The Churchill Factor

Reprinted from The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, Copyright © 2014 by Boris Johnson.

There have been many who have argued that Churchill’s effulgent public personality was the product of a certain amount of myth-making—by both himself and others. The extraordinary thing is that Churchill’s public persona—his image—was overwhelmingly congruent with reality. He might have nicked the V-sign from the Continent—but it was pure Churchill to turn it mischievously round, as he often did, so that it could be read to mean not just victory but ‘fuck off’. He drank about a pint of Pol Roger champagne a day, together with white wine at lunch, red wine at dinner and port or brandy thereafter. According to his secretary, he smoked between eight and ten large Cuban cigars a day. As for his sense of humour, and his witticisms, well, the wonder of it is how many of the stories ascribed to him turn out to be completely true. It really is true that in 1946 he met Bessie Braddock—a staunch Labour MP of ample proportions, who once called for some Tory councillors to be machine-gunned— when he was a little bit, as they say, ‘tired and emotional’. ‘Winston,’ she bristled, ‘you are drunk.’ ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘you are ugly, and I will be sober in the morning.’ It seems to be genuinely the case that he made the famous crack about the Lord Privy Seal, who had come to see him when he was in the toilet. ‘Tell the Lord Privy Seal that I am sealed in the privy, and can only deal with one shit at a time,’ he roared. Even if he didn’t say all of it, he made the essential gag— Privy Seal/sealed in privy. On a lecture tour in America, Churchill was served a buffet lunch of cold fried chicken. ‘May I have some breast?’ he is supposed to have asked his hostess. ‘Mr Churchill,’ the hostess replied, ‘in this country we ask for white meat or dark meat.’ The following day the lady received a magnificent orchid from her guest of honour. The accompanying card read, ‘I would be obliged if you would pin this on your white meat’. I had this one firmly on my list of forgeries—and then I had it authenticated by his granddaughter Celia Sandys. ‘Where did you hear it?’ I asked. ‘Horse’s mouth,’ she said. He has been credited with issuing this superb threat to de Gaulle: ‘Et marquez mes mots, mon ami, si vous me double-crosserez, je vous liquiderai.’ (‘And mark my words, my friend, if you double-cross me, I will liquidate you.’) Even if the whole thing isn’t from him, he certainly said ‘je vous liquiderai’. All these remarks have in common not just that they are funny, but that they are staggeringly rude. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, was a ‘sheep in sheep’s clothing’. When he saw Stafford Cripps—the austere Labour figure who had briefly been touted as his wartime rival—he said, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes God.’ These are just a few of the hundreds of glossy old Churchillian chestnuts, and they illustrate a key point about his political identity: that he had all the unruly combativeness of a bulldog, or of John Bull himself.

It wasn’t always to everyone’s tastes; but in time of war you wanted someone so incorrigibly cheerful and verbally inventive that he could really stick it to the Nazis—or rather, to Corporal Schickelgruber and the Narzis. There is a final sense in which Churchill incarnated something essential about the British character—and that was his continual and unselfconscious eccentricity, verbal and otherwise. He invented words to suit himself. Mountbatten was a ‘triphibian’, which meant that he was capable of deployment on land, sea and air. The Lend-Lease deal was ‘unsordid’—a word not found before or since. He had an aversion to staples and paper clips and therefore preferred documents to be joined by a treasury tag, or, as he put it, ‘klopped’. He startled people by designing and appearing in his own clothes—those blue velvet or sometimes cerise romper suits that made him look like an overgrown toddler. He was the Imelda Marcos of hats. When he wasn’t wearing his bowler, he would wear an extraordinary variety of headgear: top hats, yachting caps, fireman’s hats, giant white astrakhan hats, kepis, solar topis, builder’s helmets, fedoras, sombreros. All his life he had been a showman, an extrovert, theatrical, comical. He knew how to project his personality, and the war called for someone who could create an image of himself—decisive, combative, but also cheery and encouraging—in the minds of the people. Churchill alone was able to do that, because to a great extent he really was that character. There is a sense in which eccentricity and humour helped to express what Britain was fighting for—what it was all about. With his ludicrous hats and rompers and cigars and excess alcohol, he contrived physically to represent the central idea of his own political philosophy: the inalienable right of British people to live their lives in freedom, to do their own thing. Churchill’s qualities allowed him to stand for the nation.