He has been dead more than half a century, but Winston Churchill still has the power to set the U.K. political agenda.
Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s decision to brand the wartime leader a “villain” for his role in suppressing a strike in a Welsh mining town more than a century ago merited responses from the prime minister’s official spokesman, the leader of the House of Commons and the mayor of London.
It even briefly supplanted Brexit as the main topic of national political conversation.
The whole episode, prompted by a two-word answer to a quick-fire question at a POLITICO London Playbook event Wednesday evening, is another reminder that Churchill is lodged deeply in the psyche of the British establishment — and the Conservative Party in particular.
Revering his leadership of the country during World War II is a matter of pride for some. For most it’s just sound history. His words and deeds of that time are rarely contested. McDonnell himself, responding to the storm he created, acknowledged Churchill was “obviously a hero” in the war years.
The rest of his life and career is much more contentious.
But for someone who within months could be running Her Majesty’s Treasury, McDonnell’s “villain” comment is still a political risk — such is the esteem in which Churchill is held.
As Theresa May’s own spokesman was at pains to point out to Westminster journalists on Thursday, at a daily press briefing, Churchill topped a public poll of “Greatest Britons” in 2002.
“The British public will reach its own judgment on this characterization of Churchill,” the spokesman added, before recalling that May herself has “quoted and referenced Sir Winston Churchill on many occasions, and acknowledged him as one of the great prime ministers of the 20th century.”
She even has a picture of him on the wall of her Downing Street office, the spokesman said.
Clearly, to stand in Churchill’s shadow is still a mark of honor for many politicians — and to condemn him is probably still an unwise move for any party that wants to be electable.
‘White supremacist’
But Churchill’s memory is not so sacred as to be beyond reproach.
Critical assessments are now much more mainstream than they were, even as recently as that public vote of 2002.
Responding to claims last month by a Green party member of the Scottish parliament, Ross Greer, that Churchill was a “white supremacist” and “mass murderer,” Tory peer Danny Finkelstein agreed in the Times earlier this week that the first assessment, at least, was correct.
“Churchill justified British imperialism as being for the good of the ‘primitive’ and ‘subject races’ … to call him a white supremacist is nothing but the truth. And it is never a good idea to deny the truth,” Finkelstein wrote. “To insist that for Churchill to be a great man he must never have thought or done anything bad is to insist that the world is divided into good and bad people and you can only be one or the other.”
It may have been this that Labour’s Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, was referring to when he said the former prime minister was “an imperfect leader” and that “he did many things that I would disagree with, with the benefit of hindsight.”
McDonnell’s comment fit within a tradition of left-wing resentment of Churchill for his role, as home secretary in 1910, in using the army to crack down on striking coal miners in the south Wales mining town of Tonypandy. One protester died and hundreds were injured, though Churchill’s responsibility for sending in the troops is contested by historians.
Greer’s critique, by contrast, reflected the extent to which Churchill’s record is being reassessed by a new generation that is far more queasy about adulating such a man — no matter what his achievements.
It is in the same vein as student protests at universities across the U.K. that have forced colleges to remove statues and other tributes to colonial era benefactors and alumni whose actions are deemed by a new generation to be beyond the pale.
Finkelstein detected “something else at play, something beyond Churchill” in the increasingly heated debate about his legacy.
“It is hard for one generation not to be irritated when its ideas and assumptions are challenged by the new generation,” he wrote. “We think we have done our best to reach an enlightened view of the world and it can be annoying to have our heroes and values questioned.”
That is not to say some of Churchill’s defenders won’t fight back hard. In an op-ed for the Telegraph, Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson — who has written a biography of Churchill — accused McDonnell of peddling “myths of the old hard left.”
“Churchill was not only a man with a conspicuous social conscience but probably the greatest leader this county has ever had. What on earth has happened to Labour?” he wrote.
Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames, who is also a Tory MP, condemned the shadow chancellor as a “Poundland Lenin” and declared his remark a “very foolish and stupid thing to say.”
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt condemned Greer’s intervention last month, saying Churchill was the “greatest Briton who ever lived.”
“You only have the freedom to make stupid, ill-informed comments because he fought for your freedom. Some irony?” he added.
The Brexit factor
While serving as a brief distraction from the daily political grind of Brexit, the battle over Churchill’s memory — and the wider generational culture war it is part of — is intimately connected to Britain’s EU departure.
His name and support was invoked by both sides of the debate during the referendum — an argument that for most was settled by Soames, who said he thought he would have wanted to remain in the EU.
Yet at a private event late last year, Johnson — a leading light in the Brexit campaign — recalled the “giant bet” his hero took in the 1930s by insisting the Nazi regime must be resisted at a time when that was by no means a mainstream view. He cited the fact as evidence that “sometimes you do need to do the difficult thing, and you do need to take a position that everyone says is too fraught with risk.”
One can only guess what modern day parallel he had in mind.
With the future so uncertain, and the odds — in the view of many observers — stacked against success, it is perhaps no wonder that British politicians cling so tightly to a national hero who, despite being wrong about so much, ended up being right at the most important moment.
As for the wider British population, while still holding Churchill dear, they may be wondering what all the fuss is about.
May’s spokesman declined to mention that in a more recent BBC TV poll, earlier this year, to find the 20th century’s greatest global icon, Churchill was chosen by a panel of experts to be among four “leaders” in the running — but lost out in the public vote to a much more forward-looking figure: Nelson Mandela.
In the final itself, the public picked a contemporary of Churchill’s, and also a war hero: computing pioneer Alan Turing.
Westminster might still obsess about Churchill. But those Britons who considered a black South African leader and a gay scientist more iconic than their wartime leader appear to be moving on.