Churchill is said to have said
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.''
It has been and he did.
Though actually he did not say those words. He said
"For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."
John Charmley, perhaps the greatest historian of our time, utterly exploded the Churchillian version of history but the explosion has been ignored.
I so regret not meeting him. He was a true Tory and a devout Catholic, from a working class background. We often chatted on social media. He died this month.
To my surprise the papers did not give him an obituary but I found this article from which I quote.
<Chamberlain was portrayed here not as a weak man but a strong one in control of his situation and working to bring foreign and defence policy into alignment. If British and French military commanders had held up their end and proven remotely competent in 1940, perhaps history would remember Chamberlain’s strategy quite differently. Much battlefield blame belonged with the brass hats.
But Charmley also argued that Chamberlain’s real error was to insist on intervening, diplomatically, in the Czech crisis in 1938. This put Britain and Germany on course for conflict and effectively moralised international politics by creating “duties” for Britain to uphold. Isolation was a wiser policy, Charmley felt, not least because it could have propelled Germany and the Soviet Union into collision earlier.
Then the Prime Minister unwisely issued a guarantee to Poland in early 1939 to “save face” at home ahead of a general election. Contrary to the standard view that Chamberlain had been insufficiently vigorous in his diplomacy, Charmley maintained that he had been insufficiently restrained. Britain imprudently went to war in order to save Stalin the job of confronting Hitler himself.
This interpretation was controversial, to say the least (Alan Clark wrote a positive review for the Spectator, but the Cabinet Office felt that “it was inconsistent with his position as a Minister of the Crown”, and so it was never published). Charmley took the view, correctly, that the Second World War had been a disaster for Britain.
His approach was similar to that of Peterhouse’s Maurice Cowling, whose earlier The Impact of Hitler (1975) had explored the political intrigues behind how Britain found itself waging this “liberal war”. Unlike Cowling’s prose, Charmley’s book remains a delight to read. Years later, he quipped that Chamberlain and the Lost Peace was “the English-language version” of The Impact of Hitler.
Yet Charmley’s next target was even more ambitious. In the biography Churchill: The End of Glory (1993), Charmley went elephant-hunting. Across almost 800 pages of tiny but magnificently written text, he charted the life and career of the most famous democratic politician of them all. Rather than salvaging a reputation, this time Charmley sought to blow one up. There was no reverence here. He argued that Churchill’s war leadership played a central role in the decline of British power and that to ignore brutal facts and to concentrate instead on the mythology of the Finest Hour is just romantic nonsense.
Churchill’s policies fatally weakened Britain and its empire; he was repeatedly outmanoeuvred by the Americans, who established a position of international pre-eminence at British expense; and he refused to even think much of the future, with disastrous results at home and abroad.
Charmley felt that, for Britain, the results of victory in 1945 were not worth the sacrifices that had been made. Britain went to war to stop the appalling regime in Berlin from dominating half of Europe, yet in 1945 an equally appalling regime in Moscow dominated half of Europe, with almost half a century more to come. Charmley judged the end of the British Empire to be damaging for British power and imperial subjects alike. As he put it, “the British Empire vanishing has had a very deleterious effect on the Third World.”>
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