Churchill: Walking with Destiny

ladies and gentlemen it's a great honor to be invited to address you this evening and straight ahead this morning and it was that kind of a journey and thank you very much indeed Eric for those kind words I'd like to take you back to the evening of Friday the 10th of May 1940 the day on which Winston Churchill became prime minister he was made prime minister in me I'm going to take my jacket was a little bit out of his way and he was made Prime Minister on the evening of that day by King George the 6th and of course on the morning of that same day a dawn Adolf Hitler had unleashed blitzkrieg on the West invading Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and shortly afterwards of course also as to invade France and Churchill wrote of that day in his war memoirs I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial and what I've tried to do in my book is to unpack back to investigate the level to which that's right all his past life the time that he had been in charge of the Royal Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty in the First World War and the Second World War his time as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer and the way in which all these these various tasks and jobs in his past had prepared him for this hour and this trial of May 1940 but also I try to look at the beginning part of that phrase the bit about walking with destiny because it strikes me that it is absolutely essential in understanding Winston Churchill the one appreciates that he had a driving sense of personal destiny I didn't subtitle the book walking the Destiny as one of my friends said because all Americans are interested in destiny and all Englishmen are interested in walking the churchill sense of private destiny started at the age of 16 when he was a schoolboy at Harrow school church was almost entirely self educated because he had to be because he went to Harrow and he and he said to his best friend man called Merlin Evans that there will be a time in the great upheavals and the terrible struggles of our lives when I shall be called upon to save London and to save England and and he said this when he was when he's only 16 a half a century before before exactly that happened and the thing that made him feel that he he was especially chosen was the huge number of extraordinarily close brushes with death that Churchill had in his life he was born two months prematurely which of course in Victorian England was itself 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 very nearly died of pneumonia when the doctors administered the way in which they they they saved the young Winston was to administer brandy to the eleven-year-old and both orally and rectally which you might have thought would have put you off brandy for life but certainly didn't in Winston Churchill's case he nearly died from a house fire from a from a boating accident in the middle of Lake Geneva that that where he very nearly drowned he was hit he was involved in two plane crashes and three car crashes in his life on the front cover of my book is the yosef cache wonderful views of famous iconic photograph of Churchill by Joseph Kosh the Canadian photographer and it shows this this powerful huge great scar down the center of his furrowed which came as a result of very nearly dying in car crash in New York on 76th Street and Fifth Avenue when because he was an Englishman he looked in the wrong direction as he was crossing the road and was very nearly killed there and those ladies and gentlement adjust the peace time close brushes with death in war he fought in no fewer than five continents in sorry four campaigns on five campaigns on four continents and and again and again he took extraordinarily brave risks he said that there was nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot at without results and he was he was shot at without results on a huge number of occasions he took part in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 and in the following year his armoured train and in that by the way in that battle some twenty five percent of his unit the 21st Lancers were killed or wounded and then the following year he took part in when his armored train was ambushed in the South African War by the burrs he he was then in that engagement some 34% of his unit the durham light infantry were killed or wounded and then two months later he escaped from a BER prisoner of war camp in Pretoria and crossed three hundred miles of enemy territory and at one point he had to hide down a mineshaft and when the candle guttered out down the mineshaft he could feel rats scurrying over his face and at no point and all of these incredibly close brushes with death another one of course in the when he was a left-handed colonel in the First World War and he was in charge of the Royal Scots the 6th battalion the Royal Scots Fusiliers and he went no fewer than 30 times into no-man's land because he didn't believe in ordering his men to do something that he himself wasn't willing to do and on one occasion he left a dugout in the front line and five minutes later a German whiz-bang high-explosive shell schooled a direct hit and decapitated everyone inside and on that occasion he said that he felt as if he could hear the invisible wings beating above him now Churchill was not a Christian in the 5.2 million words that he wrote in the 6.1 million words that he spoke he never mentioned Jesus Christ at all but he did believe in an Almighty although theological II when you look into it closely the primary duty of the Almighty was to take care of Winston Churchill one of the things that this sense of destiny did for him was to make him feel incredibly calm during the graces most appalling crises and perils