Book Review: The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson

Any book about Boris Johnson and almost any book about Winston Churchill is bound to be interesting and the combination of this subject and this author cannot fail to be a good read, and does not. It is usually unwise and presumptuous to impute motives to an author, but it seems a reasonable surmise that as this author wishes to hold at least some of the great offices held by this subject, he might hope that this book will help to propel him along that path. There is nothing wrong with that and as Boris Johnson explains, that was sometimes Mr. Churchill's motive in writing. The Churchill literature is so vast it would be hard to break new ground and what Boris (disclosure: we are friends and former colleagues at the Spectator and Telegraph newspapers), has done is a combination of anecdotal accumulation and authentication and analyses of some of the techniques and qualities that contributed to Mr. Churchill's very long and eventful and varied career.

In his portrayal of Churchill the adventurer and writer, Boris is fairly unexceptionable, but in his description of the statesman he strays into hagiography and to the verges of attributions of infallibility. And in playing the British nationalist card, he takes what any serious historian would have to regard as serious and disturbing liberties. There is too much mind-reading; we don't know that if Hitler had set Guderian's armoured divisions on Dunkirk, it would have reduced the embarkation point much more quickly and bagged a much larger number of prisoners, (most of them French in the latter stages). The British certainly possessed the naval and air fire-power to make the Panzers' advance on such a narrow front costly. We don't know that French premier Paul Reynaud sought German armistice terms in order to try to be accompanied by Britain into the ignominy of defeat, Reynaud and de Gaulle denied that,

Churchill didn't allege it, and no source is cited.

It was true that Lord Halifax was Neville Chamberlain's choice to succeed him, but Chamberlain had also been shopping Halifax's position around to waverers in his last-ditch attempt to keep the premiership. Churchill's Plan Catherine, to send two battleships into the Baltic without air cover, like his espousal of aid to Finland against Stalin, are passed over without a word. Both would have been disastrous and the Finnish expedition might have brought Stalin into the war on Hitler's side. It is not clear that Hitler or anyone else with adequate authority had determined on extermination of Jews or other groups until the U.S. was in the war, an event Hitler blamed on Roosevelt and his "Jewish doctors" and "negro servants" though Hitler declared war on the U.S. and the race of Roosevelt's entourage was irrelevant (and there were no Jewish doctors nor many African-Americans among them).

There is no doubt that Churchill got mixed reviews from many of his parliamentary party colleagues when he became prime minister, but he was vested with practically unlimited power; the country and Empire placed their bets on him. That Churchill's mother had as many as 200 lovers isn't strictly relevant (or bad) if it is true, and is wild surmise beyond the best known and attested ten or fifteen. The same goes for Boris' speculation in several areas about Churchill's father. That Winston Churchill was a great orator is not at issue, but that he was "the most glorious political speaker of any age" is open to debate. Nothing would have been lost if, here or elsewhere, Boris had left room for competition, (Cromwell, Wilkes, Chatham, Disraeli,

Gladstone, Lloyd George, Webster, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Danton, de Gaulle, some of the ancients). Boris concedes only Martin Luther King as a rival, and though he was formidable, he was repetitive and confined himself essentially to a single subject.

The case made for Churchill's immense physical and moral courage is elegant and indisputable.

The ability to write good prose after a long day and a boozy dinner was conspicuous but not confined to Winston Churchill; Boris and I both know many people who can and we have done it ourselves. Boris knocks down a lot of minor naysayers; he quotes a fatuous complaint from Walpole's biographer Jack Plumb. Boris's reflections on the grumpy Evelyn Waugh are unfounded mind-reading, as is his speculation about why Hitler declined to meet Churchill in 1932, and there is no excuse for dragging the insignificant charlatan Putzi Hanfstaengl into the narrative.

