When I was growing up, there was no doubt about it. Churchill was quite the greatest statesman that Britain had ever produced. From a very early age I had a pretty clear idea of what he had done: he had led my country to victory against all the odds and against one of the most disgusting tyrannies the world has seen.

I knew the essentials of his story. My brother Leo and I used to pore over Martin Gilbert�s biographical Life in Pictures, to the point where we had memorised the captions.

I knew that he had a mastery of the art of speech-making, and my father (like many of our fathers) would recite some of his most famous lines; and I knew, even then, that this art was dying out. I knew that he was funny, and irreverent, and that even by the standards of his time he was politically incorrect.

At suppertime we were told the apocryphal stories: the one where Churchill is on the lavatory, and informed that the Lord Privy Seal wants to see him, and he says that he is sealed in the privy, etc. We knew the one where Socialist MP Bessie Braddock allegedly told him that he was drunk, and he replied, with astonishing rudeness, that she was ugly and he would be sober in the morning.

I think we also dimly knew the one about the Tory minister and the guardsman�.�.�. You probably know it, but never mind. I had the canonical version the other day from Sir Nicholas Soames, his grandson, over lunch at the Savoy.

Even allowing for Soames�s brilliance in storytelling, it has the ring of truth�and tells us something about a key theme of this book: the greatness of Churchill�s heart.

�One of his Conservative ministers was a bugger, if you see what I mean�.�.�.� (said Soames, loudly enough for most of the Grill Room to hear) �.�.�. though he was also a great friend of my grandfather. He was always getting caught, but of course in those days the press weren�t everywhere, and nobody said anything. One day he pushed his luck because he was caught rogering a Guardsman on a bench in Hyde Park at three in the morning�and it was February, by the way.

�This was immediately reported to the Chief Whip, who rang Jock Colville, my grandfather�s Private Secretary.

��Jock,� said the Chief Whip, �I am afraid I have some very bad news about so-and-so. It�s the usual thing, but the press have got it and it�s bound to come out.�

��Oh dear,� said Colville.

��I really think I should come down and tell the Prime Minister in person.�

��Yes, I suppose you should.�

�So the Chief Whip came down to Chartwell [Churchill�s home in Kent], and he walked into my grandfather�s study, where he was working at his upright desk. �Yes, Chief Whip,� he said, half turning round, �how can I help you?�

�The Chief Whip explained the unhappy situation. �He�ll have to go,� he concluded.

�There was a long pause, while Churchill puffed his cigar. Then he said: �Did I hear you correctly in saying that so-and-so has been caught with a Guardsman?�

��Yes, Prime Minister.�

��In Hyde Park?�

��Yes, Prime Minister.�

��On a park bench?�

��That�s right, Prime Minister.�

��At three o�clock in the morning?�

��That�s correct, Prime Minister.�

��In this weather! Good God, man, it makes you proud to be British!��

�

I KNEW THAT he had been amazingly brave as a young man, and that he had killed men with his own hand, and been fired at on four continents, and that he was one of the first men to go up in an aeroplane. I knew that he had been a bit of a runt at Harrow, and that he was only about 5 feet 7 and with a 31-inch chest, and that he had overcome his stammer and his depression and his appalling father to become the greatest living Englishman.

I gathered that there was something holy and magical about him, because my grandparents kept the front page of the Daily Express from the day he died, at the age of ninety. I was pleased to have been born a year before: the more I read about him, the more proud I was to have been alive when he was alive. So it seems all the more sad and strange that today�nearly fifty years after he died�he is in danger of being forgotten, or at least imperfectly remembered.

The other day I was buying a cigar at an airport in a Middle Eastern country that had probably been designed by Churchill. I noticed that the cigar was called a San Antonio Churchill, and I asked the vendor at the Duty-Free whether he knew who Churchill was. He read the name carefully and I pronounced it for him.

�Shursheel?� he said, looking blank.

�In the war,� I said, �the Second World War.�

Then he looked as though the dimmest, faintest bell was clanking at the back of his memory.

�An old leader?� he asked. �Yes, maybe, I think. I don�t know.� He shrugged.

Well, he is doing no worse than many kids today. Those who pay attention in class are under the impression that he was the guy who fought Hitler to rescue the Jews. But most young people�according to a recent survey�think that Churchill is the dog in a British insurance advertisement.

That strikes me as a shame, because he is so obviously a character that should appeal to young people today. He was eccentric, over the top, camp, with his own special trademark clothes�and a thoroughgoing genius.

I want to try to convey some of that genius to those who might not be fully conscious of it, or who have forgotten it�and I am of course aware that this is a bit of a cheek.

I am not a professional historian, and as a politician I am not worthy to loose the latchet of his shoes, or even the shoes of Roy Jenkins, who did a superb one-volume biography; and as a student of Churchill I sit at the feet of Martin Gilbert, Andrew Roberts, Max Hastings, Richard Toye and many others.

I am conscious that there are a hundred books a year on our hero�and yet I am sure it is time for a new assessment, because we cannot take his reputation for granted. The soldiers of the Second World War are gradually fading away. We are losing those who can remember the sound of his voice, and I worry that we are in danger�through sheer vagueness�of forgetting the scale of what he did.

These days we dimly believe that the Second World War was won with Russian blood and American money; and though that is in some ways true, it is also true that, without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.

What I mean is that Nazi gains in Europe might well have been irreversible. We rightly moan today about the deficiencies of the European Union�and yet we have forgotten about the sheer horror of that all too possible of possible worlds.

We need to remember it today, and we need to remember the ways in which this British Prime Minister helped to make the world we still live in. Across the globe�from Europe to Russia to Africa to the Middle East�we see traces of his shaping mind.

Churchill matters today because he saved our civilisation. And the important point is that only he could have done it.

He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.

Time and again in his seven decades in public life we can see the impact of his personality on the world, and on events�far more of them than are now widely remembered.

He was crucial to the beginning of the welfare state in the early 1900s. He helped give British workers job centres and the tea break and unemployment insurance. He invented the RAF and the tank and he was absolutely critical to the action�and Britain�s eventual victory�in the First World War. He was indispensable to the foundation of Israel (and other countries), not to mention the campaign for a united Europe.

At several moments he was the beaver who dammed the flow of events; and never did he affect the course of history more profoundly than in 1940.

Character is destiny, said the Greeks, and I agree. If that is so, then the deeper and more fascinating question is what makes up the character.

What were the elements that made him capable of filling that gigantic role? In what smithies did they forge that razor mind and iron will?

What the hammer, what the chain, in what furnace was his brain? as William Blake almost puts it. That�s the question.

But first let�s try and agree on what he did.

If you are looking for one of the decisive moments in the last world war, and a turning-point in the history of the world, then come with me. Let us go to a dingy room in the House of Commons�up some steps, through a creaky old door, down a dimly lit corridor; and here it is.

You won�t find it on the maps of the Palace of Westminster, for obvious security reasons; and you can�t normally get the guides to show you. In fact the precise room I am talking about doesn�t really exist any more, since it was blown up in the Blitz; but the replacement is faithful enough to the original.

It is one of the rooms used by the Prime Minister when he or she wants to meet colleagues in the Commons, and you don�t need to know much about the decor, because it is predictable.

Think of loads of green leather, and brass studs, and heavy coarse-grained oak panelling and Pugin wallpaper and a few prints, slightly squiffily hung. And think smoke�because we are talking about the afternoon of 28 May 1940, and in those days many politicians�including our subject�were indefatigable consumers of tobacco.

It is safe to assume there wasn�t much daylight getting through the mullioned windows, but most members of the public would easily have been able to recognise the main characters. There were seven of them in all, and they were the War Cabinet of Britain.

It is a measure of the depth of their crisis that they had been meeting almost solidly for three days. This was their ninth meeting since 26 May, and they had yet to come up with an answer to the existential question that faced them and the world.

In the chair was the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. On one side was Neville Chamberlain, the high-collared, stiff-necked and toothbrush-moustached ex�Prime Minister, and the man Churchill had unceremoniously replaced. Rightly or wrongly, Chamberlain was blamed for fatally underestimating the Hitler menace, and for the failure of appeasement. When the Nazis had bundled Britain out of Norway earlier that month, it was Chamberlain who took the rap.

Then there was Lord Halifax, the tall, cadaverous Foreign Secretary who had been born with a withered left hand that he concealed in a black glove. There was Archibald Sinclair, the leader of the Liberal Party that Churchill had dumped. There were Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood�representatives of the Labour Party against which he had directed some of his most hysterical invective. There was the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, taking notes.

The question before the meeting was very simple, and one they had been chewing over for the last few days, as the news got blacker and blacker. No one exactly spelled it out, but everyone could see what it was. Should Britain fight? Was it reasonable for young British troops to die in a war that showed every sign of being lost? Or should the British do some kind of deal that might well save hundreds of thousands of lives?

And if a deal had been done then, and the war had effectively ended with the British exit, might it have been a deal to save the lives of millions around the world?

I don�t think many people of my generation�let alone my children�s generation�are fully conscious of how close we came to it; how Britain could have discreetly, and rationally, called it quits in 1940. There were serious and influential voices who wanted to begin �negotiations�.

It is not hard to see why they thought as they did. The news from France was not just bad: it was unbelievably bad, and there did not seem the slightest hope that it would improve. German forces were lunging towards Paris, buffeting aside the French defences with such contemptuous ease that it really looked as if they belonged to some new military master race, pumped with superior zeal and efficiency. Hitler�s panzers had surged not just through the Low Countries but through the supposedly impenetrable ravines of the Ardennes; the ludicrous Maginot Line had been bypassed.

The French generals cut pathetic figures�white-haired dodderers in their Clouseau-like kepis. Every time they fell back to some new line of defence, they found that the Germans were somehow already there; and then the Stuka dive-bombers would come down like banshees and the tanks would drive on again.

The British Expeditionary Force had been cut off in a pocket around the Channel ports. They had tried briefly to counter-attack; they had been repulsed, and now they were waiting to be evacuated at Dunkirk. If Hitler had listened to his generals, he could have smashed us then: sent the ace general Guderian and his tanks into the shrinking and virtually defenceless patch of ground. He could have killed or captured the bulk of Britain�s fighting forces, and deprived this country of the physical ability to resist.

As it was, his Luftwaffe was strafing the beaches; British troops were floating in the water face down; they were firing their Lee Enfields hopelessly at the sky; they were being chopped to bits by the dive-bombers. At that moment, on 28 May, it seemed very possible�to generals and politicians, if not to the wider public�that the bulk of the troops could be lost.

The War Cabinet was staring at the biggest humiliation for British armed forces since the loss of the American colonies, and there seemed no way back. It chills the marrow to look at the map of Europe as it must have appeared to that War Cabinet.

Austria had been engulfed two years earlier; Czechoslovakia was no more; Poland had been crushed; and in the last few weeks Hitler had added a shudder-making list to his portfolio of conquest. He had taken Norway�effortlessly outwitting the British, Churchill included, who had spent months elaborating a doomed plan to pre-empt him. He had captured Denmark in little more than four hours.

Holland had surrendered; the Belgian King had pusillanimously run up the white flag at midnight the previous evening; and with every hour that went by more French forces surrendered�sometimes after resistance of insane bravery; sometimes with a despairing and fatalistic ease.

The most important geostrategic consideration of May 1940 was that Britain�the British Empire�was alone. There was no realistic prospect of help, or certainly no imminent prospect. The Italians were against us. The fascist leader Mussolini had entered into a �Pact of Steel� with Hitler, and�when it looked as though Hitler couldn�t lose�would shortly join the war on his side.

The Russians had signed the nauseating Molotov�Ribbentrop pact, by which they had agreed to carve up Poland with the Nazis. The Americans were allergic to any more European wars, understandably: they had lost more than 56,000 men in the First World War, and more than 100,000 if you include the toll from influenza. They were offering nothing much more than murmurs of distant sympathy, and for all Churchill�s wishful rhetoric there was no sign of the US cavalry coming tootling over the brow of the hill.

Everyone in that room could imagine the consequences of fighting on. They knew all about war; some of them had fought in the Great War, and the hideous memory of that slaughter was only twenty-two years old�less distant in time from them than the first Gulf War is from us today.

There was scarcely a family in Britain that had not been touched by sorrow. Was it right�was it fair�to ask the people to go through all that again? And to what end?

It seems from the cabinet minutes that the meeting more or less kicked off with Halifax. He went straight to the point: the argument he had been making for the last few days.

He was an impressive figure. He was tall, very tall; at 6 foot 5 he loomed about ten inches above Churchill�though I suppose that advantage matters less around a table. He was an Etonian and an academic star, with the domed forehead that seemed fitting in a prize fellow of All Souls. (Churchill, don�t forget, had not even been to university, and got into Sandhurst only on the third attempt.) To judge by the evidence of contemporary footage, Halifax spoke in a low and melodious sort of voice, though with the clipped enunciation of his time and class. He looked through thickish round glasses, and he perhaps raised his right hand, lightly clenched, to make his case.

The Italian embassy had sent a message, he said: that this was Britain�s moment to seek mediation via Italy. The information came via Sir Robert Vansittart�and that was a clever name to invoke, since Sir Robert Vansittart was a diplomat who was known to be ferociously anti-German and against the appeasement of Hitler. The message was therefore as delicately and appetisingly wrapped as possible, but the meaning was naked.

This was not just a simple overture from Mussolini: it was surely a signal from his senior partner. Coiling itself round Whitehall and penetrating the heart of the House of Commons, it was a feeler from Hitler. Churchill knew exactly what was going on. He was aware that the despairing French Prime Minister was in town�and indeed had just had lunch with Halifax.

M. Paul Reynaud knew that France was beaten; he knew in his heart what his British interlocutors could scarcely believe�that the French were possessed of an origami army: they just kept folding with almost magical speed. Reynaud knew that he was going to be remembered as one of the most abject figures in the history of France; and he believed that if he could persuade the British also to enter negotiations, that humiliation would be shared and palliated�and above all he might win better terms for France.

