Today’s leaders have much to learn from Churchill’s statecraft

The latest biography of British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill is a tour de force filled with fresh insights.

Winston Churchill and Robert Menzies at 10 Downing Street in 1955.

With more than 1000 biographies of Winston Churchill already written, including his own voluminous record, eminent historian and journalist Andrew Roberts could be forgiven for passing on the opportunity to write yet another account of the British leader’s inimitable life.

But Roberts, 55, thought there was still more to learn about the man who personified physical and emotional courage and “saved liberty” with his defiant wartime leadership. He was right. Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Allen Lane), an instant bestseller, has earned rave reviews and is widely ­regarded as the best single-­volume biography of Churchill.

The book, at 1105 pages, is indeed a tour de force. It is exhaustively ­researched, bracingly written with a commanding narrative, and is filled with new insights into Churchill’s life and legacy. It also challenges several common perceptions, such as that he drank too much or was per­ennially ­depressed.

“He got depressed at the time of the fall of Singapore, the fall of Tobruk and through the Gallipoli disaster,” Roberts says in an interview with Inquirer. “Anybody would have been depressed under those circumstances. But he wouldn’t have been able to chair over a thousand meetings of the war cabinet if he had been an ­actual chemical depressive with a debilitating illness.”

Churchill began each morning with a glass of whisky and soda, drank champagne for lunch and dinner, often claret, and brandy in the evening. “He did drink an enormous amount but he had an ox-like constitution,” Roberts ­explains. “There is only one ­example of him actually being drunk during World War II. He could process alcohol and, as he put it himself, ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.’ ”

The book’s strength, aside from the authoritative handling of the subject and the compelling writing, is the array of new sources mined for the task. The most ­important are George VI’s diaries — which Roberts accessed with the permission the Queen. They reveal an intimacy and frankness during the king’s Tuesday lunches with Churchill.

For example, Churchill frequently vented his frustrations about Franklin D. Roosevelt not joining the war as Adolf Hitler’s army swept across Europe. Yet there is no obvious reason why Churchill and the king should have got along. Churchill supported George’s brother, Edward VIII, during the abdication crisis. The king, who backed appeasement, wanted Lord Halifax to succeed Neville Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940.

“I facetiously put it down to the fact that Churchill knew the king wasn’t after his job, unlike a lot of others,” Roberts says. But by the time the Battle of Britain began, the king was referring to Chur­chill as his friend. “Churchill trusted the king with all the great secrets of the war and it became a tremendously close relationship.”

The book’s subtitle comes from Churchill, who believed he was “walking with destiny”. But he also feared dying in his mid-40s and was haunted by the belief his ­father neither liked him nor thought he would amount to anything. “He was driven by this fear of not having achieved enough,” Roberts says. That helps explain his dynamism and determination.

Whether it is in traversing Churchill’s privileged early life or his roving years as a journalist and soldier, his cyclical successes and failures in politics before his long stint in the “wilderness years” and then his wartime prime ministership, Roberts recognises his courage at every stage. But he also finds Churchill an emotional man who actually burst into tears on at least 50 occasions during World War II.

Roberts subscribes to the view that Churchill got a lot of things wrong but he got the big thing right, warning about Hitler and then defeating him. Roberts does not ­ignore Churchill’s blunders, such as returning Britain to the gold standard, ­opposing women’s suffrage, his role in the abdication crisis, his attitude to India, and his appeasement of Stalin. “On each occasion you find him learning from his mistakes — and that isn’t ­always true of every politician,” Roberts says.

There was no bigger disaster in his career than the Dardanelles campaign, including the Gallipoli landings, during World War I. That is one reason why Australians seem to have a love-hate relationship with Chur­chill. He is purported to have said Australians come from “bad stock”, but Roberts has doubts about this. He says Churchill “loved” Robert Menzies but “hated” John Curtin, who stood up to him and insisted on determining where Australian troops were deployed.

Roberts writes about Chur­chill’s battles with Curtin and the latter’s pivot to the US. Churchill took it personally, was embarrassed in front of FDR and saw it as “another nail in the coffin of the empire”. Yet Churchill conceded to George VI that Australia may “fall into enemy hands”. Roberts says Churchill would have understood Australia better if he had visited. “I think he would have fallen in love with Australia.”

Churchill’s name is frequently invoked for one cause or another. But his daughter Mary Soames cautioned: “Don’t ask ‘What would Winston do?’ ” Roberts says this is wise advice. “It is impossible to guess what his view would be of Tony Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull (or Scott Morrison), let alone Donald Trump or Theresa May.”

But there are always worthwhile “lessons of statecraft” from Churchill. “They can learn about his foresight, courage and leadership in that he actually said what he believed, and carried on saying it however much he was ­attacked,” Roberts says. “We clearly don’t have that in modern-day politics in Britain and America, or Australia, and so I think his example does still resonate.”

Roberts is a keen collector of Churchilliana. He acquired a new item after outbidding Gary Oldman — who portrayed Churchill brilliantly in the movie Darkest Hour — at a recent auction: a dark blue-and-white polka dot bow-tie that once belonged to Churchill. “I have never had the lese-majeste to wear it,” he says. “I would never put it around my neck because it is too much of an icon for me.”