THE CHURCHILL INTERVIEW: Michael Gove and Andrew Roberts

it no forced me to ask Andrew a few questions about his book as we've just heard Henry Kissinger has been the latest in the line of distinguished figures who singled out Andrews book as quite simply the best single volume biography of Churchill to have been written since the great man died um having had the honor of reviewing it for the Evening Standard I can attest the fact that it is a book that is as readable as it is authoritative as gripping as it is instructive quite simply one of the best books about politics about Britain about the world that you can read today but Andrew the subtitle that you've chosen for your book is walking with destiny what did you choose that particular subtitle on the day that Winston Churchill became prime minister Friday the 10th of May 1940 the same day of course that Hitler unleashed blitzkrieg on the West and invaded Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and the king appointed him prime minister that evening and eight years later writing in his memoirs on the 1st at the end of the first volume of his memoirs he said 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 it very much is the underlying theme of this book the way in which he believed in his own destiny in that he had ever since he had been a schoolboy at Harrow in 1891 Winston Churchill was entirely self educated owing to the fact that he had to be because he went to Harrow he he had said sorry Randall a man of many many more beyond Randall I can see Reuben say exactly never rude I thought I thought I thought Rupert was nodding actually I've got here anyhow the the the great thing was that at that point in 1891 so fifty years an entire half century before what he had proclaimed actually came to to life he had said he that he saw great trials great upheavals that there would be wars such as nobody had ever seen before and that he was going to be the person who saved London in the country and the Empire and so this sense of Destiny is it seems to me Epis central to understanding Winston Churchill now one of the things that you've been privileged to enjoy in preparing this biography is access to sources that other authors have not had what what influence on the way in which you huge Churchill's career and have those new sources has and what new revelations have you uncovered in writing well I was very surprised that there should be quite so many of them and in the last decade there has been a cornucopia of new sources in many ways the greatest one was the fact that her Majesty the Queen allowed me to be the first Churchill biographer to use her father King George the six Diaries and Winston Churchill met the King on every Tuesday they had an audience during the Second World War and they would serve themselves from the sideboard to ensure that nobody else was present because Churchill totally trusted the king with every one of the great secrets of state he told him about the ultra secret he told him and trusted him about the nuclear secret he told him the generals and the ministers that he was going to hire and fire and which countries were going to be attacked and when and so and that was by no means to be assumed only to the fact that of course Churchill had supported the king's elder brother Edward the eighth during the abdication crisis and also the King had been a very major supporter of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement so it could have been that they wouldn't have got on but they really did the way in which immediately certainly by the time of the fall of France all the way through the the Battle of Britain and the Blitz it became clear that the two men were going to interact superbly and thankfully the King wrote down everything that Churchill said at each of these Tuesday meetings in his diaries and so you can imagine that was a a wonderful new source but we've also got the new war cabinet meetings the actual verbatim accounts of those we have the diaries of the Soviet ambassador Ivan my ski who Churchill saw a lot of during the period in the run-up to the nazi-soviet pact we have 41 sets of papers and I'd like to thank the Churchill family for allowing me to to use Mary Soames Winston Churchill's daughters 1940 diary an incredibly moving diary on many occasions as well and this being the first biography of Churchill to use that so actually it is a it's it's been extraordinary that the last 10 years have given us so much new information and so as a result there is something on pretty much every page of this book which has not appeared on any in any biography of Churchill before the one woman what can you say and who is that um the robber abuses that give us a richer view of church's life than ever before but one of the other things about you is that you also deal in detail with Churchill's early years and his relationship with his mother and his father in some respects may mirror the relationship of other people in the upper classes in an Wardian and victorian times but there were unique circumstances the unique factors no relationship between Churchill and his parents the determined how he lived his life he's a little bit more about that yes well his father was a Lord Randolph Churchill who of course became Chancellor of the Exchequer and and resigns in 1886 was a brilliant mercurial but also highly disdainful and grand figure who never understood that Winston Churchill was going to be a serious and