So that was the message: conveyed by the Italians, supported by the French, and originating from the German dictator: that Britain should see sense and come to an arrangement with reality. We don�t know exactly the words with which Churchill replied; all we have is the laconic and possibly sanitised summary of Sir Edward Bridges. We don�t know precisely how the Prime Minister appeared to his colleagues that afternoon, but we can have a pretty good guess.

Contemporary accounts say Churchill was by now showing signs of fatigue. He was sixty-five, and he was driving his staff and his generals to distraction by his habit of working on into the small hours�fuelled by brandy and liqueurs�ringing round Whitehall for papers and information, and actually convening meetings when most sane men were tucked up with their wives.

He was dressed in his strange Victorian/Edwardian garb, with his black waistcoat and gold watch chain and his spongebag trousers�like some burly and hungover butler from the set of Downton Abbey. They say he was pale, and pasty, and that seems believable. Let us add a cigar, and some ash on his lap, and a clenched jaw with a spot of drool.

He told Halifax to forget it. As the minutes put it: �The Prime Minister said that it was clear that the French purpose was to see Signor Mussolini acting as intermediary between ourselves and Herr Hitler. He was determined not to get into this position.�

He understood exactly what the offer implied. Britain was at war with Germany, and had been since 1 September the previous year. It was a war for freedom and for principle�to protect Britain and the empire from an odious tyranny, and if possible to repel the German armies from the subjugated states. To enter �talks� with Hitler or his emissaries, to enter �negotiations�, to get round the table for any kind of discussion�it all meant the same.

The minute Britain accepted some Italian offer of mediation, Churchill knew that the sinews of resistance would relax. A white flag would be invisibly raised over Britain, and the will to fight on would be gone.

So he said no to Halifax, and some may feel that ought to have been enough: the Prime Minister had spoken in a matter of national life or death; in another country, the debate might therefore have been at an end. But that is not how the British constitution works: the Prime Minister is primus inter pares�first among equals; he must to some extent carry his colleagues with him; and to understand the dynamics of that conversation we must remember the fragility of Churchill�s position.

He had been Prime Minister for less than three weeks, and it was far from clear who were his real allies round the table. Attlee and Greenwood, the Labour contingent, were broadly supportive�Greenwood perhaps more than Attlee; and the same can be said for Sinclair the Liberal. But their voices could not be decisive. The Tories were by some way the largest party in Parliament. It was the Tories on whom he depended for his mandate�and the Tories were far from sure about Winston Churchill.

From his very emergence as a young Tory MP he had bashed and satirised his own party; he had then deserted them for the Liberals, and though he had eventually returned to the fold, there were too many Tories who thought of him as an unprincipled opportunist. Only a few days earlier the Tory benches had conspicuously cheered for Chamberlain, when he entered the Chamber, and were muted in their welcome for Churchill. Now he was sitting with two powerful Tories�Chamberlain himself, Lord President of the Council, and Edward Wood, First Earl of Halifax and Foreign Secretary.

Both men had clashed with Churchill in the past. Both had reason to regard him as not just volcanic in his energies, but (to their way of thinking) irrational and positively dangerous.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill had deeply irritated Chamberlain with his plan to cut business rates�which Chamberlain thought would unfairly curb the revenues of Tory local government�to say nothing of the systematic monstering Churchill had given Chamberlain, for months and years, over the failure to stand up to Hitler. As for Halifax, he had been viceroy of India in the 1930s, and borne the brunt of what he saw as Churchill�s bombastic and blimpish opposition to anything that smacked of Indian independence.

Then there was a further aspect to Halifax�s political position that gave him�in those grim May days�an unspoken authority, even over Churchill. Chamberlain had sustained his fatal wound on 8 May, when large numbers of Tories refused to back him in the Norway debate; and in that key meeting of 9 May, it was Halifax who had been the departing Prime Minister�s choice. Chamberlain had wanted Halifax. King George VI wanted Halifax. Many in the Labour Party, in the House of Lords, and above all on the Tory benches would have preferred to see Halifax as Prime Minister.

In fact the only reason Churchill had finally got the nod was because Halifax�following a ghastly two-minute silence after Chamberlain offered him the job�had ruled himself out of contention; not just because it would be hard to command the government from the unelected House of Lords, but as he explicitly said, because he didn�t see how he would be able to cope with Winston Churchill rolling around untethered on the quarterdeck.

Still, it must give a man a certain confidence to think he had momentarily been the King�s preferred choice as Prime Minister. In spite of Churchill�s clear opposition, Halifax now returned to the fray. What he offered was, with hindsight, shameful.

The gist of it was that we should enter a negotiation with the Italians, with the blessing of Hitler, at which our opening gambit would be the surrender of various British assets�and though he did not spell these out in the meeting, they are thought to have been Malta, Gibraltar and a share of the running of the Suez Canal.

It says something for Halifax�s nerve that he felt able to offer this to Churchill as a course of action. Reward aggression by entering talks? Hand over British possessions to a ludicrous jut-jawed and jackbooted tyrant like Mussolini?

Churchill repeated his objections. The French were trying to get us on a �slippery slope� towards talks with Hitler and capitulation. We would be in a much stronger position, he argued, once the Germans had tried and failed to invade.

But Halifax came back again: we would get better terms now, before France had gone out of the war�before the Luftwaffe had come over and destroyed our aircraft factories.

It makes one cringe, now, to read poor Halifax�s defeatism; and we need to understand and to forgive his wrong-headedness. He has been the object of character assassination ever since the July 1940 publication of the book Guilty Men, Michael Foot�s philippic against appeasement.

Halifax had been over to see Hitler in 1937�and though he at one stage (rather splendidly) mistook the F�hrer for a footman, we must concede that he had an embarrassing familiarity with Goering. Both men loved fox-hunting, and Goering nicknamed him �Halalifax��with emetic chumminess�because halali is a German hunting cry. But it is nonsense to think of him as some kind of apologist for Nazi Germany, or a fifth columnist within the British government. In his own way, Halifax was a patriot as much as Churchill.

He thought he could see a way to protect Britain and to safeguard the empire, and to save lives; and it is not as if he was alone. The British ruling class was riddled�or at least conspicuously weevilled�with appeasers and pro-Nazis. It wasn�t just the Mitfords, or the followers of Britain�s home-grown would-be duce, fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.

In 1936 Lady Nelly Cecil noted that nearly all of her relatives were �tender to the Nazis�, and the reason was simple. In the 1930s your average toff was much more fearful of Bolshevism, and communists� alarming ideology of redistribution, than they were fearful of Hitler. Indeed, they saw fascism as a bulwark against the reds, and they had high-level political backing.

David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the F�hrer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a �born leader�, declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister. He wished that Britain had �a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today�. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!

Now the snowy-haired Welsh wizard had been himself bewitched, and Churchill�s former mentor had become an out-and-out defeatist. It wasn�t so very long ago that the media had been singing the same tune. The Daily Mail had long been campaigning for Hitler to be given a free hand in eastern Europe, the better to beat up the bolshies. �If Hitler did not exist,� said the Mail, �all western Europe might now be clamouring for such a champion.�

The Times had been so pro-appeasement that the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, described how he used to go through the proofs taking out anything that might offend the Germans. The press baron Beaverbrook himself had actually sacked Churchill from his Evening Standard column, on the grounds that he was too hard on the Nazis. Respectable liberal opinion�theatre types like John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike, G. B. Shaw�were lobbying for the government to �give consideration� to talks.

Of course, the mood had changed in the last year; feelings against Germany had unsurprisingly hardened and grown much more widespread. All we are saying�in mitigation of Halifax�is that in seeking peace, he had the support of many British people, at all levels of society. And so the argument went on, between Halifax and the Prime Minister, for that crucial hour.

Outside it was a warm and gorgeous May day; the chestnut candles were out in St James�s Park. Inside it was a game of ping-pong.

Churchill told Halifax that any negotiation with Hitler was a trap that would put Britain at his mercy; Halifax said he couldn�t understand what was so wrong with the French suggestion.

Chamberlain and Greenwood both chipped in with the (useless) observation that both options�fighting on and entering negotiations�were risky.

As it got to five o�clock, Halifax said that nothing in his suggestion could be remotely described as ultimate capitulation.

Churchill said that the chances of Britain being offered decent terms were a thousand to one against.

It was a stalemate; and it was now�according to most historians�that Churchill played his masterstroke. He announced that the meeting would be adjourned, and would begin again at 7 p.m. He then convened the full cabinet of twenty-five, ministers from every department�many of whom were to hear him as Prime Minister for the first time. Consider his position.

He could not persuade Halifax, and nor could he simply crush or ignore him. Only the previous day the Foreign Secretary had been so bold as to accuse him of talking �frightful rot�. If Halifax resigned, Churchill�s position would be weak: it was hardly as if his first efforts as war leader had been crowned with triumph�the Norway campaign, for which he was overwhelmingly responsible, had been a considerable fiasco.

The appeal to reason had failed. But the bigger the audience, the more fervid the atmosphere; and now he made an appeal to the emotions. Before the full cabinet he made a quite astonishing speech�without any hint of the intellectual restraint he had been obliged to display in the smaller meeting. It was time for �frightful rot� on steroids.

The best account we have is from the diary of Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, and there seems to be no reason not to trust it. Churchill began calmly enough.

Let�s go back to that moment on 24 May 1940, when Heinz Guderian, one of the most audacious tank commanders in history, is on the verge of an extraordinary triumph. After vicious fighting, his panzers have crossed the Aa canal in northern France. They pause in their exertions, their engines pinking gently in the sun, and Guderian prepares for a final assault on the British.

His prey is now less than twenty miles away�the 400,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force: flinching, fearful, bracing themselves for the ignominy of surrender. All Guderian needs to do is rev up those mighty Maybach engines, plunge onwards towards Dunkirk, and the British army will be shattered. Back home, the islanders� ability to resist will be gone. And then he gets a message from Berlin�a decision that he will later denounce as a disaster.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Hitler wants him to stop; to wait; and in an ecstasy of frustration, Guderian obeys. For the next few days�because the evacuation is agonisingly slow�the British jugular is pitifully exposed, pulsing beneath the Nazi knife.

In this horrific context, the British War Cabinet ponders what to do: to deal, or to fight. Now let us take Churchill out of the equation.

Let�s send down one of those giant Monty Python hands and pluck him from the smoke-filled room. Let us suppose that he�d copped it as a young man, on one of those many occasions when he had set out so boisterously to cheat death. Let�s imagine that his preposterous luck had run out years earlier, and that he had been skewered by a Dervish spear or plugged by a ten-rupee jezail or that he had crashed one of his rope-and-canvas flying machines or died in the trenches.

We leave the fate of Britain and the world in the hands of Halifax, Chamberlain and the representatives of the Labour and Liberal parties. Would they have treated with Hitler, as the Foreign Secretary was proposing? It seems overwhelmingly likely.

Chamberlain was already physically feeble, and was to die of cancer only a few months later: and the whole purpose of his removal from the Premiership was that it was impossible to see him as a war leader. Halifax�s position we know: he wanted to negotiate. The others had neither the parliamentary clout nor the bellicose flair to lead the country, in defiance of Hitler, at a moment of terrifying danger.

It was Churchill�and only Churchill�who had made resistance to the Nazis his political mission. There was a sense in which his objections to Halifax were selfish.

He was fighting for his political life and credibility, and if he gave in to Halifax he was finished. His prestige, his reputation, his prospects, his ego�all those things that matter to politicians�were engaged in the cause of fighting on; and this has led some historians to make the mistake of thinking that it was all about him, and not about the British interest.

In the last few years there has erupted an unsightly rash of revisionist accounts, suggesting that Britain should indeed have done what so many people�in all walks of society�were hoping and praying for: struck a bargain with Nazi Germany. The argument goes that the British Empire and the Nazi Reich were capable of peaceful coexistence�and there is no doubt that Hitler had said plenty of things to encourage that idea.

In the 1930s he had sent Ribbentrop over to schmooze the Establishment, and with considerable success. In 1938 Halifax was allegedly so incautious as to declare to Hitler�s adjutant that he would �like to see as the culmination of my work the F�hrer entering London at the side of the English king amid the acclamation of the English people�.

As we have seen, there were members of the upper and middle classes who had exhibited an unfortunate feeling for Hitlerism�including the former monarch, Edward VIII. And even now, in these evil days of 1940, Hitler would sometimes proclaim his admiration for the British Empire, and his view that it was not in Germany�s interest to crush Britain�since that would only benefit rival powers, such as America, Japan and Russia.

We English were also members of the Aryan race, we gathered�though perhaps not as genetically special as the Teutonic variant. Britain and her empire could survive as a sort of junior partner�full of historical interest but fundamentally effete: the Greeks to the Nazi Rome.

Many thought that indignity a price worth paying for the preservation of the empire, and to avert slaughter. It was not just that people wanted a deal with Hitler: many thought it was inevitable.

The French did: Admiral Darlan of the French fleet was convinced that Britain would lose, and in 1940 he prepared to join forces with Germany.

So did many Americans: the ambassador of the day was the egregious Irish-American Joe Kennedy: bootlegger, crook and father of JFK. He was endlessly requesting meetings with Hitler and sending lip-smackingly gloomy messages to Washington. �Democracy is finished in England,� he proclaimed towards the end of 1940, shortly before he was recalled.

He was wrong, of course, just as Halifax was wrong, and the appeasers were wrong, and all the revisionists are wrong today. But to do battle with their nonsense, we have to try to understand what might have happened if their wishes had come true.

I am always nervous of �counterfactual� history, since it strikes me that the so-called chain of causation is never really clear. Events aren�t like billiard balls, with one obviously propelling the next�and even billiards can be deceptive.

Take out one spillikin from the heap of factors, and you can never tell how the rest will fall. But of all the �what ifs� of history, this is about the most popular. Some of our best modern historians have conducted this thought experiment�and they overwhelmingly reach the same conclusion: that if you end British resistance in 1940, you create the conditions for an irredeemable disaster in Europe.

Hitler would almost certainly have won. That is, he would have been able to launch Operation Barbarossa�the attack on Russia�much earlier than June 1941. He would not have had those pesky Brits causing trouble for him in the Mediterranean and in the North African desert, and tying up men and weapons.

