He claims that Churchill sent troops against the miners at Tonypandy, when in fact he stopped the troops who were on the way there, leaving the police to engage the miners with rolled-up mackintoshes.

They lost because the electorate, while admiring Churchill personally, wanted the welfare state, nationalisation and the ‘New Jerusalem’ offered by Clement Attlee (whose name is consistently misspelt in this book).Īli makes so many basic factual errors that Churchill’s reputation emerges unscathed from this onslaughtĪli believes that General Kitchener was in command and responsible for Britain’s early defeats in the Boer War in 1899, even though Kitchener did not set foot in South Africa until January 1900, three months after the war broke out. The Tories would have done much worse if he had not been their leader. The statement that the Conservatives lost the 1945 election due to ‘anti-Churchill feeling’ is similarly wrong.

Yet Churchill was not the war cabinet, and Gallup actually recorded Churchill’s personal popularity remaining above 80 per cent throughout his wartime premiership – dipping briefly for a single month to 78 per cent – and on three occasions reaching 93 per cent. Yet Churchill had been demanding higher defence spending throughout his wilderness years.Īli further claims that in 1943, a Gallup Poll ‘revealed that only one third of the population expressed satisfaction with the war cabinet, i.e. Explaining Churchill’s supposed unpopularity during the second world war, Ali claims it was because ‘the men fleeing Dunkirk knew how unprepared and badly armed they were’. He had already helped create the welfare state, readied the Royal Navy for the Great War and warned the world about the rise of the Nazis, among many other significant achievements. The book claims that Churchill ‘had been little more than a clever politician engaged in career building’ before he became prime minister in 1940. He makes so many basic factual errors that Churchill’s reputation emerges unscathed from this onslaught.

There’s a general rule in biography, as in journalism, that knocking copy ought to be better researched than ordinary writing, but it is not one that Ali observes. If there were indeed a Churchill cult, it has done a singularly bad job of drowning out criticism of its hero. He has therefore written a book that parrots every earlier revisionist slur about Churchill – war criminal, evil imperialist, mass murderer, pro-fascist – from detractors such as Caroline Elkins, Priya Gopal, Richard Gott, David Irving, Madrushee Mukerji, Clive Ponting, Richard Toye and Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Tariq Ali, the Marxist writer and activist, believes that a ‘Churchill cult’ is ‘drowning all serious debate’ about the wartime leader, and that ‘an alternative was badly needed’.

Winston churchill andrew roberts