles outside the United Kingdom as Prime Minister he was the person who therefore and think of that travel it was often in unpressurized cabins he was in his early seventies very often it was within the radius of the Luftwaffe when he came back from the United States on one occasion his plane was struck by lightning had the instrumentation gone down so would he have and when he took ships it was across u-boat infested oceans the sheer the sheer courage of that and of course it was necessary because he was the glue that kept the big three together President Roosevelt of course was profoundly disabled he was still able to to leave the Europe the American continent three times during the war Marshall Stalin did not enjoy flying he didn't like flying he was a bit scared of flying he stayed he only left the Soviet Union once during the Second World War and so it took Winston Churchill to visit Moscow twice to visit the Washington several times Quebec and so on Cairo Casablanca the the the sheer amount of time that he spent traveling showed in tremendous guts on his part and of course he was ill he had a minor heart flutter in the in the White House when he was staying for three weeks after Pearl Harbor in the White House he had several bouts of pneumonia on one occasion in my in May 1943 in Carthage a doctor came to him and asked him for some blood for a testing and Churchill said yes well you can take some from my or my finger and I also have an almost infinite expanse of arse so there you have just to conclude a man of extraordinary courage both physical and moral a man of the capacity for foresight that in my view puts all of the all of the other mistakes he made the trivial mistake they make they make all of those mistakes trivial but he was somebody who could learn from his mistakes and did and then also that on top of everything else that eloquence and as a result therefore ladies and gentlemen you have somebody who was able to go beyond even what he heard predicted and prescribed for himself as a 16 year old school boy because he was not just able to save London and England he also saved civilization itself thank you very much thank you thank you thank you thank you very much dr. Roberts we do have time for some questions I should mention that Andrew will be signing copies of his New York Times best seller Churchill walking with destiny right after this Q&A session out in the out in the lobby but we do have some time for some questions now from the audience we have microphones with students or students with microphones students bringing the microphones around please wait for a microphone and thank you very much for your speech enjoyed it I enjoyed I didn't read your book I downloaded it audibly listen to it that's much better by the way your nature is very good and I like the voice that he had for Winston itself so you could tell well tell the accent that's for you so there's all kinds of questions that I have a little tiny one and that is Halifax during that meeting in May he said he didn't want to be Prime Minister but then there's the theory that he really wanted Winston to take it and he knew he would sign the peace agreement with Churchill and then he would become Israel troops to that and I go into this in in a great deal of detail deliberately in this book because there are so many different sources about this and they don't all agree and I think that Winston Churchill's own own memory of this where he gets the day wrong and the time wrong for this and also sort of claims that the Premiership fell into his lap through a long silence that that he claims took place it doesn't ring true for me at all and I think some of the other other sources make it a little bit more clear that what Winston Churchill actually did on the at 4:30 in the afternoon on Thursday the 9th of May 1940 was to do what he had always done in his career which was to to ask for the office that he took and he knew the crisis he knew the he'd been waiting for this for 40 years anyway he'd wanted the Premiership all his life and this was going to be his great moment and the idea that he sat back and waited it to fall into his lap just doesn't ring true to me at all I think he I think he demanded it and and he had every right to because he was the only person who had been proved right about Adolf Hitler over the previous 10 years and all Halifax and certainly David Morrison somebody else who's in this room who was the Chief Whip and Neville Chamberlain himself of course had all been proved wrong and so I'd be interested to hear what you and other readers feel about my chapter 19 which for me is the is the is really the key one I think that that's what happened I was asked a question which is not involved huge political churchill but one of the paragraphs in your early chapters which i have read the whole book said English imperialism in India was wrong and then you said Churchill believed that England had brought raros rose but most importantly and uncorrupt judicial system a administration that was work and ended sati and you had a whole paragraph of things that Churchill thought were good for India and there's that paragraph you said but of course imperialism was wrong and I thought that was satire I just curious was that your point or not there really ought to be a special fund for irony next question over on this side dr. Roberts on this side yes sir there was a whimsical story