He would have been able to direct his full fury at Russia�as he had always intended when, fingers crossed behind his back, he agreed to the Nazi�Soviet pact�and he would almost certainly have pulled it off, before the campaign was reduced to a frozen hell. As it was, the achievements of the Wehrmacht were astonishing: they captured millions of square miles and millions of men. They captured Stalingrad and reached the outer stations of the Moscow metro. Imagine if they had captured Moscow, decapitated the communist regime, and sent Stalin into a funk from which he did not recover (he had already had a nervous collapse when the German tanks rolled across his frontier).

Historians have envisaged the swift implosion of the communist tyranny�assisted, perhaps, by middle-class victims of collectivisation�and the installation of some pro-Nazi puppet regime. And then what?

Hitler and Himmler and the rest of the satanic crew would have been able to use this vast canvas�from the Atlantic to the Urals�to paint their hideous fantasies of government. With Britain out, there was no one to stop them, no one to interrupt them, no one with even the moral standing to denounce them.

In America, the isolationists would have won: if Britain wasn�t going to risk the lives of its people, why should they? In Berlin, Albert Speer would have got on with his deranged plans for a new world capital, to be called Germania.

At its heart was to be the Hall of the People�a demented granite version of the Pantheon of Agrippa; a building so vast that you could fit the dome of London�s St Paul�s through the oculus�the circular hole at the top of the dome. It was intended to seat 100,000 people, and the chanting and the shouting were expected to be so prodigious that they were planning for rainfall in the building itself, as the warm exhalations rose, condensed, and precipitated on the heads of the fervent crowds of fascists.

This nightmarish structure was surmounted by a mammoth eagle, so that the whole thing looked a bit like some cosmic Prussian helmet 290 metres high�almost as tall as the Shard skyscraper in Southwark; and around it radiated other vast symbols of dominance: an arch twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe; colossal railway stations from which double-decker trains would zoom at 190 kmh, conveying German settlers to the Caspian and the Urals and the other tracts of eastern Europe from which the Slavic Untermenschen had been expelled.

The whole European landmass, with the exception of Switzerland (though there was a secret plan to invade that, too), was to consist either of the Reich or of client fascist states. As many counterfactual novelists have spotted, there were all sorts of plans to convert the territory into a sinister edition of the European Union.

In 1942, the Reich economics minister and president of the Reichsbank, Dr Walter Funk, wrote a paper calling for a Europ�ische Wirtschaftsgesellschaft�a European Common Market. He proposed a single currency, a central bank, a common agricultural policy, and other familiar ideas. Ribbentrop proposed a similar-sounding scheme, though, to be fair, Hitler opposed this on the ground that it wasn�t sufficiently beastly to the rest of the Nazi European Union.

In this Gestapo-controlled Nazi EU, the authorities would have been free to pursue their hateful racist ideology. The Nazis had begun their persecutions in the 1930s, and long before Churchill came to power�before the decision to fight on�they were moving populations of Jews and Poles.

They were creating ghettos near railway hubs as a prelude to �deportation��and as Eichmann later admitted at his trial, deportation meant liquidation. Unchecked and for the main part uncriticised, the Nazis would have got on with the job of massacring those of whom they disapproved�Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally unsound and the disabled.

They would have let their imaginations roam as they performed their experiments on human flesh: horrible, detached, inhuman and arrogant beyond belief. When Winston Churchill spoke later that summer of 1940 about Europe sinking into �the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science�, he was exactly right.

That is the most likely alternative world, then; but even if Hitler had not succeeded in Russia�even if Stalin had beaten back his assault�would life have been much better?

We would have been looking at a division of Europe between two forms of totalitarianism: on one side a world terrorised by the KGB or the Stasi; on the other side the subjects of the Gestapo�everywhere a population that lived in fear of the knock in the night, arbitrary arrest, the camps, and no way to protest.

Of the roughly two hundred countries in the world today, about 120 can claim to be democracies of some kind or other�to uphold the right of voters to determine their own fate. Most of the world pays at least lip-service to the idea that democracy is, as Churchill once put it, the worst system of government in the world, except for all the others. But if Hitler and Stalin had prevailed�or if one or the other had prevailed�does anyone seriously believe that democracy would be on her throne today?

With their superstitious habit of imputing justice and rightness to the course of history, human beings would have absorbed a dismal lesson: that the gods had smiled on the tyrannies, and that tyranny was therefore what our incompetent species required.

We in Britain would have acquiesced in this moral bankruptcy�and it is all too easy to imagine how Halifax (or Lloyd George, or whoever) could have persuaded the electorate that this was the peace they were yearning for�and yet there, surely, they would have been kidding themselves.

Do you think that by this cowardice Britain could have bought peace from the Nazis? As Churchill pointed out to the War Cabinet, any deal struck with Hitler must mean disarmament of the fleet, and a fatal weakening of Britain�s long-term ability to defend herself or to fight back.

And the crucial point was surely this: that there was no deal with Hitler that could conceivably be relied upon. Churchill had been proved crushingly right in his warnings about Nazism�made since the early 1930s, when he had been out to Germany to see the parades of gleaming-eyed youths. In countless newspaper articles and speeches he had identified a spiritual evil that so many others chose not to see: the fundamental revanchism and aggression of the Nazi regime. Now he had been massively vindicated, about the Rhineland, and about Czechoslovakia, about Poland and about the desperate need for Britain to rearm.

Many counterfactual historians have pointed out that the Nazis were a long way ahead of their rivals in developing some of the most lethal weapons of the twentieth century: they had the first jet fighters; they had the first rocket-propelled missiles. Imagine if those German scientists had been so desperate to defeat the Soviets that they had been the first to produce an atomic weapon.

Think of that fate for Britain, all you who are tempted by the revisionist argument, you who secretly wonder whether the country might have done better to do a deal. Britain would have been alone, facing a hostile continent united under a bestial totalitarianism, and with nuclear-armed rockets bristling on the V2 launching pads at Peenem�nde. It would have been a new slavery, or worse.

Hitler didn�t tell Guderian to stop his tanks on the Aa canal because he was some closet Anglophile. He didn�t stay his hand because of some fellow-feeling for those of the Aryan race. Most serious historians agree with Guderian: that the F�hrer simply made a mistake�that he was himself taken aback by the speed of his conquest, and feared a counter-attack.

The truth is that he saw Britain not as a potential partner, but as the enemy, and though he sometimes burbled approvingly of the British Empire, he also called for the complete annihilation of British forces. He didn�t call off his extensive plans to invade Britain (Operation �Sea Lion�) because he wanted in some way to spare the British.

He did so because it had become too risky, and because one man was telling the rest of the country to fight on the beaches and the hills and the landing grounds, and was even telling his own cabinet that rather than surrender he would die choking in his own blood upon the ground.

Hitler�s Operation Sea Lion was a project not just of invasion but of subjugation. He was going to carry off Nelson�s column from Trafalgar Square, and install it in Berlin. Goering had plans to pillage the entire collection from the National Gallery. They were even going�infamy of infamies�to send the Elgin Marbles back to Nazi-controlled Athens. The Nazis had already drawn up a blacklist of British figures who were known to be particularly anti-Nazi, who would presumably have been either imprisoned or shot; and at one stage Himmler proposed killing or enslaving 80 per cent of the British population.

Such were the potential fruits of the deal that Halifax offered. Not only would the British have been complicit in the totalitarian tyranny that was to engulf Europe; it seems at least possible, if not likely, that they would eventually have been overrun themselves.

If Britain had done a deal in 1940�and this is the final and most important point�then there would have been no liberation of the continent. The country would not have been a haven of resistance, but a gloomy client state of an infernal Nazi EU.

There would have been no Polish soldiers training with the British army, there would have been no Czech airmen with the RAF, there would have been no Free French waiting and hoping for an end to their national shame.

Above all there would have been no Lend-Lease, no liberty ships, no Churchillian effort to woo America away from isolationism; and of course there would have been no prospect of D-Day, no heroism and sacrifice at Omaha Beach, no hope that the new world would come with all its power and might to rescue and liberate the old.

The Americans would never have entered that European conflict, if Britain had been so mad and so wrong as to do a deal in 1940. It is incredible to look back and see how close we came, and how well supported the idea was.

I don�t know whether it is right to think of history as running on train tracks, but let us think of Hitler�s story as one of those huge and unstoppable double-decker expresses that he had commissioned, howling through the night with its cargo of German settlers.

Think of that locomotive, whizzing towards final victory. Then think of some kid climbing the parapet of the railway bridge and dropping the crowbar that jams the points and sends the whole enterprise for a gigantic burton�a mangled, hissing heap of metal. Winston Churchill was the crowbar of destiny. If he hadn�t been where he was, and put up resistance, that Nazi train would have carried right on. It was something of a miracle�given his previous career�that he was there at all.

These days it is probably fair to say that thrusting young Tories�and especially males�will regard Winston Churchill as a sort of divinity. These honest fellows may sport posters on their teenage bedroom walls: Churchill in a pinstripe suit and toting a tommy gun, or just giving two fingers to the Hun.

On entering university they may join Churchill Societies or Churchill Dining Clubs that meet in Churchill Rooms where his portrait grimly endures their port-fuelled yacketing. They may even wear spotty bow ties.

When they make it to Parliament they piously trail their fingers on the left toecap of the bronze effigy that stands in the Members� Lobby�hoping to receive some psychic charge before they are called on to speak. When they in due course become Tory Prime Minister, and they find themselves in a bit of a corner (as inevitably happens), they will discover that they can make a defiant speech in St Stephen�s Club, where the cameras will capture them in the same frame as the image of the old war leader�pink, prognathous and pouting down at his successor with what we can only assume is pride.

The Tories are jealous of their relation with Churchill. It is a question of badging, of political ownership. They think of him as the people of Parma think of the formaggio parmigiano.

He is their biggest cheese, their prize possession, the World-Cup-winning hat-trick-scorer and greatest ever captain of the Tory team. So I wonder sometimes whether people are fully aware of the suspicion and doubt with which he was greeted by Tories when he became Prime Minister in 1940�or the venom with which they spat his name.

To lead his country in war, Churchill had to command not just the long-faced men of Munich�Halifax and Chamberlain�but hundreds of Tories who had been conditioned to think of him as an opportunist, a turncoat, a blowhard, an egotist, a rotter, a bounder, a cad, and on several well-attested occasions a downright drunk.

We have seen how they cheered for Chamberlain, and only murmured for Churchill, when he entered the Commons for the first time as PM on 13 May 1940 (an event that rattled Churchill: �I shan�t last long,� he said as he left the Chamber). They sustained their hostility. From his seat in the parliamentary press gallery, Paul Einzig, the correspondent of the Financial News, was able to study the Tories�and he could see the ill-will that formed above them like a vapour.

For at least two months after he took office Einzig recorded that Tory MPs would sit in �sullen silence� when he rose to speak, even after he had completed one of his historic speeches. When the Labour benches cheered, the Tories were still plotting to get rid of him. On about 13 May, William Spens, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, said that three-quarters of his members were willing to give Churchill the heave-ho and put Chamberlain back.

From about the same time we have a letter from Nancy Dugdale, the wife of a Chamberlainite MP, that sums up the mood of fastidious horror. She wrote to her husband, Tommy Dugdale, who was already serving in the armed forces:

At the age of seventy-three Winston Churchill wrote a curious little essay that he did not intend for publication�at least not until after his death. It is all about a spooky experience that he had in the winter of 1947. The glory days of the war and the premiership are over, and he finds himself in his studio in the cottage at Chartwell.

He is getting ready to paint, when he feels an odd sensation�and turns round to see his father sitting in an armchair. Randolph�s eyes are twinkling and he is fiddling with his amber cigarette holder, just as Churchill remembers him from those rare moments when he was both charming and loving to his son.

There then takes place a poignant conversation. The conceit is that in the fifty-two years since he died�in political isolation and syphilitic despair�Randolph does not know what has happened in the world. So Churchill fills him in.

He tells him that King George VI is on the throne, and that they still race the Derby, and that the Turf Club is �OK� and that �OK� is a new American expression. He tells Randolph how the former Tory leader Arthur Balfour eventually came a cropper�a pleasing reflection, since neither of them really got on with snooty old Balfour. He relates the rise of socialism. He explains that there have been two world wars in each of which about thirty million people have died, and how the Russians have a new type of tsar, more fell and murderous than any that has gone before.

The trick of the piece is that Randolph never quite understands what his son has accomplished. The father gathers that the son is now a part-time painter, of indifferent ability, that he appears to live in a small cottage, and that he never rose above the rank of major in the yeomanry.

At the end of Churchill�s grim exposition of the modern world, Randolph seems vaguely impressed with how much his son seems to know about current affairs. He says, with deafening irony, �Of course you are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I really wonder that you didn�t go into politics. You might have done a lot to help. You might even have made a name for yourself.�

At this he smiles and strikes a match, and in the flash the apparition vanishes. Many historians have taken this sketch�which Churchill�s family called �The Dream��to be immensely and deliberately revealing about the psychological make-up of Winston Churchill. So it surely is.

It is elegiac; it is wistful; it is in one sense a great sorrowful sigh of yearning from a man who always wanted to impress his father and never succeeded. As Winston Churchill used to tell his own children, he never had more than five conversations with his father�or not conversations of any length; and he always had the feeling that he didn�t quite measure up to expectations.

He spent his youth in the certainty, relentlessly rubbed in by Randolph, that he must be less clever than his father. Randolph had been to Eton, whereas it was thought safer to send young Winston to Harrow�partly because of his health (the air of the hill being deemed better for his fragile lungs than the dank air by the Thames) but really because Harrow, in those days, was supposed to be less intellectually demanding.

Randolph had been to Merton College, Oxford, and had almost got a first in law. He could quote Horace with fluency. Churchill, on the other hand, had flunked his exams and only scraped into Sandhurst.