that my country has ever faced especially of course those from 1940 and 1941 and he was able to joke to his entourage into Parliament when even in confidence motions in the House of Commons which are very rare until quite recently at least and and during one of them he was being attacked for the completely useless a 22 tank and and he said that when the teething troubles and the defects of the a.22 tank became apparent wall it was appropriately rechristened the Churchill and heater and the and the key point about the keyword in that gag of course is appropriately because Churchill recognized that he himself had terrible defects and teething troubles he had made mistake after mistake blunder after blunder in his career he had got women's suffrage wrong he had got the gold-standard wrong he got the abdication crisis wrong the blackened hands in Ireland primarily of course the Dardanelles catastrophe of 1915 that was a extraordinary disaster to have befallen allied arms it was a brilliant idea to have tried to get the Navy the Royal Navy through the Straits from the eastern Mediterranean up through the Straits of the Dardanelles and to have anchored it off Constantinople modern day damn bull and thereby to have to have basically through the threat of shelling force the Ottoman Empire out of the Great War would if it had come off have been one of the great strategic Jews in the history of warfare but it didn't the implementation of it went wrong not Churchill's fault he wasn't in there at the time he was back in London but on the 18th of March 1915 the Allies lost no fewer than six ships trying to get through the Straits and then down to Churchill largely they doubled down on the defeat and on the five weeks later on the 25th of April 1915 we landed the largest amphibious assault in the history of mankind up to that point and it was a disaster when you see though go to those battlefields and you see the 45-degree angles that the men had to charge up against extremely well entrenched Turkish fields of machine-gun fire you realize how over the next eight months the Allies could have lost one hundred and forty seven thousand killed and wounded which of course was blamed on Churchill very largely indeed even in the nineteen thirties he had people shout what about the Dardanelles at him at the political meetings that he spoke at but the great thing about Churchill was that he was somebody he was able to learn from his mistakes he was a politician who was constantly learning and what he learned from the Dardanelles was never in the Second World War to overrule the Chiefs of Staff he would have general Lord Alan Berg the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff and the and the chief of the Imperial General Staff sit across the cabinet table from him during defense committee meetings breaking pencils in half saying no I disagree with you prime minister crap and but and he had every constitutional right to overrule him if he wanted to he was Minister of Defense as well as Prime Minister but he never did I'm often asked why I should have written this book considering that there are 1009 biographies of Winston Churchill so was it not ridiculously hubristic of me to have written a one thousand and tenth and the answer is that that I don't believe so because there has been in the last six to ten years an absolute avalanche of new sources that have come out about Churchill which justify the writing of this book Her Majesty the Queen allowed me to be the first Churchill biographer to use her father's Diaries and King George the sixth met Churchill on every Tuesday of the Second World War he they they lunched together and they served themselves from the side plate because on the sideboard because Churchill trusted the king with all of the great secrets of the Second World War he told him about the nuclear secret about the ultra decrypts about which ministers and admirals and generals were going to be hard and fired which countries were going to be invaded when and under what circumstances and so um you have this and the King wrote everything down in his diary and they wouldn't they didn't necessarily have to get on it wasn't automatic that they were going to the king of course was a great supporter of Neville Chamberlain and the policy of appeasement and the king had been and Churchill had been a huge and staunch supporter of the Kings elder brother the Edward King Edward the eighth during the abdication crisis and so they might not have got on but they did immediately and in the Diaries Churchill is referred to by the king as his friend and he was the only one of the Kings for prime ministers who he referred to by his first name so that's one new source and a tremendous one the next are the forty-one sets of papers that have been deposited at Churchill College Cambridge which is the is a wonderful a wonderful resource forty one sets since the last major biography of him including the diaries of his daughter of Churchill's daughter Mary Soames and then I myself six years ago discovered the verbatim accounts of the War Cabinet and so we know what every individual said in the war cap now the diaries of Ivan my ski the Soviet ambassador 1932 to 43 have become available in in Moscow over the last five years and my ski saw a lot of Churchill especially of course during the nazi-soviet pact the Churchill family have been tremendously helpful to me they've given me exclusive access to to large number of papers including Pamela herriman's love letters and param Emily Harriman who of course was married to Randolph Churchill Winston Churchill's son during the Second World War and had a baby by him and also had a very active romantic life during the Second World War as well as of course having an affair with Averell Harriman