significant figure and if anything one of the one of the really moving things of letters in this book are these these terrible letters from from Lord Randolph and these low moving letters from his son Winston both to the father and the mother about how when nobody seemed to neither of them seemed to appreciate him at all and it was it was very much a it was beyond you mentioned the normal days of Victorian children should be seen and not heard and the rest of it and you also move on on to that since they had we're Wardian period but it actually was much worse than that and so under normal circumstances you would have thought that Churchill might have been damaged by this in one way or another but in fact he was such an extraordinary figure that he in fact worshipped his father all the more he wrote his father's to volume biography he sought out his father in order to to talk about his his father talk he sought out his father's friends in order to talk about his father he had this marvelous belief in his father's political opinions which were the Tory Democrat opinions of Benjamin Disraeli that he continued he he was almost completely broke all his life and then when at the age of 71 he finally got into the black he the first thing he did was to buy the first of 37 racehorses and he put the jockeys into the pink and chocolate colors of of his of his father's so and of course he called his son Randolph as well so there was a there was a an innate an extraordinary love of his father which mattered intensely you also see it of course in 1947 at the time that he wrote the a a story about a short story about meeting his father's ghost and he met his father's ghost and they talked and at no point did he tell his father that he had been epicentral in the winning of the Second World War and so you can see Winston Churchill's life as being driven by a desire to impress the ghosts of his long dead father the earth there are so many qualities about Churchill did impress two of them of course are physical courage and also his skill as a writer and the rock contemporary politicians who've shown great physical parody Johnny Mercer and Tom Dugan Hart who have been on too far in Afghanistan and then also writers like Rory stores and Jesse Norman who've written books contemporary works of literature there are a fascination if I can turn first to Churchill as a writer there are very few politicians very few Vigors in public life who have the literary output that he has he of course won the develop rise of literature what was it that was the world spring in Churchill's literary creativity poverty yeah the the reason that he wrote 37 Berks was because he was constantly broke owing to the fact that his parents spent much more money than they had and that he was able as a war correspondent to become through his bravery and also his beautiful encapsulation of what he said that noble thing the English sentence to to write so beautifully and as a result he wound up being the best paid war correspondent in in the world at the time and then of course while he when he was writing his great articles even in the 1930s when he was out of office and out of favor nonetheless he was getting the equivalents and I knew that you write occasionally articles Michael and but and I certainly do but I don't know whether or not either of us have ever been paid the equivalent modern-day equivalent of 26,000 pounds per article not even by the Daily Mail but you make the point that he was a gifted writer and of course he notwithstanding the fact that he had an undistinguished a record as a as a scholar at school he was an amazingly eloquent anyway sorry not as on distinguished as he made out that he was um he learned Macaulay's lays of engine room he was limitlessly eloquent later yeah how did he manage to be such a master of the English language well he was thought of as such a poor scholar exactly well I'm very pleased to the former Minister of Education should be interested in this owing to the fact that of course in his wonderful book my early life which I do recommend everyone to read immediately after you've read my book he made himself out to be something of a dunce which he simply wasn't when you go to the Churchill archives in Cambridge and it's a great honor to have des Matheny here who course is overseas these wonderful glorious incredibly efficient beautifully organized archives you see when you look at his at his school reports then in fact he was constantly in the top third of every class he was in including for Latin which he pretended that he was so so bad at so in fact there simply it doesn't follow that that he was anything like as thick as he made himself out to be well as well as being an eloquent orator and a brilliant writer he was of course visionary prescient in political terms and of course his greatest achievement apart from his wartime leadership was to spot the threat of Hitler and Nazism almost before anyone else did in British politics why was he capable of doing so why was it that he was able to recognize the the danger that Hitler's regime posed always before any other politician certainly before any other conservative voltage I think there were three things and I think they're all very important the first is that he was a file OSI might Winston Churchill like to Jews it was not usual amongst his age and class and background and it was epicentral to understanding why he was the first major British politics politician to to