As Winston had struggled on his duffer�s career path, he had watched his father�s meteoric ascent, his rise to the Chancellorship, how he dominated the Tory Party; and then it was the cruel fate of young Winston also to watch his father�s decline. He scoured newspapers for accounts of his speeches. He was furiously loyal. He refused to accept that his faculties were dimming, that his diction was slurred and that he lacked his former oratorical fire; and when once he was in the audience and someone let out a catcall, the teenage Churchill whirled round and hissed, �Stop that now, you snub-nosed radical!�

When Churchill was twenty his relations with his father had a last golden moment. He found himself invited to lunches with great and famous men such as Joe Chamberlain, Herbert Henry Asquith and Lord Rosebery, and performed creditably. �He has much smartened up,� noted his father, �and he has got steadier�.�.�. Sandhurst has done wonders for him.� By his own account, Churchill dreamed of being politically useful to his old man, of joining him in Parliament, of rallying to his cause�and then he was gone, dead at forty-five, before his son had the chance.

So here he is now in �The Dream�, with his father before him, and the moment has finally come to explain to his wrathful parent that the cosmic Head Master has a new end-of-term report for Winston; that he is no longer a wastrel and an idler but the Greatest Living Englishman and the Saviour of his Country�and, puff, Randolph has gone again before he can hear the good news.

We end the piece in a state of melancholy. Churchill feels too tired to go on painting. His cigar has gone out and the ash has fallen among the paints. On the face of it we are meant to feel sorry for him and the hyper-Victorian distance of his relationship with Randolph. But I can�t help thinking that there is also a bit of smugness in this essay.

He is not only seeking his father�s posthumous approval. He is surreptitiously boasting�to Randolph and to the reader�of how he defied those miserable expectations, and actually exceeded his father in virtually every respect.

So there! says Winston Churchill to the vanished shade of Randolph. Put that in your cigarette holder and smoke it, you gooseberry-eyed and walrus-moustached demagogue. You had no right to be so critical�that is the message to Randolph and the subtext of the essay.

What was Churchill trying to do in that studio at Chartwell, when the ghost of his father appeared? He was actually repairing an old oil painting of Randolph, one that had been damaged in some Ulster club. He was taking that image, and he was using his own paints and his own skill to tart it up.

There, surely, is the metaphor that sums up the whole exercise. Churchill said that he set out to �vindicate� his father, and that is true. But he also means to go one better. He takes that battered and nicotine-stained canvas and he embellishes it.

It was Randolph who began the family tradition of making money from journalism. As Churchill notes in �The Dream�, Randolph went off to South Africa for the Daily Graphic, and earned the colossal sum of �100 an article. So how does Churchill launch himself upon the world?

He goes off to South Africa, among other places, and becomes the most highly paid journalist of his age; and like Randolph, he makes a bit of a habit of cheesing off the people who help him in his ambitions.

And what kind of lesson did Randolph offer his son, about how to get on in Parliament? He displayed a shocking disloyalty to the Tories, and set up a group called the �Fourth Party�, whose mission was to bash Gladstone but also to wind up the Tory Party leadership, in the form of Sir Stafford Northcote.

Randolph and chums called him �the goat�, and after a while the goat could take it no more, and wrote to Randolph, begging him not to be such a tosser. Randolph wrote back, with blissful condescension, saying: �Since I have been in parliament I have always acted on my own account, and I shall continue to do so.�

There, too, is young Churchill�s cue: and when he gets to Parliament in 1900 he begins by setting up his own group of rebellious young Tories�called the Hughligans, in honour of Hugh Cecil, one of their number�and razzes the Tory high command, with Randolphian brio and insolence.

It was Randolph who showed the first and programmatic disdain for the very idea of party loyalty. As his son later described it, his father�s preferred strategic position was �looking down on the Front Benches on both sides and regarding all parties in the House of Commons with an impartiality which is quite sublime�.

So how does Churchill treat his political parties? As he once said�with the kind of candour that would be simply intolerable in today�s desiccated politics�choosing a political party is like choosing a horse: you just go for the nag that will take you farthest and fastest. As we have seen, he chooses one, and leaps off just before it is about to die; leaps on a Liberal horse; and when that, too, is obviously about to cark it (or possibly dead on its feet), he leaps back on a new Tory steed. No one, before or since, has been so magnificently and unrepentantly disloyal.

Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it�a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.

And he gets it from Randolph. Randolph�s formula was called �Tory Democracy�. The idea was a bit vague (asked to define it, Randolph said it was �opportunism, mostly�). But Tory Democracy galvanised and invigorated the Tory Party in the 1880s, and the idea certainly invigorated the career of Randolph Churchill.

His son takes up the theme. Randolph campaigned for servants to be entitled to compensation for industrial accidents, and in the same spirit Winston is the author of important social reforms: bringing the pension age down to sixty-five, setting up Labour Exchanges, giving workers the tea break, and so on�while always remaining, on the whole, a steady defender of free markets.

Churchill inherits his political positioning from Randolph; and above all he inherits his style, his self-projection. Randolph became the most famous orator of his day, the man who could clear the tea rooms when he stood up to speak, and whose working-class fans called him �Little Randy� and �Cheeky Randy�. �Give it to �em hot, Randy!� they cried, when the shrimp-like fellow worked himself up into a frenzy of pop-eyed invective�a snarling version of the P. G. Wodehouse character Gussie Fink-Nottle in the great prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School.

He was a phrase-maker of note, who said that Gladstone was �an old man in a hurry�. Speaking of Gladstone�s habit of relaxing by chopping wood at Hawarden Castle, he said, �the forest laments in order that Mr Gladstone may perspire�. Churchill adopts the same speaking techniques�mostly writing out the whole text in full, before trying to declaim as much as possible from memory�and becomes the most glorious political speaker not just of his age but perhaps of any age.

But where, you may ask, did Randolph get it all from? Who was his inspiration?

Both Churchills, father and son, are avowedly working in the tradition of that greatest of all Tory magicians and opportunists, Benjamin Disraeli. Randolph was Disraeli�s disciple and his vicar on earth. When Disraeli died, Randolph helped to establish the �Primrose League� in his memory, because the primrose was the favourite flower of the great Victorian leader and dandy.

As Randolph tells his son in �The Dream�, �I always believed in Dizzy, that old Jew. He saw the future. He had to bring the British working man into the centre of the picture.� The two Churchills�father and son�were, as Winston put it, the �bearers of the mantle of Elijah�, the heirs of Disraeli.

The continuities are indeed very striking, and go way beyond an interest in social reform. Disraeli and the Churchills also have in common the journalism (and in Winston�s case, the novel), the love of show, the rhetorical flourishes, the sense of history, the imperialism, the monarchism, the slight air of camp and the inveterate opportunism.

These days it seems that Disraeli is in danger of some sort of eclipse. Douglas Hurd has produced a fine but slightly finger-wagging biography, demanding to know what Disraeli actually achieved by comparison with �effective� plodders like Peel.

This is unfair on Disraeli, of course, but also on a crucial tradition in modern British politics. If it hadn�t been for Disraeli, we would not have had Randolph Churchill, and if it hadn�t been for the example and model provided by Randolph, we would never have had Winston Churchill. What was Churchill�s delighted reaction, when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made him Chancellor of the Exchequer? �I still have my father�s robes!�

I do not mean to suggest that Churchill was identical to his father, or some kind of mini-me. In all sorts of important ways, he was very different, and a very much better man.

Randolph was a serious cad, in a way that Churchill never quite managed. It is hard to imagine Winston contracting syphilis. Both his parents were �famous for sex�, in the phrase of Muriel Spark, in a way that Churchill wasn�t.

You can�t see Churchill getting so deranged with anger as to assault his valet, as Randolph did, and you can�t imagine him writing such dreadful letters to his children. And Winston would never have behaved in the demented way that Randolph did in 1873, when he tried to blackmail the Prince of Wales, and then challenged him to a duel.

This bizarre and revolting story has now faded into a dusty crevice of the library; but when Winston Churchill was beginning his career, there were people who remembered it�and they must have wondered how far the apple had fallen from the tree.

It all began because Randolph�s older brother, the Earl of Blandford, was having a major extramarital affair with a woman called Lady Edith Aylesford. This Edith seems from her photo to have had a longish nose, but she must have been a sex bomb. She was simultaneously involved with Blandford, with her husband, and with �Bertie��the portly and underemployed heir to the throne. That was how they carried on in those days, you see.

Edith decided that she wanted to divorce her husband, Lord Aylesford, and shack up with Blandford. For reasons that are not quite clear, Randolph decided that his older brother should be party to no such thing. It would bring disgrace on the family even to be cited in a divorce case, he said.

So he came up with a wheeze to get the Prince of Wales�who set the moral tone for society�to forbid the divorce. He found some letters from Prince Bertie to Edith. They were hot stuff, said Randolph. They implied intimacy between the Prince and Lady Edith, and if they were exposed�why, then Bertie would never sit upon the throne!

He threatened to publish. An epic scandal impended. The Queen was informed. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, had to step in. An incandescent Bertie challenged Randolph to a duel, to which Randolph wrote back by figuratively sticking up two fingers to the heir to the throne, by pointing out that no subject could be asked to risk the life of a future monarch.

In the end the whole Churchill family had to be banished to Ireland, with the Duke of Marlborough going as Viceroy and Randolph serving as his Private Secretary; which is why Winston spent his early years in Dublin. As for the various marriages and love affairs, they all came to grief in one way or another.

I dig up this unhappy tale as evidence of that quality of Randolph�s that Winston certainly did inherit�and that is not the caddishness, but the recklessness, or rather, the willingness to take risks. It was loopy of Randolph to think he could stop the divorce of his brother by blackmailing the Prince of Wales.

It was loopy of him, at the end of his career, to think that there was no one who could replace him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and that he was safe to threaten to resign. �I had forgotten Goschen,� he said, once they put Goschen in instead. (Indeed, George Goschen, the first Viscount Goschen, is only remembered for being forgotten by Randolph.) But that gambler�s temperament he passed on to his son�and it is vital that he did.

By the time Winston Churchill came to power in May 1940, there were many people who were amazed, and many who were appalled�but also many who thought it was inevitable. In 1936�even as he was denying him a place in the cabinet�Stanley Baldwin remarked that they would need to keep Churchill in reserve to serve as a war prime minister.

By 1939 there were poster campaigns in London, with the slogan �What Price Churchill?� Candidates began to stand in by-elections on a �Bring Back Churchill� ticket. In May 1940, shortly before the Norway debate, his acolyte Harold Macmillan approached Churchill in the lobby and said, �We must have a new Prime Minister and it must be you.�

As Churchill said about the moment when he finally took over, �I felt as though I was walking with destiny. All my life was a preparation for this hour and this trial.� He did indeed seem somehow predestined for the job, and not just in his own eyes.

No one else had such long experience of fighting�both as a politician and a soldier. No one else seemed built on the same scale as Churchill, or equal to the level of events�and there was a further reason why so many people looked at him in this way, as the natural man for the moment.

They knew that throughout the amazing snakes-and-ladders of his life he had followed the pattern of Randolph not just in his ducal disdain for party or his Homeric desire for glory but in his willingness to back himself and his ideas�to take risks that no one else would take.

In peacetime, such behaviour can be disastrous. But you can�t win a war without taking risks, and you won�t take risks unless you are brave. That, finally, was the quality that people sensed in Churchill; that was why some people yearned for him in 1940, in spite of all the sneering of the Tory establishment and the appeasers.

His whole career so far had been a testament to that primordial virtue�the virtue, as he pointed out himself, that makes possible all the others. Of the immense physical and moral courage of Churchill there can be no doubt.

It was a glorious evening in Croydon, on 18 July 1919. The war was over, and Churchill was back in government�long since restored after the disgrace of Gallipoli. He had put in a hard day as Secretary of State for War and Air, and now he hankered for excitement. It was time for one of his flying lessons.

With several hours of daylight left, he had driven down to the aerodrome south of London. Together with his instructor, Captain Jack Scott, he clambered into the biplane�a De Havilland Airco DH4, with its brass fittings and fine wooden propeller. Scott sat in the front seat of the dual-control machine, Churchill behind him. Though he had no formal pilot�s licence, Churchill was experienced enough to perform the take-off himself.

For a while, things seemed to go according to the book. They chuntered down the field; the engine pulled well; they ascended to 70 or 80 feet above the upturned faces of the ground crew. They must have made a fine sight�one of Britain�s most famous statesmen, his big head sheathed in leather flying cap and goggles, soaring heavenward in what was then a cutting-edge piece of British technology�one of the very first people since Icarus to master the skies, to defy gravity in a machine that was heavier than air.

Just as they reached a fatal distance from the ground, things started to go wrong.

In those days Croydon Aerodrome was bordered by clumps of tall elm trees. In order to avoid these trees the ascending pilot was obliged to make two banked turns, first to the right and then to the left. Churchill made his first turn�no problems. The wind sang through the struts. The speedometer registered 60 knots, healthy enough to avoid a stall.

He turned left, and the delicate fins and ailerons obeyed his touch. Slowly and gently he now centred the joystick�as he had been taught�to bring the machine back on an even keel. He brought it all the way back; he moved the head of the joystick about a foot. He noticed something funny.

The plane remained banked, at 45 degrees. The machine showed no sign of responding to his commands. In fact, it started to list even more to the left. The speedo was falling fast. It was instantly obvious to Winston Churchill that he and Captain Scott were in trouble.

�She is out of control,� said Churchill to Scott�a highly experienced and capable man, who had already endured one bad crash, and had the injuries to show for it. In that moment Churchill felt Scott overriding him, taking control of the joystick and pedals�yanking and pushing to perform the only manoeuvre that you can, in such situations: pointing the nose downwards so as to pick up enough speed to get out of the side-slip. Any higher, and it might have worked. They were only 90 feet off the ground. Disaster was at hand.

As they descended, out of control, Churchill saw the sunlit aerodrome beneath him, and had the impression that it was bathed in a baleful yellowish glare. In a flash�and he didn�t have much longer than a flash�the thought formed in his head: �This is very likely death.� And so, very likely, it was.

Let us leave our hero there for a second or two, hurtling headlong towards the packed earth of Croydon. Let us look back at the risks he had already run. Consider the way he had loaded the statistical dice against himself�not just in his career as an aviator, but in his exhibitionist lust for glory of all kinds.