I heard once when Winston was visiting the White House I'd like you to debunk it if you might that mr. Churchill had a habit at times of not wearing a stitch of clothing and that the president walked in on him and Winston without skipping a beat said let it be known that the Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States would you confirm or deny that sir absolutely confirm it it comes from Patrick Fowler and the queue was one of Churchill's secretaries and it's very much in the Canon yes it did happen when he was turned out of office how did he handle that and we've heard it was war weariness on a part of the British people but it was a turn towards socialism and how long was he in a funk about that oh do you mean Lee snap out of it and Winston Churchill was never in a funk about anything he he snapped out of it immediately the defeat in the 1945 general election on the 26th of July came as a surprise to him because he had been treated by huge crowds with with great enthusiasm all the way through the general election especially the crowds in the Midlands and in the north and he had a terrible shock on the day if there had been a presidential system he would undoubtedly have won that election but of course we have a parliamentary one and he was only one person one name on 650 ballots and the Conservative Party was going to be punished for appeasement and many people also did want the what they thought of as the New Jerusalem of socialism the welfare state the National Health Service all the things that they thought were going to come an awful lot cheaper than they ultimately did and when Clementine Churchill's wife said to him on that day as the results were coming in and it was clear there was a landslide against him that it might be a blessing in disguise Winston Churchill replied well from where I'm sitting it seems quite effectively disguised question has to be asked though on whether or not it was a blessing in disguise because ultimately Churchill was exhausted by the end of the war the kind of things that he would have needed to have dealt with with regard to austerity and the end of empire and so on were not things that he was excited or interested about and and he was able to recharge his batteries over the following six years he went on painting holidays to Lake Como and France and Marrakesh and elsewhere and by the end of it he was able to come back and win the 1951 general election which considering the massive defeat that he'd experienced in 1945 was an extraordinary achievement so maybe actually Clementine was right and it was indeed a blessing in disguise although not for the British people I hasten to add because we've still got the National Health Service to this day and it is a it is an appalling incubus thank you for your speech tonight considering the environment we find ourselves in today with all the talking heads out there willing to give their insight and wisdom including former presidents knowing Winston Churchill as well as you do what do you think he would say to Donald Trump in his battle against his own party entrenched deep state and those people who really just aren't supportive of him what do you think he would say today I think that's search well first of all Mary Soames Churchill's daughter always used to say to me and others never assume that you know what papar would have said under any circumstances especially in art half a century after his death I think it would have been very difficult with them Churchill in modern day politics although but not least because he smoked 160,000 cigars and you know drank a good deal and and other things that would have worked against him as a modern-day politician with regard to and that's a British politician let alone an American one nonetheless I think he was very very good at using all the latest technology I think he'd have been brilliant on Twitter for example he he was so good many of his great reposts would have fitted in perfectly to 280 characters or fewer there was a time when he was giving a speech and and someone shouted rot at him and and he replied I'd like to thank the Honourable member for telling us what's in his mind that certainly would have fitted into 280 characters question 4 over here is that sorry I thought I said what okay Oh Sir Winston Churchill as well as Theodore Roosevelt I mean the theater as a Franklin Roosevelt and many other great leaders have come from the higher echelon of society privileged in their upbringing but of course we have the Toccata me of abraham lincoln who came from the lowest level what do you think is the inspiration or the cause of such leadership it's obviously not based on upbringing it must be based on some other element that makes them so great yes that's a very good question certainly not upbringing and or indeed social class every Winston Churchill was an aristocrat he was born in a palace and not just any old palace a palace that the Royals envied he was the grandson of a Duke of course and he had this this sense of noblesse oblige now today I'm afraid he would be attacked as as having a sense of entitlement but actually the kind of entitlement that he had was the best possible kind the idea that you you had privileges in life but it was your duty to spend your entire life returning to the to the to the people the energies that you had in your in your existence and so it was something that was tremendously powerful