spot how evil Hitler and the Nazis were he was he grew up as her plea his father like Jews he was he appreciated the contribution made by Jews to Western civilization in its ethics he was somebody who supported of course the Balfour Declaration and he just felt naturally at home with Jews and as a result he had an early warning system for what Hitler and the Nazis were like that would deny to an awful lot of other people from his age and class and background the second thing was he was a historian and so he was able to place Adolf Hitler in the continuum historical continuum that began with the threats made to the with regard to her Gemini's ation of europe made by philip ii of spain then on to louis xiv who of course his great ancestor John Churchill first over defeated in the war of Spanish Succession then on to Napoleon then on to the Kaiser and so he fitted Hitler into all of that and the third thing which I think is also very important is that he had seen fanaticism up close in his life in the way that many other politicians certainly the other politicians the other prime ministers of the 1930s people like Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain never did and so because he had seen his friend slice the pieces on a stretcher in the Northwest Frontier by the path ins and he had killed four dervishes at the Battle of Omdurman and that therefore come absolutely.i to eye and face to face with Islamic fundamentalist fanaticism was able to see the same kind of thing and the Nazis and so if you put those three together he was going to be a different kind of politician than the than the other ones who were willing to look the other way when it came to the Nazis that's incredibly insightful but one of the things is that even though of course Churchill was absolutely right and early and prescient in detecting Nazi horror if you look at his political career and your unsparing in chronicling this he made mistakes whether it was over the abdication whether it was over India whether it was earlier in his career by making himself at the sydney street siege the as he thought that the here of the air rather than behaving in a statesman like fashion what do you think judge will learn from the mistakes that he made well you could state you don't need to stop there I mean he'll so got women's sufferage wrong he got the dardanelles of course massively wrong that led to one hundred and sixty thousand casualties he got the gold-standard wrong as he said to his wife Clementine I would have made nothing if I had not made mistakes and the great thing about Winston Churchill is that he learned from them he wasn't one of those politicians who just banged on again against closed doors what he did was to learn from each of the mistakes and that classic moment comes I think from the Dardanelles when he never in the Second World War ever once overruled the Chiefs of Staff when they win all three of them agreed on something so you would get these situations where in the Defense Committee of the of the War Cabinet and Allen Brooks General Sir Alan book the the chief of the Imperial General Staff from December 1941 and the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff from March 1942 would sit across the table from Churchill breaking pencils in half saying no I disagree with you prime minister crack and it must be extremely off-putting to have a six-foot to Flutey Ulsterman break pencils in in your face but nonetheless this extraordinary creative tension between these two men was the reason that we came up with the with the overall strategy of destroying the Axis powers and taking a quarter million prisoners in May 1942 and then sorry May 1943 and then going on to Sicily then Italy and then before finally drawing enough power German power down into the Mediterranean before the killer punch coming across the across the channel with Operation Overlord in June 1944 it was essential that Churchill did not act as a dictator which he never did he always did it in clashing aggressive but nonetheless creative ten with the Chiefs of Staff there's a lesson for the cabinet there and and one of the pods it's often made is that Churchill was alleged to be in the grip of the black dog a depressive by nature and it's often said that Churchill himself rising with a glass of Polaroid really Andy was an alcoholic now these perhaps are caricatures that affect the anxieties of our age rather than the realities of his but was he a depressive and was he over reliant on alcohol um I don't believe he was either he was he got depressed undoubtedly he got depressed he got depressed when in February 1942 when Singapore fell in June 1942 when Tobruk fell and of course a lot throughout 1915 during the Dardanelles but actually when you look at this black dog concept he only ever used the phrase black dog once in his entire life and that was in June 1911 when his when he was writing to his wife Clementine about the about this this thing the black dog which also at the time had a important had a had a different sense with his Edwardian nannies and governesses used to use the phrase to explain ill-tempered children and when it actually comes to it depression is a deeply debilitating illness and the idea that he was able to chair a thousand one thousand meetings of the of the defense committee committee of the War Cabinet is really extraordinary all times of day and night do you really think that could have happy he could have done that were he