the FDR's envoi she also had an affair with jock Whitney and ed Murrow the great American journalist and general Kenneth Anderson and Field Marshal Sir Charles Portal and someone we just know of as Jerry so although I was given exclusive access to her papers clearly nobody had exclusive access to her and the sorry about that ladies and so probably this and that what we get from all of these papers and also the 15.1 tons of papers that are in Churchill College Cambridge and this is huge there and there are now 24 volumes some of them 2,000 pages long of of Churchill's letters in the companion volumes to the official biography and what you get when you get all of this extraordinary amount of information old and new together is you appreciate that this was not a man like other politicians of his age and class and background he wasn't the buttoned up Victorian era Stoke rat of a Victorian England at all he was a man driven by his emotions driven by his passions during the Second World War Winston Churchill burst into tears no fewer than 50 times and it must been very off-putting to have a prime minister person's ethnicity has actually happened to them about three weeks ago but certain but overall it doesn't have him very often in in England and and but people understood that Churchill was not the the normal heiress to creative of his age and class and background he was a throwback to an earlier era the Regency period when when people very much wore their hearts on their sleeves he although of course he had a grand upbringing he was born in a palace not just any old palace Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire is one that even the Royals envied he was also the grandson and a Duke of course but his father Lord Randolph Churchill who was an aloof and disdainful brilliant politician Chancellor of the Exchequer but but but a burden but not a but not a loving father in any possible way he never saw any kind of brilliance in his son and he wrote him letters full of contempt letters that no father should ever write to any son and yet when he died at the age of 45 when Churchill was 20 in 1895 Churchill sought out his father's friends he wrote his father's to volume biography thousand pages he adopted his father's political stance the Tory democracy of Benjamin Disraeli and his father speaking stance and and quoted his father and called his son Randolph and in 1947 he believed in no other strange moment in in November of 1947 he believed he'd met the ghost of his father they had a long conversation and no point did he let on that he had been instrumental in helping win the second world war so you can very much see Churchill's Churchill's life and career as being an attempt to impress the shade of his long dead father his mother Jennie Jerome an American of course born in in Brooklyn was very unlike and their normal American mothers in that she took no interest at all in her in her son in the first issues happening she was a great society beauty and she was having affairs with the Prince of Wales and the Austrian ambassador and so on but in the first six months of the year 1884 when Churchill was nine months old she only saw her son Winston for six and a half hours in those six months and yet again Churchill did not allow it to change his attitude towards her rather like his father and II and he worshiped her and and he rose from his brilliant autobiography my early life which I really do recommend that you read immediately after mine he said she sung for me like the evening star brilliant but at a distance Churchill was not a depressive he's always been made out to be a manic-depressive he only actually mentions the words Black Dog once in his entire life which was in July 1911 when he was writing to his daughter Clementine and at that time the phrase black dog was used by Edwardian matrons and governesses to explain their ill-tempered children he got depressed undoubtedly he got depressed at the time of the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and the time of the fall of Tobruk in June 1942 and of course pretty much all the way through the Dardanelles catastrophe but those were moments that any sentient decision-maker would have got depressed he didn't get depressed depression is a is a debilitating illness and he did not get depressed on the basis of of a chemical reaction neither was he an alcoholic he did drink an enormous amount there's no doubt about that he he had a extraordinary capacity for alcohol an iron Constitution when it came to alcohol somebody knew him well the journalist CP Scott said that Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drunk that much I have he do and it's true in the 2194 days of the Second World War there is only one day the 7th of March 1944 that he he got drunk and the meeting went on at Chartwell until 3 o'clock sorry at checkers until 3 o'clock in the morning they were drinking whiskey or least he was until 3 a.m. and what they decided to do on that the Defense Committee of the War Cabinet decided to do on that occasion was to hold the same meeting the next morning as though the last one hasn't happened as marvelous main aft after Churchill retired he he used to invite friends and and pretty much anybody else also there anyone who asked down to his gorgeous house chart or manner in Kent and on one occasion in 1955 he had two American Mormons who invited and he showed them the study and showed them his library and then when they got to the drawing room as he always did at six o'clock he he asked whether or not they wanted to have a drink and one of these Mormons said to him strong drink rejith and stingeth like a serpent and turtle replied I've long been looking for a drink like that [Laughter] Churchill was almost constantly broke throughout