Churchill had begun his obsession with flying before the First War, when he was still First Lord of the Admiralty. At the beginning of 1913 he went to visit the naval air station at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. He was captivated by the atmosphere: young Biggles-like characters nervelessly hurling themselves about the ether as they tested the world�s first seaplane (a word that Churchill was credited with coining). Apart from the moustaches, it must have been like the early days of the US space programme: the Right Stuff exuding from every pore.

Churchill immediately saw the potential of what they were doing. He wanted a proper division, with its own identity and esprit de corps: and so began what was to become the Royal Air Force. �We are in the Stephenson age of flying,� he proclaimed, referring to the inventor of the steam locomotive. �Now our machines are frail. One day they will be robust, and of value to our country.� He was so excited, in fact, that he wanted to take off himself�and to learn how to fly.

To see how bonkers this was, remember that it was then just ten years since the very dawn of flight. It was only in 1903 that Orville and Wilbur Wright had finally taken off at Kitty Hawk, in their bizarre contraption. Here was Churchill, a not-especially-fit thirty-nine-year-old, asking for tuition in flying these objects that�to modern eyes�are barely recognisable as planes. They look like weird giant canvas box kites mounted on pram wheels with a lawn-mower engine shoved on one end, and the whole thing lashed together with ropes or leather straps.

They look lethal. They were. It has been calculated that in 1912 one flight in five thousand ended in death. By modern standards, that is insanely dangerous. Compare another mode of transport that is sometimes�irrationally�held to be dangerous, such as cycling in London, where one journey in about 14 million ends in a fatality; and you see the risk that Churchill was running.

These days no one would be allowed aloft in one of those planes, let alone a senior government minister. One of Churchill�s first instructors was a twenty-three-year-old sprig of the aristocracy called Spenser Grey�until Spenser had to bow out, after having a serious prang and suffering life-changing injuries.

Churchill�s friends begged him to stop. His cousin Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough, said: �I do not suppose I shall get the chance of writing you many more letters if you continue your journeys in the Air. Really, I consider you owe it to your wife, family and friends to desist from a practice or pastime�whichever you call it�which is fraught with so much danger to life. It really is wrong of you.� F. E. Smith told him he was being �foolish� and �unfair to his family�.

His cousin Lady Londonderry said he was �evil�. His wife, Clementine, was distraught�and sometimes Churchill would steal away without even telling her. �I have been very naughty today about flying,� he confessed on 29 November 1913, as though he had been to the larder and eaten the children�s pudding.

His next instructor was another dashing young captain, Gilbert Wildman-Lushington. On 30 November�his birthday�Churchill spent the whole day with Lushington, much of it in the air. The captain wrote to his fianc�e, Miss Airlie Hynes, about his exuberant pupil. �I started Winston off on his instruction about 12.15, and he got so bitten with it I could hardly get him out of the machine, in fact except for about � of an hour for lunch we were in the machine till 3.30. He showed great promise, and is coming down again for further instruction and practice.�

The brief lunch had taken place in Lushington�s cabin, where Churchill spotted a photo of the young woman. When was the wedding? he asked. Captain Lushington replied that he was saving up for it�and you can imagine that teaching Churchill was a useful freelance income. Alas, the wedding never took place. Three days later Lushington himself was killed, side-slipping in the very plane he had used for the lesson.

There is an eerie letter from Churchill to Lushington, presumably written on the evening of the day they had spent together. He asks why he couldn�t seem to make the rudder work, and why it seemed so stiff. �Probably the explanation is that I was pushing against myself,� he says, cryptically. Lushington writes back, confirming that this is indeed probably the case. He has tried the rudder and it seems fine: �You were pushing against yourself,� says Lushington, before taking off again for his last doomed flight.

We might ask: how can you push against yourself? What does that mean? Did Churchill really understand what was happening with these primitive flaps and levers? Did anyone?

He swore to Clementine that he would give up, after the death of Lushington. Then in 1914 he swore again that he would do so, after he invited French air ace Gustav Hamel to come over the Channel from Paris, and give a display to the Royal Flying Corps.

Hamel took off from Paris and was never seen again. And yet on Churchill went with his flying. He was constantly nipping over to France, glorying lark-like in the high places, boasting about the speed and the convenience of the air. By 1919 he was back at the controls, and in the immediate run-up to this fateful episode at Croydon he had been given all sorts of presentiments of doom.

On one occasion he had got completely lost in a storm over northern France, and had to descend until he could see a railway line by which to steer his course. Only the previous month he had sustained a serious smash at the Buc aerodrome near Paris. The long grass had slowed his take-off, so that the plane�s skis hit the edge of a concealed road at the end of the runway.

The plane did a somersault�like a shot rabbit, he said�and he ended up hanging upside down by his harness. Now he was about to be violently and involuntarily reunited with the soil of Croydon, and if his life had flashed before him he might have reflected that he had behaved recklessly for years.

When we look at the prodigious bravery of his early military career, we are driven to the conclusion that he actively courted danger. It is as though he hungered�like Achilles or some Arthurian knight�for the prestige that goes not just with being in the thick of battle, but above all for being seen in the thick of battle.

His exploits began in Cuba at the age of twenty, when he first found himself in that ambiguous role that was to serve him so well: at once an officer of the British army, and yet also a front-line reporter. Sandhurst had ended satisfactorily, in the sense that he became a bold and skilful horseman and graduated twentieth out of a class of 130, before enlisting as a cornet in the 4th Queen�s Own Hussars. The army was expensive, however, and he saw journalism as an ingenious way of supplementing his income and personally burnishing his own reputation.

When the Cubans rebelled against their Spanish colonial masters, Churchill wangled himself into the Spanish forces. Ostensibly he was there to report for the Daily Graphic; in reality he hoped to get as close as possible to a live bullet without actually being hit.

He got lucky quickly. On his twenty-first birthday he was in the jungle, when shots rang out. The horse behind him copped it; a red stain spread over his chestnut coat, and he died. Churchill�s account quivered with excitement, as he described how the bullet had come �within a foot of my head�. The next day he was bathing in a river and more shots were heard. �The bullets whizzed over our heads,� he said with pride.

All this was glorious in its way, but it could hardly be described as a full-scale battle. He wanted active service in the British army. He wanted to do some shooting himself�and preferably against Her Majesty�s enemies. Thanks to some nifty lobbying by his mother (who is said to have used all her resources of feminine charm to bend the generals to her will) he got himself a billet, two years later, with the Malakand Field Force, commanded by Sir Bindon Blood.

The mission of this well-moustachioed imperialist was to make life tough for some Afridi rebels�Muslim tribesmen on India�s North-West Frontier, the borderland between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. They had risen against the British Empire, in a region that still shelters some of the world�s most hardened fanatics and terrorists. Then as now, the operation was no picnic.

The Afridis fought back ferociously. Churchill�s hankering for action was answered�and how. It is pretty hair-raising to read his accounts of the engagements: men cut to pieces next to him; tribesmen charging towards him until he shoots them; British infantry scattering in panic, leaving a wounded officer to be carved up on his stretcher by the fanatical Afridis. He was under fire for hour after hour.

On one occasion he blazed away with his pistol, then dropped it and picked up a rifle. He later reported, �I fired 40 rounds with some effect at close quarters. I cannot be certain, but I think I hit four men. At any rate, they fell.� Sometimes he seemed to be positively swanking about the way he exposed himself to fire. �I rode my grey pony all along the skirmish line when everyone else was lying down in cover. Foolish perhaps, but I play for high stakes and given an audience there is no act too daring or too noble.�

He behaved, all in, with the kind of suicidal daring displayed by those 1980s millennialist tribesmen of northern Kenya, who believed that they could ward off bullets by smearing themselves with nut oil. His exploits in Malakand would earn a modern soldier the Victoria Cross, or at least some pretty serious gong. And then he repeated and excelled them.

In 1898, at Omdurman in the Sudan, he took part in the last full cavalry charge by the British army. Once again, Churchill was in the role of colonial suppressor, helping to put down a revolt by Sudanese Muslims who resented British rule and, among other grievances, the attempt by London to abolish the slavery of black Africans. Once again, Jennie had been instrumental in getting him the position as a hybrid soldier-cum-reporter�much to the disgust of the army top brass. This time he was a more important player�a scout who at one point actually told the even more lushly moustachioed General Kitchener the whereabouts of the Sudanese Islamic army.

The objective of the mission was to defeat the Muslim leader, and to avenge the killing of General Charles Gordon�whose frenzied skewering at Khartoum, thirteen years earlier, had shocked the Victorian world. At 8.40 a.m. on 2 September 1898 Churchill found himself riding towards the 60,000-strong Dervish army, admittedly after they had been pounded for an hour or more by British guns. Churchill and his men thought they were taking on a bunch of 150 native spearmen�only to find they were riflemen.

The Dervishes suddenly knelt and started shooting at the detachment of lancers. What could they do? Beat it, or charge? They charged. Churchill had covered about a hundred yards in the direction of the Dervishes when he realised that he was about to rush into a ravine full of �closely packed spearmen�, twelve deep.

What did he do? He kept charging. There was a terrific melee; many of the Dervishes were knocked over like skittles. Churchill fired the ten shots of his Mauser pistol�s magazine and came through without a scratch, either to himself or his horse. Having broken through the ravine, he then trotted around the scene, where Dervishes and British were hacking away at each other.

He �rode up to individuals, firing my pistol in their faces and killing several�three for certain�two doubtful�one very doubtful�. When it is put like this, you might get the impression that these battles were a bit one-sided. After all, we had got the Maxim gun, and they had not.

That is totally to underestimate the risk. Of the 310 men in the charge, 21 had been killed and 49 wounded. As Churchill put it later, it was �the most dangerous two minutes I shall live to see�.

Or was it? He then fought in the Boer War, and came under fire on many occasions from these tough Dutch farmers�who were better shots, and had better weapons, than either the Afridis or the Dervishes. We have no space here to repeat the whole drama of Churchill and the Boers; there have been books on it, not least two of them by Churchill himself.

In summary, he went out as a twenty-four-year-old reporter to this unfortunate war, in which the might of the British Empire was all but humiliated by bearded and glottally challenged characters from the pages of a veld novel by Wilbur Smith. In 1900 he managed to get himself into a colossal scrape that launched him finally on to the front page.

He was taking a train to a place called Colenso, in Natal, when it was ambushed by the enemy and derailed. He then showed great coolness under fire, and disregard for his own safety, in organising resistance. As usual, he was shot at, and as usual he survived as if by a miracle. He was captured and escaped from prison; he jumped on a goods train; he hid in a wood; he was spooked by a vulture; he hid in a coal mine; he emerged to a hero�s welcome at Louren�o Marques in what is now Mozambique.

He later cycled through Pretoria with a price on his head; he was shot at again and very nearly killed at a place called Dewetsdorp; he showed �conspicuous gallantry� at a battle called Diamond Hill�.�.�. I hope I am beginning to make my point.

I could go on: I could add that when he joined the army in 1915, after Gallipoli, he went and served with the troops on the Western Front, and went out into no man�s land thirty-six times, sometimes going so close to the German lines that he could hear them talking. I could tell you about his disregard for the shells and the bullets�but I believe that the reader may be getting the message.

As a young man, and indeed throughout his life, Churchill showed the courage of a lion. How many bullets and other missiles were fired in his general direction? A thousand? How many men did he kill, with his own hand? A dozen? Maybe more. No prime minister since Wellington had seen so much active service, or been so personally homicidal to any inhabitants of the developing world who offered him violence, and to some, no doubt, who did not.

He has the unique distinction, as a prime minister, of having been shot at on four continents. By this stage the sensitive reader may be willing to accept this overwhelming evidence of Churchill�s bravery�but want to know more about the psychology behind it. Why was he like this?

What wound his spring so tight? One of the great joys of Churchill�s character�and one of the reasons for his mental robustness�is that he is capable of great honesty about his motives. He knows that he is playing to the gallery, he tells his mother, as he explains his conduct in Malakand. He needs the audience for the daring and the noble acts�because he has something to prove.

As he admits. �Being in many ways a coward�particularly at school�there is no ambition I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation for personal courage.� The child is father to the man, and gingery young Churchill was a pretty runty sort of kid.

He was not in the team for Harrow football, the violent and hearty game that is a peculiarity of the school. He didn�t even play much cricket, and on one occasion the other boys threw cricket balls at him�and he scarpered and hid in the woods. The memory stuck with him; he felt judged and found wanting by his peers, just as he felt judged and found wanting by Randolph.

As it happens, I think he erred in this self-criticism. He wasn�t a coward as a young schoolboy. He was hellish brave. He was first sent away to school at the age of seven, to the care of a sadistic whacker called Herbert Sneyd-Kynnersley. This man was a High Anglican old perv who used to give the boys twenty strokes of the cane�drawing blood after the third�for the slightest infraction.

Though he was miserably unhappy at the school, Churchill never complained about this barbarism, and indeed it wouldn�t have been exposed had not the family doctor noticed the weals. But you know what young Churchill did?

One day Sneyd-Kynnersley had given him a thrashing for taking some sugar, and Churchill went and got the old boy�s straw hat�and kicked it to pieces. I love him for that. He wasn�t really anything like a coward at school: he may not have been much good at muddy team games, but he was the inter-schools fencing champion. He famously pushed older boys into the swimming pool, and if you want a final proof of his sheer raw courage, as a teenager, I give you the famous occasion when he was playing hare and hounds with his brother and cousin in Dorset.

They trapped him on a bridge, one at either end, and beneath the bridge was a chasm. Then Churchill noticed a fir tree whose top came up to the level of the bridge, and in a second his ingenious mind had conceived a project.

He would leap on to the tree, and slide down, using the branches to slow his descent. Nice idea in theory, disastrous in execution. It was three days before he regained consciousness and three months before he was out of bed.

In that episode we see so many elements of his character�the imagination, the bravado, and the ability to take a decision in a flash. Churchill�s bravery wasn�t something he just put on. It wasn�t a mask he struggled with. He was made like that. The spirit of derring-do just pumped through his veins, like some higher-octane fuel than the one the rest of us run on.

Nothing could stop him, not even that accident in Croydon, where we have rejoined the plane as it fell fast towards the ground. Now it went smack into the runway at 50 mph. The left wing went in first, smashed to pieces, while the propeller was buried in the earth.