not just in British politics but of course he extended it also to the Empire and and believed that that was a sacred trust that needed to to take the the lives and the and the energies and the effort of millions of Britons and I think therefore actually there is something very model if it could be properly harnessed in that kind of attitude towards life and it doesn't it doesn't in any way have to come from a particular class whatsoever but I do think that it would be a shame if we were to basically cut out from politics anyone who's had a privileged upbringing because of this ghastly sense of the opposite of envy and because Envy is the most barren of all the vices and it's something that socialism builds on and taken and and sucks out and and and makes it really makes people feel that just because somebody's had a privileged background that they have nothing to contribute and yet the the great Renaissance men of history and women of history have have not come from any particular social class at all so I'm I think I'm with you in what I suspect is your is your question I think that it's a it's a terrible new idea this idea of somebody being so entitled that they can't contribute to society of course they can and they must [Applause] [Music] got a couple more questions and then I'm going to end with the Churchill Jake if that's all right gentlemen here two questions are related did Churchill have friends and secondly did he live a lonely life as busy as it was um he he had lots of friends he had lots of great friends he was a man who had a special special talent indeed I would argue a genius for friendship when one looks at the relationships we that he had with people like Professor Linderman or Effie Smith or Brendan Bracken or most of the members of the club that he set up off his friends called the other Club one realizes that he was a man who had a tremendous capacity for friendship and this came from several areas first of all his wonderful sense of humor of course which which was which was gigantic also his belief in sticking by his friends even if it's even if it hurt him politically he was he was willing to so long as they behaved honorably of course he would he would put up with any any amount of bad behavior from his friends frankly there's a there's a rule in the other Club which states that that nothing shall in no rule nothing in this club will interfere with the asperity and rancor of party politics and so he was able to take to make friends from outside his own political party which was very lucky considering you changed his party twice famously saying that anyone can rat but it takes a certain ingenuity to rear at and and so yes no he did wick was he'll only I don't believe he was only for a moment no he he'd been partly because of his friends and partly also because of his his wife Clementine Hugh who was his rock and he he really he was fascinated of course by politics and and could always pick up the phone to anybody that he wanted to he was a man who was capable of being on his own and that was a good thing too because he wrote as as Larry said he wrote the best part of 50 books 980 articles he was he was somebody who needed to be on his own in order to work but he was he was capable of being alone but not lonely and I think that's one of the great attributes in life we have time for one more question after a World War two we saw the sense of Englishness and the duty of the Englishman declined we saw the Empire decline was that a material thing was that a cultural thing was that a lack of leadership that someone like Churchill might have been able to change had he been a younger man at that time or was it just the the sunset of an empire after an exhausting series of world wars I think it was the I think it's very much the last of those although culturally of course socialism had did suck the lifeblood out of the empire as well because the Atlee government wanted to to be rid of India nonetheless by the end of the Second World War maybe we could have survived one world war but to to you know within a quarter of a century it was asking too much of anyone and yet if an empire if the great a great empire an empire on which a quarter of the which-which at one stage had about of covered about a fifth of the world land surface was ever going to to decline and die as as our state as the British Empire did in what better what more noble cause could it possibly die than in the defeat of Nazism if it had to go that was the way to go an honorable way to go I think ladies and gentlemen just one one Churchill gag that I'd like him to tell you my favorite Churchill gag oh is changes from times they're about 200 Churchill jokes in this book and so obviously they they change from points from time to time but the one that I particularly love at the moment is the moment when his private secretary came to him in the early 1950s and told him that their cook had been made pregnant as the result of the nocturnal assignation with a man in the street in Verona and Winston Churchill immediately replied obviously not one of the two gentlemen thank you very much indeed [Applause]

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 63,478

Rating: 4.8682284 out of 5

Keywords: hillsdale, churchill, politics, national leadership seminar, nls, leader, college

Id: ncJpNNsF3qY

Length: 55min 36sec (3336 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019