a depressive which can hit you at any particular time all the money medical opinion argues that in fact he wasn't at all let alone the idea that he was bipolar or manic depressive or anything like that with regard to drinking he did drink in enormous amounts there is no doubt about that CP Scott famously said that Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drank that much but what you have to remember at all stages was that he was as as he put it alcohol was always his servant and never his master he was able to keep his drinking at a level that he could deal with it there is only one occasion in the whole of the Second World War which is 2174 days long when people believed when the people around him all knew that he was drunk it was the 7th March 1944 the and and people said that he was drunk yes one day ladies and gentlemen in the in in a war a six year war where the kind of pressures and stresses are such that nobody in this room could ever imagine dealing with one day of it let alone 2,000 of them and yes on that occasion he got drunk but no decisions were taken owing to the fact that they had the meeting all over again the next morning and everybody pretended happened happens well Andrew I think all of us could agree Operation Overlord indeed any of us least a bad reaction at that point and also it's encouraging to know that a healthy intake of alcohol every day is a precondition of political success but if you were to and I knew this is unfair it's my final question um if we were Californians heaven forfend and you would have distilled the Churchill life lessons for success what would he be I think I think there are two things really that no three things that you've got to fit in to one another that explain why he was such an extraordinary person and why half a century after his life we're still coming here to a hotel in central London to celebrate him and his and his life and his achievements and the first has to be his as you mentioned earlier his his foresight not just with regard to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler although they were of course the most most appalling threat to Western civilization in the last thousand years I would argue but also the way he was able only the following year in March 1946 in the iron curtain speech at Fulton Missouri to be able to to also point out the threat made by Stalin and Soviet Communism and to put that in the same kind of overview the same kind of continuum that I mentioned earlier which which went from the sixteenth century to the to the end of the 20th century that in itself was a mystic lien full sight which is it which is given to few that's the first thing the second thing is the physical courage the extraordinary physical courage that this man had I'm not just talking about the fact that he went into the no-man's land as a lieutenant colonel in the in charge of the 6th battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers no fewer than 30 times so close actually in no-man's land that he was able to hear that he was hit able to hear German the German speaking in their trenches and that is an extraordinary thing but also the physical courage of fighting on four continents and in in five campaigns and again and again in the Second World War traveling no fewer than a hundred and ten thousand miles the it was it was essential that he did that because he needed to be the glue that kept the big three together Stalin didn't believe in flying and an only flew outside the Soviet Union once during the war and of course FDR was profoundly disabled and although he did fly outside it really took Churchill to be that to be that figure to do that and again and again you see this extraordinary physical courage flying in those days by the way involved especially in his late sixties early seventies in unpressurized cabins freezing cold within the very often within the radius of the Luftwaffe this was this showed extraordinary physical courage however even that in my view pulls before the moral courage that he showed again and again and simply not buckling to the overall view the way in which people in the 1930s the the establishment view the general view the way in which he was able to say something that he believed again and again and he had such eloquence in saying it and that eloquence ultimately derived not from tricks of the trade but from his instinctive belief in what he was saying and you attached the the these three things all together the physical courage the moral courage and the foresight and of course the eloquent four things and you have therefore a politician who was able to do things and say things that all politicians today should take to cognizance of they were are qualities that are needed today just as much as ever they were and also they as a result of all of them managed to create a situation which went beyond even what he had said as a 16 year old schoolboy in Harrow that he was going to save London and the country and the Empire because he also as well as saving them saved civilization itself thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: The International Churchill Society

Views: 8,563

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: Winston Churchill, Prime Minister, Great Britain, Allies, Michael Gove, Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts, The Churchill Interview, International Churchill Society

Id: 64RxJ0QwfLQ

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2018