his life he he only actually managed to not be in debt in his early 70s for the first time and that was when he signed a contract for his war memoirs otherwise he was he was he was constantly broken two occasions he nearly had to put Chartwell up for sale in the 1930s however this didn't prevent him from employing 14 servants and when he did get some money as I say when he signed this contract he did a classically eighteenth-century Regency era Socratic thing and bought the first of 37 racehorses but what he did what he used to do was to write articles and the reason we know so much really about Winston Churchill is that in order to pay off his debts he he wrote 37 books and over 800 articles and he would write articles about any subject Under the Sun and if an editor didn't want to publish one he would do what a lot of us journalists do which is just keep the the peace until a different editor came along and tried out on him and of course during the Second World War any editor would publish anything that Winston Churchill wrote and so you have the extraordinary situation in March 1942 with a terrible time of course for the Allies at that time the Russians were treating through the Ukraine the British were treating across the North African littoral the Japanese having taken a 1/8 of the planet and this is the moment the British prime minister in the Illustrated Sunday Herald wrote an article entitled are there men on the moon which concluded there probably were men on the moon and almost certainly eight such things as UFOs and aliens again were to resume to publish nautical caving there were men on the moon we would wonder and but the great thing about that is about Churchill doesn't nobody did they saw him as as an extraordinary eccentric figure so how was it ladies and gentlemen that this that this man was able to be not only the first politician to warn against Hitler and the Nazis and their rise in the 1930s but for many years the only major politician to do so I think it comes down to three things oh and by the way he wasn't just what he didn't just warm successfully about before the Second World War of course before the First World War he'd also warned about the threat posed by will Hermine Germany and Prussian militarism and after the Second World War he was the first person that at Fulton Missouri in his iron curtain speech on the 5th of March 1946 to warn about Soviet Communism and Stalin but with regard to Hitler and the Nazis I think he comes down to three things the first is that he was a Philo's he might he liked Jews he'd gone on holiday with Jews his father had like Jews he'd grown up with them he appreciated the contributions they've made to Western civilization he had marred them and so he had an early warning system when it came to Hitler in the Nazis that an awful lot of other people in the British Parliament did not have many of whom of course were anti-semitic the second thing was that he was somebody who'd come up close to fanaticism in his life on the Northwest Frontier in the Sudan and and so he was able to see the same tropes in the political fanaticism of Hitler and in a way that the other prime ministers of the 1930s people like Stanley Macdonald and Ramsey sorry Matt Ramsey McDonald's and Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain weren't able to do and the third thing was that he was an historian one of the reasons that I am proud to be an historian is that Winston Churchill was one and he was able to place Hitler in the long panoply of threats hegemonist ik threats to the European balance of power you go back to philip ii of spain and the spanish armada and then of course louis xiv and the war of Spanish Succession which his own great ancestor John Churchill firstly Kimura was instrumental in defeating and then Napoleon who he admired in many ways for his for his sense of Destiny in his ambition but also appreciated the the threat that he posed and then the Kaiser against whom he had himself fought and then Hitler and so you have all these things together coming together but none of them would be worthwhile unless he had a moral courage that equated to his physical courage which fortunately he did he was shouted down in the House of Commons on one occasion he was lambasted in the press he was ridiculed people didn't want to listen to what he had to say about Hitler he was nearly had his seat taken away from him by the Conservative Party after the Munich Agreement and yet he didn't change his message about the danger posed by Hitler and what to do about it especially with regard to rearmament in the air and he never employed a speechwriter he never employed a spin doctor he didn't take much notice of opinion polls fact during the war when he was told that it was important that politicians keep their ear to the ground he said that he didn't think that people would respect politicians caught in so ungainly apostrophe and say you have this this sense very much of people knowing that what that what you got from Winston Churchill was coming straight from him and and that engendered a sense of trust he none of this would be worthwhile or matter in the slightest of course unless he had also had transcendental eloquence unless he was able through the most amazing amount of incredibly hard work to make speeches and create phrases that will live for as long as our tongue and he did this through a life time of of listening he had a photographic memory which is like a photographic memory but it's four four phrases and and sounds and it went back half a century he was able to to remember phrases from the old Victorian Musical and and everything since and was a voracious reader of course and so he was able to create these extraordinary morale-boosting speeches when he was