Churchill was whacked forward. He was crushed. The pressure seemed unendurable. Streams of petrol shot past him and he thought�again�that he was going to die. But it turned out that the good Captain Scott had turned off the electric current, shortly before he was knocked out.

Churchill got out and vowed that he would never pilot himself in the air again�a vow he kept, more or less, until the middle of the Second World War, when he needed, again, to show what he was made of; and when his general willingness to take the risk of getting in a plane became vital to British resistance.

�

OF COURSE he enjoyed showing off�not just to his mother, or to the press, or to the public, but above all to the person who chronicled his deeds most lovingly and faithfully: himself. Whatever Churchill said or did, he had an eye, like Julius Caesar, to the way he would report it.

But that didn�t make him any less lion hearted. And it was precisely because he was so unambiguously and irrefutably brave that he was able, from 1940, to demand so much bravery from others. Others�Attlee, Eden�had certainly fought in the war; but their reputations were not quite the same.

There was one thing the public could say for certain about Churchill: that there was nothing that he was going to ask the British armed forces to do that he would not have done himself.

And then Churchill had one further advantage over the others. He not only inspired by his personal example and career. He had the gift of language to put heart into people, and to breathe some of his own courage into others.

Aha, I am thinking, as I stand at last in Winston Churchill�s study. So this is how he did it. By special leave of the staff at Chartwell I have come right up to the desk�beyond the rope barrier. I am looking at the very same pair of round black John Lennon-ish Bond Street spectacles that he used; and there are his hole-punches. There is the bust of Napoleon, rather bigger than the bust of Nelson, and there are the paperweights that you see in some of the photographs.

As I stoop to examine the deep scuffing in the right arm of his desk chair�a reminder of the odd way Churchill used to clutch it, perhaps because of his dislocated shoulder�I am politely asked to step back. I think they are worried I am going to test the chair with my weight.

I comply unhesitatingly. I have seen enough.

This is not just an English country house, with a stunning view of the weald of Kent, with fish ponds and croquet lawn and a cinema and painting studio and every civilised amenity that could be devised by a gentleman of leisure. No, no: this much-amended Elizabethan manor is no scene of repose. This is a machine.

It is no wonder that the design of this house proceeded from the same teeming brain that helped invent the tank and the seaplane and which foresaw the atom bomb. Chartwell Manor, Westerham, Kent, was one of the world�s first word processors. The whole house is a gigantic engine for the generation of text.

Downstairs there is a room with green lamps hanging from the ceiling, and maps on the wall, and a telephone exchange: and here he kept his researchers�about six of them at once, junior Oxford dons, research fellows, some of them destined for high academic honours. There they were, filleting, devilling, rootling around in books and documents in search of stuff that might be of use.

They were his Nibelung, his elves, the tinkling dwarves in the smithy of Hephaestus. Or, to compare them with their modern equivalent, they were Winston Churchill�s personal search engine�his Google. When they needed more books, they would pad down the corridor to the library�with its 60,000 mainly leather-bound volumes. This was his data bank. When he needed some fact or text, he would figuratively hit the �execute� key, and summon them; and up they would go�only one at any time. They would go into the study, and there they would find him in the act of composition.

One of the many reasons for feeling overawed by Churchill is that he could not only discharge his duties as a minister of the Crown by day. He would then have a slap-up dinner, with champagne, wine and brandy. Only then, at 10 p.m., refreshed and very jovial, would he begin to write.

�

I KNOW THAT I speak for many journalists�and many others�when I say that it is perfectly possible to write after lunch, even if, or particularly if, you have had a bottle of wine. It is simply not possible to do this after dinner; not after booze. I don�t know anybody else who is capable of knocking out first-class copy after a long day and a drunken dinner.

There must have been something unique in his metabolic pathways; and what makes it even more astonishing is that most of the time he didn�t even write. He dictated. He would gather his thoughts and then, wreathed in tobacco and alcohol�and perhaps wearing his monogrammed slippers and the peculiar mauve velvet siren suit made for him by Turnbull and Asser�he would walk the wooden floorboards and growl out his massively excogitated sentences. And that was barely the beginning of the word-processing system.

Typists would struggle to keep up, but on he jawed, even into the small hours of the night, licking and champing his unlit cigar. Sometimes he would take them with him into his tiny and austere bedroom, and then while they blushed and squeaked he would disrobe and submerge himself in his sunken Shanks bath and continue to prose on, while they sat on the floor and pitter-pattered away on the specially muffled keyboards that he preferred.

The sheaves of typewritten paper he would then correct and amend by hand�and we have innumerable examples of his cursive blue-inked marginalia�and then the results would be typeset as they would appear on the page; and even that was not the end.

Now I pace across the room to an upright sloping bureau that is set against the wall, like a newspaper-reading slab in a club. It was here that he engaged in the final exercise of word-processing, a ritual that we would now perform effortlessly with our Microsoft programmes. He would fiddle with the text. He would switch clauses around for emphasis, he would swap one epithet for another and in general he would take the utmost delight in the process of polishing his efforts; and then he would send the whole lot off to be typeset again.

It was a fantastically expensive method of working, and yet it enabled Churchill to produce not just more words than Dickens, or more words than Shakespeare�but more words than Dickens and Shakespeare combined. Go into so many respectable middle-class English homes, especially of the older generation, and you will see them there, bulking out the bookshelves next to the Encyclopaedia Britannica: The World Crisis; A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; The Second World War; Marlborough�His Life and Times, and many others�and then ask yourself which ones have actually been read.

There are some people�faced with this vast quantity of text�who may be tempted to dismiss or downplay the virtuosity of Churchill as a writer. Indeed, he has always had his detractors. Evelyn Waugh, that inveterate Churchill-basher, said he was a �master of sham-Augustan prose�, with �no specific literary talent but a gift of lucid self-expression�. After reading Churchill�s life of his father Randolph, Waugh dismissed it as a �shifty barrister�s case, not a work of literature�.

By the late 1960s his historical gifts were being pummelled by the likes of J. H. Plumb, the Cambridge University pioneer of �social history�. �There is no discussion of the labouring classes and industrial technology,� complained Plumb of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. �He had an ignorance of economic, social and intellectual history of staggering proportions.� His prose style was �curiously old-fashioned and somewhat out of place, like St Patrick�s cathedral on 5th avenue�.

As for his amazing achievement in winning the Nobel prize for literature, it is conventional to treat this as a joke�an embarrassing attempt by the Swedes to make up for their neutrality in the war. Even relatively sympathetic historians, such as Peter Clarke, have dismissed the possibility that there was any merit involved. �Rarely can an author�s writings have received less attention than those of the winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1953,� he says. This is not just a little bit snooty, but surely untrue.

Look at the list of Nobel winners in the last century. Avant-garde Japanese playwrights. Marxist-feminist Latin Americans. Polish exponents of the concrete poem. All of them are no doubt meritorious in their way, but many of them are much less read than Churchill.

Why did Evelyn Waugh sneer at Churchill�s writings? Notice that he�Waugh�had actually tried to emulate Churchill in the 1930s, and got himself sent out to cover a war in Abyssinia. He produced Scoop, of course, one of the great stylistic landmarks of the twentieth century. But his reporting had nothing like the same journalistic impact as Churchill�s.

Is it that Waugh was a teensy bit jealous? I think so; and the reason was not just that Churchill had become so much more famous than Waugh had been, by the time he was twenty-five, but that he had made such stupendous sums from writing. And that, for most journalists, alas, is the truly sensitive point of comparison.

By 1900 he had not only written five books�some of which had been best-sellers�but he had become just about the highest-paid journalist in Britain. For his Boer War coverage he was paid �250 per month�the equivalent of �10,000 a month today. He was commissioned to write the life of his father in 1903, and given a staggering payment of �8,000. To give you the scale of those riches, consider that there were then only a million people in the country who had the privilege of paying income tax, and that was because they earned �160 per year.

These publishers didn�t pay him this kind of money because they liked his blue eyes. They paid him handsomely because he was popular with the public, and helped boost circulation, and the reason he was popular was that he wrote so well, with a rich and rollicking readability. He was a superb reporter. Try this account from the Morning Post of April 1900.

We take up the story as Churchill and his fellow mounted scouts are trying to beat the Boers to secure a kopje, a rocky outcrop in the South African plain.

We join our hero on his feet in the House of Commons. He�s rhythmically thumping out a speech he will never forget. It�s an occasion that will be imprinted in his memory�the time he found a new way to leave his listeners breathless and stunned.

It is 22 April 1904, and the young thruster is at the top of his game. He is twenty-nine, pink in the cheek, with a downy corona of gingery-brown hair still adhering to his head. He almost bursts with brio. This year alone he has spoken dozens of times, yo-yoing up and down to catch the eye of the Speaker on debates ranging from the Army Estimates to the Brussels Sugar Convention to Chinese Indentured Labour; and he is starting to get a bit of a name.

His portrait has been regularly published in the papers, complete with admiring captions. He is seen pounding his fist into his palm, or with hands on hips, or making his famous double-handed chopping motion�and with his impudent attacks on his own party, and with the Tories seemingly swirling towards the electoral oubliette, he is a man on the up. The Liberals are about to find him a seat; he scents the prospect of office�.�.�.

So he slashes away at the Tories on the benches in front of him�as an energetic rambler might thwack a row of thistles gone to seed. The Tories are a �sham�, he says. They have forgotten the precepts of Tory Democracy, he tells Balfour, who has already spoken in the debate�and one can imagine Balfour listening and looking inscrutable from beneath his vulturine eyelids.

Around him the Tories are hissing and scratching and fitfully trying to put him off his stroke. It is the Labour benches which are cheering him�and not surprisingly, in view of the kind of thing he is saying.

This isn�t anything a Tory would today recognise as Conservatism. It would send Margaret Thatcher wild. In fact there isn�t even a modern Labour government that would agree to the kind of thing that Churchill seems to be advocating. He is making a case to allow big groups of striking workers to go to the homes of those who are not on strike�and effectively to bully them into joining in. He wants unions to be protected from legal action, so that they can�t be fined even if their members break the law in the course of their agitations.

It�s not so much socialism as neo-anarcho-syndicalism�though before any of today�s Tories get too upset, they should remember the context: Churchill was speaking when poverty was far deeper, and when the working man could still suffer oppression at the hands of the bosses, of a kind that is unknown today. Churchill has been going for forty-five minutes, and going well.

He comes to the climax of his remarks, and lambasts the entire House of Commons for its flagrant lack of proper class representation. Where are the working men? demands this scion of Blenheim. Look at the influence of the company directors, the learned professions, the service members, the railway, landed and liquor interests, he says�and we can imagine his ducal arm sweeping round to take in the balefully staring Tories.

It must be admitted, he says, that the influence of the labouring classes is ludicrously small. �And it rests with those who�.�.�.� he says; and then he stops.

A few eyes turn enquiringly his way. With whom does it rest? What is it that rests? What rests on whom? The House waits.

A whole second elapses. Churchill tries again. �It rests with those who�.�.�.� But by now it is clear that something is up.

It seems he is the victim, ironically, of some kind of mental sabotage�a sudden wildcat industrial action in his memory.

In the vast cargo hold of his brain the baggage handlers have gone on strike. The conveyor belt of his tongue flaps vacantly. No words come out. He tries again, but it is no use. He can�t for the life of him remember what he was going to say next.

For three whole minutes he stands there, while the Tories cachinnate, and the opposition benches try to make noises of sympathy. Three minutes! The House of Commons at the best of times is an unforgiving ecosystem: lose your way for just a few seconds, and you will feel the scorn of the Chamber. By now Churchill has been unable to pronounce a word for longer than you have been reading this chapter.

This is disaster, a living death. People are starting to whisper and look at the floor. This is what happened to Randolph, they say; poor young chap, going the way of his father�overwhelmed by a horrible premature senility. At last he sits down. �I thank the House for having listened to me,� he says in despair, and covers his head with his hands.

The following day the papers are full of Mr Churchill�s shipwreck, and a famous nerve specialist is called upon to diagnose the cause. It is a case, says the doctor, of �defective cerebration�. Well, there can�t be a person in the world who hasn�t at some time suffered from defective cerebration�a useful-sounding disorder�but that wasn�t really the problem with Winston Churchill that day.

If we have one unshakeable and instinctive conviction about him, it is that he was the greatest public speaker of the last hundred years; definitely the greatest orator Britain has produced, and perhaps even knocking Martin Luther King off the global number-one spot. He is the only politician whose speeches and speaking style can still be parodied by people of all ages.

Ah, Churchill! we say, and we jut our chins and recite something, in that familiar sing-song growl, about fighting them on the beaches. He stands in relation to oratory as Shakespeare stands to the writing of plays: the top performer, a mixture of Pericles and Abraham Lincoln with a small but irrefutable dash of Les Dawson.

We think of him as somehow supernaturally gifted, as if he had sprung from a union of Zeus and Polyhymnia the very Muse of Rhetoric. I am afraid we are only partly right.

The truth is that he was a genius in his own way, but he wasn�t really a natural. He was no Lloyd George; he was no Luther King, at least in the sense that he could not improvise as some born speakers can; and when he spoke it certainly did not pour from his full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Churchill�s speeches were a triumph of effort, and preparation, in which phrases were revised and licked into shape as a she-bear licks her cubs. Dancing before him like a will-o�-the-wisp was always the ghostly luminescence of his father�s reputation, and as he grows up we can feel him straining and yearning in emulation.

We catch him at Harrow, speaking up noisily in a debate with senior boys. As a Sandhurst subaltern, he makes a passionate defence of the right of some prostitutes to frequent the bar of the Empire in Leicester Square. �Ladies of the Empire,� says the nineteen-year-old virgin, rising on a stool amid his guffawing comrades, �I stand for liberty!�

It is not immediately obvious why this subject�the freedom of prostitutes to ply their trade�should have prompted the first public speech by Britain�s greatest statesman.

There is no evidence of any reward for his intervention, carnal or otherwise. The answer is surely that it was a jape. He wanted to draw attention to himself�and he succeeded. The speech was reported in the papers.