This book is a mine of useful vignettes illustrating that Churchill had style, loved luxury and though often rude, did possess megalopsychia (greatness of soul). He was a romantic, unlike his great contemporary Roosevelt, who, although Boris swaddles himself in the Union flag and declines to recognize it, was co-saviour of the West and Churchill's rival as the century's greatest statesman and, given his victory over the constraints of polio, as a champion of human courage over adversity also. The sections on Churchill's marriage and children put that contentious and sometimes tragic family in a soft light, just as Churchill's immobilizing depressive tendencies are glossed over as part of the normal "cycle," but that is just as well.

Churchill was a reforming Home secretary but not a reforming chancellor. He was a median Liberal and a pink Tory, but he doesn't rank highly as a reformer. Boris is worrisomely loose with other "facts;" i.e. there weren't 37 million people killed in World War I or 30 million in World War II, (16 million and 70 million). Hood and Prince of Wales weren't sister-ships and Belfast isn't a battle-cruiser with 12-inch guns, but a cruiser with eight-inch guns. (She's anchored still under Boris's nose near the Tower Bridge.) These aren't important errors, but they aren't confidence-builders either. Boris takes a little too much public schoolboy pleasure in Churchill's practice of exposing himself before male and female secretaries and higher ranks including the president of the United States.

The assessment of blame is fair for Gallipoli, Chanak, and the bungled intervention in Russia in 1919, while India, the abdication, and the return to the gold standard are downplayed But the worst misjudgments are omitted, including devotion to the Italian campaign, tenacious efforts to defer D-Day and duck the invasion of Southern France altogether, the signing over to Stalin of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, and, also against Roosevelt's wishes, the prior agreement of German occupation zones. (Roosevelt rightly believed the Normandie landings would succeed and that once the Western Allies were across the Rhine, the Germans would cave before them while fighting like tigers against the Russians in the East.

Up to this point, The Churchill Factor is a good and lively narrative with a few new insights. But in assessing Churchill's war role, Boris almost ignores Roosevelt, who said it would be impossible to coexist with Hitler starting in 1933, two years before Churchill wrote in Great Contemporaries that it was unclear whether Hitler would be a force for good. Boris quotes Roosevelt's isolationist war secretary, Harry Woodring, without mentioning that Roosevelt fired him, and writes nothing of Roosevelt's resupply of Britain's army with rifles, artillery and ordnance after Dunkirk on executive authority only and as an election campaign to break a tradition as old as the republic and seek a third term was about to begin. Boris writes of the contribution of "Russian manpower and American money," and at the end of the European war there were on the Western front, 14 British divisions and 72 American divisions. Worse, Boris dives head-first into the putrid fraud of the Yalta Myth and claims Roosevelt gave Stalin eastern Europe., Churchill gave it to him on what he himself called a "naughty piece of paper" in Moscow in 1944; at Yalta, Stalin promised withdrawal and democracy. The Yalta Myth is a gigantic fraud confected by disgruntled British imperialists, habitually defeated American

Republican McCarthyites, Gaullist poseurs, and leftist Cold War appeasers of the Brandt-Trudeau variety. Boris's portrayal of Lend-Lease, which Churchill and a unanimous Parliament called the "most unsordid act in history" as an American swindle is scandalous. Contrary to what this author and Harold MacMillan thought of it, Roosevelt, not Churchill, brought the U.S. into the war, and Churchill was unaware of the potential American entry into the war through the Pacific until the first meeting of the leaders at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland in August 1941.

Once airborne, Boris levitates stratospherically to credit his subject with "winning the Cold War," founding Israel, and creating a united Europe while retaining his British anti-federalist credentials. He certainly deserves some credit as an early Cold warrior and early supporter of European cooperation and a Jewish state. We owe the survival and victory of democracy and the free market system jointly to Churchill and Roosevelt; there is gratitude, credit, and admiration to share for both without short-changing one at the expense of the other. I always identify with a biographer championing his subject and have done it myself. I like and admire Boris and my fear is that his opponents will focus on the unrigorous aspects of this book as unabashed idolatry and that it may not have the effect that (if I may engage in a little mind-reading myself), I surmise he hopes for. I wish him well, revere his subject, and enjoyed the read.