asked by his private secretary Colville how it was that he had done it in the war he said really there are three things three tricks of the trade three techniques that he used the first was always keep your sentences short a sentence should convey one idea and one idea only don't bog them down with with sub-clauses the second is keep words short don't show off how clever you are by using long words use the correct word needed in each in each place in the in the sentence and the third was they put all possible use words that the english-speaking peoples had used in their common parlance for a thousand years words from anglo-saxon and Old English and when you look nating when you look at the peroration the last paragraph of Churchill's great we shall fight on the beaches speech at the 4th of June 9 1948 the speech where he was telling the British people what they were gonna do when the Germans landed in southern England and how they were going to fight on the beaches and the landing crafts and in the hills and the streets and and fight with ever-growing confidence in the air and ending with that sublime line we shall never surrender if you look at those 141 words of that last paragraph all but two of them come from Old English the only two exceptions being the word confidence which comes from the Latin and surrender which comes from the French you you you have asked an Englishman here ladies so to conclude you have therefore this man of extraordinary courage owned by the way this courage did not end of course in the in with the outbreak of the Second World War during the Blitz he went up onto the air ministry roof to watch the Blitz take place he covered one hundred and ten thousand miles outside the United Kingdom as Prime Minister between 1940 and forty five very often in planes that were within the radius of the Luftwaffe unpressurized cabins of course he was over seventy for much of the time and and he showed therefore exactly the same physical courage as moral courage he was the glue that kept the big three together in many ways and and he was ill as well during the Second World War there's a there's a moment when he very nearly died of pneumonia in May 1943 on one occasion the doctor came to him and said and so they needed some blood for a for a blood test and he said well you can take some for my finger or for my ear and I also have an almost infinite expansive arse so so here is this man of great courage who learns lessons learns political lessons as he said to his wife in January 9 his wife Clementine in January 1916 I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes and somebody who has this this the sense of foresight of being able to to get not just the Hitler Hitler and the Nazis right but also the Soviets and and and the Kaiser and you bring these all these extraordinary things together and you have somebody who ultimately was able to go further than even he himself had predicted for himself as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy because he didn't just save London and England but actually saved civilization itself thank you very much thank you thank you very much we've got a quarter of an hour or so for questions if you'd like to ask asked questions gentlemen right at the frontier there's a microphone on its way if you put your hand up then the ladies can see where the next questions coming from thank you so much for doing this can you talk a little bit about Churchill's thinking about Operation Overlord which later became d-day and something I'd heard recently was that towards the end of the war many of his enthusiasms in terms of war strategy had to be contained and managed by some of his most intimate partners yes absolutely no this is this is something that in the 75th anniversary of d-day there was a book that came out that was well reviewed in the New York Times God knows why because it was striped from beginning to end and what it was attempting to argue was that church was against d-day Churchill had been planning for d-day since we were flung off the continent in in Dunkirk in June 1940 he'd been building up the mulberry harbour concept which he had been a driving force behind it he had been checking out the beaches and and the areas for invasion he always understood that the way we were ultimately going to win in the West was for a cross-channel punch across into northwest France and he never he never resolved from that but what he also wanted to do was to make sure that that attack did not take place until we knew that it was going to be successful and for that we needed to have two things the first was air superiority complete air superiority over the over the beaches and over Normandy on d-day itself on the day of d-day when the Germans flew 319 sorties over Normandy the Allies flew 13,000 688 that is the level of air superiority that we had and that we needed we also needed to have won the Battle of the Atlantic you can't put an army of by the 1st of July 1 men over the channel if there's any danger at all of it not being able to be resupplied and so we had to win the Battle of the Atlantic and that wasn't won until the August of 1943 and so the talk of having an earlier d-day at one point George Marshall was even the US army chief of staff was even talking about as early as the fall of 1942 it's frankly for the birds because of the sheer a kit amount of equipment that you needed to get into southern England in order to make sure that the thing was going to be successful and in January 1942 the Germans added a fourth rotor to the Enigma machine meaning that all our decrypts of the german shark code were plunged into gobbledygook and it wasn't until the December of that year that the boffins at Bletchley Park were able to break back into the shark code at which