By the age of twenty-three he thought himself a sufficiently experienced orator to write an essay on the subject called �The Scaffolding of Rhetoric�. This is a splendidly portentous and self-confident document�never published in his lifetime�in which he seems to be analysing what he obviously considers to be his own success. �Sometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience,� he says�a point that may not be unconnected with his lisp, and what he claimed was an obstructive ligament in his tongue, unknown to the anatomy of any other human being.

He goes on to describe the effects of his prescribed methods on the human herd: �The cheers become louder and more frequent; the enthusiasm momentarily increases; until they are convulsed by emotions they are unable to control and shaken by passions of which they have resigned all direction.� That is certainly a trick that some orators have been able to perform. That was the skill that fate had given his greatest adversary�the German dictator against whom he would have to wage rhetorical war in 1940 and beyond.

But was it really Churchill�s skill? Did his audience quiver like aspens? Were they convulsed by emotions they were unable to control? His maiden speech in the Commons is generally held to have been a success; and yet at least one observer thought he looked a bit weedy��scholarly and limp�. People inevitably drew comparisons with Randolph, and they were not always kind.

�Mr Churchill does not inherit his father�s voice�save for the slight lisp�or his father�s manner. Accent, address, appearance do not help him,� said one review. Another journalist noted, in an essentially friendly piece, that �Mr Churchill and oratory are not neighbours yet. Nor do I think it likely they ever will be.�

This kind of criticism was perhaps frustrating for Churchill. He took enormous pride in his speeches, and in his novel Savrola�written when he was in India�he paints a gloriously self-aggrandising picture of his (aka Savrola�s) methods of composition.

It is not raining in London 94 per cent of the time. This, alas, is not one of those times. I am soaked. My blue suit is black and shiny with water and there is a sucking noise in my shoes as I get off my bike and enter the impressive Portland stone gateway.

All the way up the Romford Road I have cycled, through neighbourhoods whose languages and culture have changed a bit since Churchill came this way�past mosques and shops selling saris and kebabs and all the paraphernalia that goes with mobile phones. I am here at the burial-grounds of the City of London, at Wanstead.

�I have come to find a grave,� I tell them at the gate. They assure me I have plenty of choice. �Dame Anna Neagle�s buried here,� says the chap in the peaked cap, helpfully. �And Sir Bobby Moore, and a couple of Jack the Ripper�s victims.� And so are thousands of others.

As far as the eye can see there are the tombs and monuments of the Victorians in marble and porphyry and granite. The names have been in some cases eroded by time and sulphurous rain, and for a few minutes I worry that this is going to be one of those airport car park nightmares, and that I will spend hours pacing the well-kept paths, and getting wetter and wetter.

And then I see it�or a grave exactly matching the description. I squelch towards it over the grass, and yes, surely this is it: a simple cross on a square plinth, and before it a rectangle of freshly tilled earth and a couple of alliums. It occurs to me that someone has been looking after it, a bit. I lean down to read the name at the foot of the plinth.

Winston Spencer Churchill, it says.

Except, of course, that it isn�t Churchill�s body mouldering underneath. He�s somewhere else�at Bladon in Oxfordshire. This is the resting-place of someone he is said to have loved very dearly indeed.

I stand for a moment. It has stopped raining, and drops are falling slowly from the chestnut trees above. I brood on the person below, and her passionate relationship with Churchill; and Churchill�s feelings for her.

I am here on a mission, to try to answer the important question about any famous person; the key question, in fact, about any human being. In Churchill�s case the question is critical, because there are so many people (and by no means just politicians or journalists) who have secretly or openly regarded his life as the pattern, example, inspiration and role model for their own. That is why we need to dig into his essential nature.

One night I was explaining Churchill to some friends: his bravery, his genius for language, his indomitable energy. �Yes,� said one friend, leaning back in a languid way, �but what do you think he was like to meet? I mean: was he a nice guy?�

Well, I can tell you about what he was like to meet�because a few months previously I had virtually met him.

�

AS SOON AS I walked into the Churchill archive in Cambridge I bit back a yelp of alarm. Allen Packwood, the director, was there to greet me, and he seemed to be holding out an artificial hand. Manners, of course, got the better of me, and I shook his prosthesis; and then I realised that it was made of bronze.

�You have just shaken the hand of Winston Churchill,� he said. I examined the cast, and was struck by how dainty it seemed. The fingers were shapely, but not long or large. This was the hand that so fiercely swung polo mallets until the age of fifty-two, that fired Mausers, that steered seaplanes, that pulled apart the barbed wire of no man�s land.

This was the hand that signed the paper that felled the city, five sovereign fingers that put a regime to death. �He had small hands,� confirmed Allen. I would say that Churchill�s hands were about the same size as his mother�s�and if you doubt me, have a look at the cast of Jennie�s hand in a glass case at Chartwell. Churchill�s hands look rather finer.

�And they were very pink,� said Allen, �because he liked baths so much.� It wasn�t just that his hands were small. We all know that statue in Parliament Square, of Churchill hunched forward with his stick. You have the impression of a physical colossus with raking arms and bison-like shoulders. In fact Martin Gilbert says he was 5 foot 8, while other authorities�William Manchester, Norman Rose�say he was at best 5 foot 6�.

There are some photos of him walking across Horse Guards�leg swinging in his butler�s trousers�and I swear there is a touch of the Tom Cruise about the heel. When I told Andrew Roberts, that most eminent Churchillian, of Churchill�s vertical sub-eminence, he was not entirely surprised. �I knew we would have seen eye to eye!� he exclaimed.

Who else was 5 foot 6 or under? Some of the biggest tyrants and creeps in world history: Augustus (5 foot 6), Napoleon (ditto), Mussolini (ditto), Stalin (teensy at 5 foot 4). Hitler was only 5 foot 8. All these characters have been associated with the over-compensatory aggression that is sometimes referred to as �short man� syndrome; and there is some evidence, at least on the face of it, that Churchill suffered from this, too.

He could certainly be�how shall we say�short with people. Roberts has daringly observed that, of the two men, Hitler was probably kinder and more solicitous to his staff. Churchill would not only keep them up all night while he dictated; he could get quite testy if they got things wrong. �Where were you educated?� he would shout. �Why don�t you read a book?�

Mind you, he didn�t only shout at underlings. We have a description of him from the 1920s, marching about Baldwin�s room during a dispute with Neville Chamberlain, ranting and shaking his fist. Let us therefore now assemble the whole case against his character. Let us follow the example of the modern showboating district attorney, and create a kind of insinuating hodge-podge or collage of all the evidence�trivial or otherwise.

The case against him is that he was not only the greatest man of modern British history but also, in his own sweet way, something of a tosser in his treatment of others.

Here are the things that his enemies (and sometimes his friends) would say, and the reasons they gave for saying them. They said that he behaved like a spoilt child; and we must accept that he was used to getting his way�and from a very early age. Read the emetic and manipulative letters he writes to his mother at the age of twelve, begging her to let him go to see Buffalo Bill.

So let us pause now outside the Temple of Artemis, and adopt the sibilant whisper of a TV naturalist. We have come at the height of August to the vast and rolling park of Blenheim Palace, a noted breeding-ground for the English aristocracy. A light summer shower is falling. It is mid-morning. Inside that graceful little Ionic-porticoed temple the time-honoured mating ritual is coming, in theory, to its climax.

Sitting on the bench at the back are Winston Churchill, thirty-three, President of the Board of Trade, and a lovely female with large dark eyes, called Clementine Hozier. Notice how carefully the male has chosen the location: the palace, to display the wealth and power of his family, and the genes he has to offer; the view of the lake, to inspire feelings of romance; a scrunchy gravel path on either side, to alert him to anyone who might be coming.

Any minute now he is going to pop the question. Clementine is surely aware of the significance of the temple: Artemis is the virgin goddess of hunting, and here the virgin has been brought to bay.

Let us tiptoe over the moss behind the building, and see whether we can hear what they are saying. Shhh.

Churchill appears to be talking�.�.�. and talking. The female is still sitting with her eyes downcast. In fact, she is looking not at the animated face of the male, but at a beetle on the floor. She is watching the beetle as it moves slowly from one crack in the flagstone to the next�and she is wondering, frankly, whether Churchill is ever going to get to the point. Churchill has had her on his own, in the temple, for half an hour�and still he hasn�t summoned up the courage to blurt it out.

Any biologist studying the romantic life of Winston Churchill might conclude that he makes the courtship of the giant panda look positively rash and impetuous. He first met Clementine four years ago, and made a not wholly favourable impression. He met her more recently, and things went swimmingly�and now he has sent her letters that make it pretty clear what he has in mind for her. He has plotted it all out, as he plots out so much in his life.

Five days ago, on 7 August 1908, he wrote to invite her to Blenheim, and he dropped a hint that no one could miss. �I want so much to show you that beautiful place and in its gardens we shall find lots of places to talk in, and lots of things to talk about.� The next day he writes another letter, explaining which train she should catch, and refers to �those strange mysterious eyes of yours whose secret I have been trying so hard to learn�.

He goes on to warn her, with tactical self-deprecation, that he has difficulties with girls, being �stupid and clumsy in that relation and naturally quite self-reliant and self-contained�. By that path, he admits, he has managed to �arrive at loneliness��.�.�. HINT! HINT! Clementine is being clearly given to understand�by all the forms and conventions of Edwardian England, where premarital sex was a no-no for respectable girls�that she is going to be made an offer.

Well, she has been here in Blenheim for three days, and nothing has happened. Churchill has not lunged; he has not pounced; he has not even coughed as they sat on the sofa, and suddenly draped an arm round her lovely shoulders. Poor thing, we feel: she must be starting to wonder whether she has failed some unspoken exam. Now is the morning when she has to leave, and Churchill has not even got out of bed. In fact (though she doesn�t know this) his cousin the Duke of Marlborough himself has had to go into Churchill�s room in order to rouse him, and tell him firmly that if he wants to propose to this girl, he had better get up and get a move on.

So at 11 a.m. Churchill has finally found her, and they have walked through the formal gardens, with their neatly shaven bushes and nude Greek statuary; they have turned left and wandered past the boathouse, where the water laps musically under the jetty. They have passed all sorts of bowery corners and bosky nooks of a kind that might have been specifically designed to prompt a marriage proposal.

Now they have been secluded in this temple for what must seem to the young woman to be an agonisingly long time�and still no action. She later describes watching that beetle, moving as slowly as Churchill himself. �I thought to myself, �If that beetle reaches that crack, and Winston hasn�t proposed, he�s not going to.�� There were plenty of people who would have put money on the beetle.

If you go behind the Temple of Diana (or Artemis) today, you will find graffiti from those who have more recently enjoyed its tranquillity. Someone has charmingly inscribed a swastika, but there are a few love hearts. I bet �Dave� didn�t sit for half an hour before announcing his feelings for �Sarah�. Knowing us British, I expect this has been the scene of quite a lot of alfresco lovemaking�and those happy fornicators would perhaps be mildly puzzled to hear of Churchill�s technique.

Some people have gone so far as to claim that there is no evidence that by the age of thirty-four Churchill had even lost his virginity; and they suggest that this may perhaps help to explain his bashfulness in the temple. There has long been a widely held view that women, or at least sexual relations with women, were less important to Churchill than they are to some other world leaders, or that he had fewer notches on his bedpost than you might expect for a man whose appetites�for praise, food, drink, cigars, excitement, etc.�were generally so titanic. By the time of his engagement one newspaper had already described him as a �confirmed bachelor�; which didn�t carry quite the implication it has these days, but reflected the way he was seen.

�I always hear that no one can nail Winston down to any particular lady,� one woman wrote to Lloyd George, �and the opinion is that �he is not a lady�s man��.�.�. and that he had a rather curious way of looking at a woman. Winston would become a million times more popular if it could be thought that he cared enough for some woman to risk even a little discomfort for her sake. Perhaps it will come but I doubt it.�

Was he sexist? One group of women who certainly felt that he looked at them in a curious way were the suffragettes. �You brute!� cried prominent suffragette Theresa Garnett as she attacked him with a dog whip. �Why don�t you treat women properly?� The suffragettes could not forgive his early opposition to their cause. They punched him, knocked him to the ground, and mercilessly heckled and interrupted his speeches, sometimes by ringing bells as he reached his perorations.

Churchill responded with unvarying politeness; and most people now accept that he was a bit hard done by. His initial reservations about female suffrage appear to have been motivated not so much by male chauvinism as by a straight calculation: that polling evidence suggested women would tend to vote Tory. In any case, he eventually changed his tune, and in 1917 he supported the extension of the franchise to all women over thirty.

Nor do most historians now accept the picture of Churchill as some sort of asexual Edward Heath-like character; in fact, the notion is utter nonsense. All his life he loved the company of women, appreciated their beauty, sought them out and tried to show off to them. Even in his mid-seventies we find him doing somersaults in the sea in the south of France, and hoping to impress some Hollywood starlet�slightly to the irritation of Clementine.

For a man who is supposed not to have been much interested, he has a long list of youthful dalliances and entanglements of one kind or other. There is �the beautiful Polly Hacket�, who appears when he is eighteen. They go for walks in the park and he gives her a packet of sugar plums�who are you calling unromantic, eh?

Then he pursues a showgirl of some description called Mabel Love�though history is blushingly silent on what happened between them. He falls head over heels in love with Pamela Plowden, the daughter of the Resident at Hyderabad, and declares she is �the most beautiful girl I have ever seen�. He takes her on an elephant; does all the right things�it is hardly his fault if she turns him down.

He has a bit of a thing with a married woman called Ettie Grenfell. He makes advances towards Ethel Barrymore, of the showbiz dynasty. He pursues one Muriel Wilson, and spends a week driving around France with her; and then there is the romance with Violet Asquith, who seems to have fallen more or less in love with him, and whose feelings were so strong that he needed to go up to see her, at Slains castle in Scotland, and propitiate her only two weeks before his marriage to Clementine (perhaps because he feared that there would be political consequences from treating her badly: he depended on her father for promotion, after all).

There are some who now think his relationship with Violet was much more significant, and physical, than has been previously allowed. Who knows what really happened between them? Or between Churchill and the others, and women whose names we don�t even know? And frankly who cares?