point we could send the destroyers and bombers to where the wolf packs were u-boat wolf packs were congregating in the Atlantic but that that couldn't be done until then and so it's completely wrong to say that Churchill's against d-day what he did want to the attack he was against was dragoon the anvil attack in southern France he thought that because it was 300 miles plus to the south and because d-day had already taken place 10 weeks earlier that an attack in mid-august was in that particular part of the of the theater was unnecessary what he prefer to have done was to have gone through what's called the ljubljana gap to try to get to Vienna before the Red Army it was a political decision and one that was not supported by marshal or Roosevelt or indeed his own chiefs of staff and as I mentioned earlier he didn't overrule his Chiefs of Staff if all three of them agreed on something so so it's a it's a fascinating the the interaction between the generals the masters and the commanders political masters and military commanders and of course between the Americans and the British a is an absolutely fascinating subject which I wrote about in the book called masters and commanders gentlemen here oh sorry right there and then there's one them okay so first accursed a comment your book is a triumph it's so elegant you're to be congratulated you are so kind thank you very much indeed a second can you illuminate a little bit about his relationship with his wife yes yes it was a fantastic relationship Clementine Churchill was a huge support to him especially in his his dark hours those moments that I mentioned earlier that he got depressed and she was somebody who was able to tell him things that nobody else could in June 1940 and there in the only letter that survives between the two of them because of course they were living together at Number ten at the time she she told him that he had to stop being so ill-tempered to his staff and behave behave more kindly to them and this was in the week of Dunkirk he did her he did have other things on his mind but nonetheless it was that was that that worked well and she fought for him like a tigress especially at the time the Dardanelles crisis where he writes this letter it's a marvelous letters in chapter 10 and she says to the prime minister that that he'd be a fool to get rid of Churchill because Churchill was one of the only people in the cabinet who really wanted to get to grips with the Germans and it's a letter that I'm afraid the Prime Minister came out very asketh came out very badly from because he he's sneeringly showed to it showed it to his his family and friends laughing at her from it but it's something any man would be so proud to have a wife like that actually I do have a wife like that and I am proud but when Leo Clementine was a was a and it was a tough aristocratic battle-ax but and and she didn't mind telling people exactly what she thought of them but but one wonderful consult yes oh this gentleman here yes and then we'll go to somebody here sir what happened at the end of the war so he was hero of the war savior of England stopped Hitler and then I think after the war ended he was not Prime Minister for very much longer and well what's going on is actually whilst the war was still going on it was the 26th of July 1945 so we were still fighting Japan at that time although the Germans had surrendered and there was a general election and the Conservatives were annihilated there was a complete disastrous defeat for his party the party led by him and the reason is that if we'd had a presidential election like you have he would have undoubtedly won it but it was his was only one name on 635 ballot papers and the Conservatives were responsible for the policy of appeasement and a lot of people wanted to punish them for that and so so so the election was a disaster for Churchill and on the morning of as the results were coming through and it was clear there was a landslide victory against him Clementine said to him well it might be a blessing in disguise which point church were applied from where I'm sitting it's quite effectively disguised [Laughter] you the journey to be with us here today and it's been out has been wonderful I want to circle back to the Kings Diaries and you mentioned earlier you were given this extraordinary access and I'm curious what worthy or the greatest revelations that you discovered in perusing those papers and what impact did it have and how did it alter your perception of history and your perception of Churchill well thank you David that is that's a very important question it really was something that the King was told again and again by Churchill and that was a sense of intense frustration that he felt about the glacial speed that the Roosevelt administration was moving towards bellicosity in the Second World War he saw the Second World War as the as a manichaean struggle between civilization and democracy on one side and the most evil most evil regime ever to merge human history on the other and he couldn't understand why the American administration wasn't getting more into it's harder and faster of course he knew about the America first movement and the isolationists but he didn't have he he he knew that on an intellectual level but emotionally he felt tremendous frustration that the but this is something of course he couldn't say in in public he couldn't tell anyone he couldn't tell his entourage really let alone in Parliament all the press all the people and so he kept it for the King because he knew he could he could completely trust the king the King being the one person in in in the country wasn't after his job and and I think it was tremendously helpful to have that kind of pressure cooker set up or one former prime minister told me that his meetings with the Queen reminded him of nothing so much as as psychiatrists as meeting your psychiatrist you know lying on the psychiatrist couch and so saying whatever you you know is really on your mind at the time and knowing it's not gonna go any further and and I think there is an element of that with with Churchill and and Roosevelt but it was very much this sense of sheer frustration with America and and and Roosevelt and he was critical of American Roosevelt in a way that again he couldn't be at all he criticized the the placing of the the way in which the American Navy had two long lines of warships at Pearl Harbor and the way that they those were placed he said was you know the nobody does that everybody else places their warships in a way that it's much more difficult for for enemy aircraft to hit for example and can I also thank you for the 2006 clarity that you so kindly gave me at dinner last night it was absolutely magnificent thank hi could you tell us a little bit more about the legend of around the burning of his formal portrait yes well it's not a legend unfortunately it is it is true he was given a portrait by the House of Commons and the House of Lords together portrait by Graham Sutherland that he hated and which is his wife Clementine hated and before he died Clementine warned him that she was going to that no good was going to come to this this enormous painting and sure enough she and a lady called grace Hamlin who was her secretary and Gracie's brother who was their gardener took it down to the woodshed and and chopped it up into pieces and burnt it so this isn't isn't her finest hour but but it's but it's no myth yes a little bit more time for some more questions before I tell to Churchill jokes and then you can all come off and buy my book your determination to disappear back additional layers and savvy to find new information is so appreciated it makes me curious who or what you'd most like to write about next well I have already signed a contract for for my next my next book and I'm just hoping you're not going to boo when I say that it's going to be called King George the third last king of America and what I'm going to try and persuade you Americans is that he was not the villain of the musical Hamilton still less still less the tyrant of the Declaration of Independence but was instead a renaissance Prince and enlightened monarch who was just very very unlucky to share the same decade as giants such as your REM founding fathers Justin though Thank You John Davis why do you think Churchill refused to consider letting the Empire go and the England couldn't afford it anymore well he did he did let the Empire go of course because he didn't oppose the return of India to independence welcome attorney we've never been independent the first place but nonetheless the the the whole returned by the Labour government of nineteen forty five to fifty of India and Burma started the rest of decolonization so there wasn't much point in keeping most of the places many of which and if you haven't gotten during Burma many of which we only acquired in order to protect and and refuel the Navy to defend India and Burma so he wasn't imperialist all his life he was he was a true believer in the British Empire and and so that was why it during his peacetime Premiership from 1951 to 55 he didn't he didn't give independence to any other colonies but he knew but because of the sheer exhaustion at the time at the end of the Second World War we had given one-third of our net worth in we'd spent that during the Second World War and so we didn't have the wherewithal to continue to run an empire and he recognized that I think this might be the last question and then after that as I say I'll just have to tell you a couple of Churchill gags did I like it I know that Boris Johnson is the new Winston Churchill discuss I think the thing about Winston Churchill is he thinks he's Boris Johnson Boris it's a good thing when when politicians write books I'm always happy when when politicians write history books it shows that they're thinking as they're interested in history and shows that they they are willing to learn from the past and and Boris is no exception to that however of the 14 major anecdotes in in that book he wrote about Churchill two of them are true right okay we've only got one minute so I'm gonna just gonna finish it off with two with two gags Mike my favorite Churchill jokes change all the time because in my book there are 200 of them and and he was he was just constantly immensely witty and amusing but the two I'm enjoying at the moment ah firstly one when his when his private secretary John Colville who I mentioned earlier came to him and said that their cook had been made pregnant as the result of a nocturnal assignation with a man in the street in Verona and Winston Churchill replied obviously not one of the two gentlemen and he and the LA the last one is at the time when Yocum von Ribbentrop the Nazi foreign minister at that time the German ambassador to German ambassador to London came to him and said in the next war met him in a reception and threatened him said in the next war Italy will be on the side of the Third Reich and Churchill replied well it seems only sorry never laugh your own joke before you give it as you give them before you give the punchline as terrible publishes anyway so Italy will be on the side of the Third Reich and Churchill replied well it seems only fair we had to have them last time thank you very much indeed

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 3,688

Rating: 4.9466667 out of 5

Keywords: Aspen Ideas Festival, Andrew Roberts

Id: SY1ocw5jA1k

Length: 48min 59sec (2939 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2019