There are all sorts of reasons why Churchill was not held by his contemporaries to be a modern Casanova, but the most obvious is surely that he was too darned busy. In habits he superficially resembled a Bertie Wooster figure�rising late, living on his own in a flat, smoking cigars with cronies in clubs, surrounded by lissom and intelligent girls who never quite count as girlfriends, and with his devoted secretary Eddie Marsh hovering around like Jeeves. But in industry and output he is the polar opposite. (You will recall Bertie Wooster�s credentials as a journalist rested entirely on a single article on �What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing� that once appeared in the periodical edited by his Aunt Dahlia called Milady�s Boudoir.)

Churchill had written five books, and become a Member of Parliament, and reported from multiple war zones, and written innumerable articles, and given many well-paid lectures, by the time he was twenty-five. He was one of the half-dozen youngest people ever to hold cabinet rank. When he sat down on that bench with Clementine, he was already the author of millions of published words, many of them popularly and critically acclaimed. The miracle is that he found any time to see girls at all.

Read his correspondence, and you will find all sorts of tantalising clues about his early romantic career�what does Pamela Plowden mean when she writes in 1940 to congratulate him on the premiership, by referring back fondly to �our days of hansom cabs�? Was he Not Safe In Taxis? But in the end such speculations are not only impertinent; they are irrelevant. All that matters is that Churchill beat the beetle; he proposed to Clementine, and, as he put it, they �lived happily ever after�.

Clementine was twenty-two; her background was relatively impoverished and a little bit rackety�in the sense that her mother, Lady Blanche Hozier, had enjoyed so many extramarital amours that Clementine was not entirely sure as to the identity of her father. Clementine had been engaged three times before, and though many newspapers commented on her beauty, her rival Violet Asquith was prepared to be splendidly bitchy about her other qualities.

Here is the seething Violet, writing about the impending marriage to a friend:

It is the end of July 1940. The British position is absolutely desperate. The last of the British Expeditionary Force has long since scuttled from France. The Germans are in the process of trying to destroy the RAF. Churchill is up inspecting the defences of Hartlepool�a town that had famously been shelled by German ships in the Great War.

He stops in front of a British soldier equipped with an American-made weapon�a 1928 Thompson SMG, or submachine gun. Churchill plucks it out of the soldier�s hands, barrel first. He holds the gun, muzzle thrust down and forward, as if he is on patrol on the British coast. He turns to face the camera�and the resulting picture becomes one of the great images of his will to resist.

In fact, the photograph is so strong and arresting that it becomes a propaganda hit for both sides. Goebbels immediately reprinted Churchill and the tommy gun in leaflets that accused him of being a war criminal and gangster�a man who loved personally to flourish the very same killing machine as Al Capone.

The British used it, too, though with the tin-hatted soldiers cropped out�and in the British case the propaganda message was rather different. Yes, says the picture (which can be bought on all sorts of mugs and tea towels and posters to this day): our war effort is indeed being led by a civilian of advancing years, a man who is so outlandish in his garb that he is still wearing a tall �Cambridge� bowler hat, a titfer he bought at Lock�s of St James�s in 1919�they still have the record�and which went out of fashion years ago.

Yes, he has the same taste in headgear as Stan Laurel, and yes he wears spotty bow ties and pinstriped suits and looks like a country solicitor. But I tell you what�that poster informs the viewer�this man Churchill has fired a gun many times. He knows how to cock it and load it.

He knows the business end of a tommy gun, and he knows how to shoot. To use an overused word, there is something iconic about that shot, because in 1940 Churchill was in the process of becoming an icon�almost literally.

He was transmogrifying himself into the spirit of the nation, the very emblem of defiance. Consider those round-cheeked features, the hint of merriment in the upturned lip, the frank gaze of the eyes. He has channelled that portly gentleman who for two centuries or more has embodied the truculent-but-jovial response of the British to any great continental combination. He has become John Bull, and he shares many obvious qualities with that eighteenth-century personification of England�most familiar from prints and propaganda of the Napoleonic era.

He is fat, jolly, high-living, rumbustious�and patriotic to a degree that many have always considered hyperbolical and unnecessary, but which now, in the present crisis, seems utterly right. It is impossible to imagine any of his rivals achieving this feat�not Halifax, Chamberlain, Stafford Cripps, Eden, Attlee�none of them.

No other leading British politician of the day could have toted that tommy gun and got away with it (and indeed, it is still a golden rule of all political photo-opportunities: �don�t touch the gun!� the image-makers hiss). None of them had the requisite swagger, and none of them had the colour, the contour, the charisma, the cut-through of the Churchillian personality.

To lead the country in time of war, to keep people together at a moment of profound anxiety, you need to �connect� with them�to use more modern political jargon�in a deep and emotional way. It was not enough to appeal to the logic of defiance. He couldn�t just exhort them to be brave.

He needed to engage their attention, to cheer them, to boost them; if necessary even to make them laugh and, better still, to laugh at their enemies. To move the British people, he needed at some level to identify with them�with those aspects of their character that he, and they, conceived to be elemental to the national psyche.

What are the key attributes of the Brits�at least in our own not-quite-so-humble opinion? Well, we think we have a great sense of humour, unlike some other countries we could mention. Ever since Shakespeare put that chauvinistic drinking-song into the mouth of Iago and Cassio, we have fancied our ability to drink your Hollander under the table, your Dane dead drunk, and so on. The British tend to be a bit suspicious of people who are inordinately thin (and we are now the second-fattest nation on earth); and in general we think of Britain as the natural homeland of the eccentric, the oddball and the individualist.

All four of these traits Churchill covered under the capacious bowler hat of his own personality. The interesting question, when we consider his role in 1940, was how far he confected that identity. Did it all just happen with complete and unconscious spontaneity? Or was he really the most brilliant self-image-maker and spin-doctor of them all?

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. One of the things we believe about Churchill today was that he was John Bull-ish in his irreverence, in his deployment of wit�often barbed wit.

There are any number of anecdotes that appear to illustrate his bluff, hilarious and mordant manner. They cling to him like burrs. Many of them, alas, are not provably true�or certainly not true of Winston Churchill.

Take the one about the time he was sitting next to a clean-living Methodist bishop�at a reception, allegedly, in Canada�when a good-looking young waitress came up and offered them both a glass of sherry from a tray. Churchill took one. But the bishop said, �Young lady, I would rather commit adultery than take an intoxicating beverage.�

At which point Churchill beckoned the girl, and said, �Come back, lassie, I didn�t know we had a choice.� Perhaps I am wrong, but that feels to me less like a true story about Churchill, and more like some after-dinner anecdote from the pages of The Funster�s Friend�pinned on Churchill in the hope of making it more amusing.

Such accounts are mainly of interest because of the light they cast on his image�on the fact that people have thought Churchill the right sort of person to fit the story. Some of them could only be about Churchill, but are still dubious�like the yarn about the special sheaths that had to be fitted to the muzzles of the rifles of British troops about to be sent to the Arctic. These were made by a condom manufacturer, and were 10� inches long. Churchill is said to have inspected the consignment and called for fresh labels. �I want every box, every carton, every packet saying, British. Size: medium. That will show the Nazis, if ever they recover them, who is the master race.� I apologise for retailing this sort of stuff�but there are many more out there in the same vein.

Sometimes modern scholarship has been able to dismiss claims of Churchillian paternity, even of the ones that have long been thought to bear his stamp. For years I have treasured that one about Nancy Astor, a Virginia-born lady of pronounced views who became Britain�s first female MP and spent much of the 1930s saying that Hitler was an all-round stand-up guy.

�Winston,� she is supposed to have said to him, �if I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee.� �Nancy,� Churchill is alleged to have replied to her, �if I were your husband I would drink it.� Alas, Churchill almost certainly never made this brilliant remark, or if he did, he had swiped it from someone else.

Martin Gilbert attributed the gag not to Churchill but to his great friend F. E. Smith�and then further researches spoilt the thing entirely by tracking it down to a 1900 edition of the Chicago Tribune, where it appeared in a joke-of-the-day column. Did the young Churchill somehow spot it that year, on his trip to America, and squirrel it away for use on Nancy Astor? I doubt it. Did someone simply recycle the joke, and decide that to be properly funny it needed to be put plausibly in the mouths of some famous people? Much more likely.

Again, I always believed�in fact, I think I heard it from my parents�that Churchill had once ticked off a pompous civil servant who objected to the use of prepositions at the end of sentences. �This is the kind of English up with which I will not put,� Churchill is meant to have said.

Except that he didn�t. It turns out to have been a joke that was published in the Strand magazine, ascribed to no one in particular�but was thought so good that it should be put in the mouth of Churchill. Nor did he say that �In the future, the fascists will call themselves anti-fascists�. Doubtless a profound remark, depending on your view of politics�but it is not one of Churchill�s.

Nor�and I almost cried when I discovered that this one wasn�t true�did he ever say, of his relations with the exhausting and almost intolerable de Gaulle, �The hardest cross I have had to bear has been the Cross of Lorraine.� It was actually said by General Spears, Churchill�s envoy to France. But who ever remembers General Spears?

Then there is the beautiful put-down of G. B. Shaw, who sent him two tickets for a first night of one of his plays with the message that he should �bring a friend, if you have one�. Churchill got the ball back over the net by saying that he couldn�t make the first night, but would come to the second �if there is one�.

Except that he didn�t, because the omniscient Allen Packwood of Cambridge has found letters from both Shaw and Churchill�unanimously denying it.

Like some hyper-gravitational astral body, it is Churchill who magically claims the joke�when it turns out he never cracked it at all. Which has led some to wonder�mistakenly, in my view�whether he was really as fertile in humour as all that.

You could develop this line of thought, if you chose, and observe that his habits were not completely Falstaffian. He did indeed drink whisky and water from very early in the morning�but his daughter once pointed out that it was a very weak whisky indeed; just a splash of Johnnie Walker at the bottom of the glass, more of a �mouthwash�, as he said, than a proper drink.

As for his cigars, his valet and many others testify that he very rarely smoked them all the way through�generally leaving at least a third or a half in the ashtray. He understood perfectly well that they were not just tobacco; they were part of his brand. On the way to make his speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, he called for the car to stop as they neared their destination. He patted his pockets, pulled out a cigar and popped it, unlit, into his mouth.

�Never forget your trademark,� he growled in his trademark growl. Far from being a dissolute Toby Belch, he showed�in his own way�remarkable personal discipline. He worked out with dumb-bells. In the dispatching of business he was more phenomenally industrious than anyone you have ever known. All of which suggests again, perhaps, that the more exuberant sides of his personality contained an element of calculated exaggeration�something a little bit borrowed, like the V for Victory sign that he took from occupied Europe, where it was scrawled by anti-Nazis on buildings and stood for �vrijheid� or freedom.

Was Churchill a poseur? No, though everybody to some extent acts out the identity they have assigned themselves. 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�. And yes, whichever way you look at it, his potations were epic. 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. He did once give up spirits (but not if diluted) for a year in 1936, for the sake of a wager; but that did not impede his consumption of other forms of alcohol on a scale that�in the words of his Private Secretary�would have felled a lesser human being.

Nor did he just wave his cigars around for effect, like some vain and Freudian accoutrement of masculine power. According to his secretary, he smoked between eight and ten large Cuban cigars a day. Even if he left a few inches unburned�and the ends were generally collected and stuffed in the pipe of the gardener at Chartwell�that is still a lot of cigars: about three thousand a year, it has been estimated, or 250,000 over his lifetime.

In spite of all this he managed to get into his eighties with a blood pressure of 140/80. It is as if his body was itself a physical symbol of the nation�s ability to soak up punishment. Talk about Falstaffian behaviour: there is a gripping description of what it was like to watch Churchill eating in his own home, by a man who came to interview him at Chartwell. He wanted everything at once, in no particular order. He would eat a forkful of steak and kidney pie, then puff on a cigar, then gobble a chocolate, then gulp some brandy, then have another forkful of meat�and talking all the while.

As for his sense of humour, and his witticisms, well, the wonder of it really is how many of the stories turn out to be completely true. That is why so many apocryphal stories have been ascribed to Churchill�because the pearl of ornament has formed about the grit of truth; more than a grit�a boulder.

There are so many true stories about Churchill�s behaviour that the false ones have been opportunistically added, by skilled forgers, in the knowledge that it can be hard sometimes to tell which is which. 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.� That seems to our taste almost unforgivably brutal; but serve her right for being so personal. Anyway, he wasn�t completely sloshed, said his bodyguard, Ron Golding, who confirmed the story; just a bit �wobbly�. And it is all the better for being an instant reply.

F. E. Smith once said: �Churchill has spent the best years of his life preparing his impromptu remarks.� This one just popped out, and has earned its place, I see, at number one in a Daily Express survey of the greatest insults in history.

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.

Again, we see his love of chiasmus�or reversing the word order in an unexpected way: like �beginning of the end/end of the beginning�, or �I am ready to meet my maker; whether my maker is ready for the great ordeal of meeting me is another question�; �we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us�; �I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me�; and there are many others.

Sometimes I have been tempted to dismiss a story as being surely apocryphal�only to discover that it really is true. He did say that. Take the yarn about the time he was on a lecture tour in America, and 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. You can�t argue with that.

Churchill�s humour is both conceptual and verbal. He not only used his colossal English vocabulary, but is also responsible for some of the greatest Franglais of all time. 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 not just a �sheep in sheep�s clothing�. One day he went farther, with an attack that ranks in the great tradition of parliamentary invective, an insult of which his father Randolph would have been proud.

Adolf Hitler was so impressed by photographs of the Midland Hotel, Manchester, that he decided it would be the perfect Nazi headquarters in Britain�once Britain had been brought to her knees, and the ruling classes either shot or led off in chains. It is indeed a very fine establishment: a vast ruddy brick fantasy of Edwardian Gothic, with 312 rooms and en suite bathrooms and Michelin-starred restaurants and health suites and Teasmades. I have stayed there several times myself, and used the excellent room service in the small hours. The full English breakfast will keep you going all day.

The hotel was also, once, the temporary address of Winston Churchill. It was here that he came in 1906, when he was fighting for the constituency of Manchester North-West, and here that he hung his hat. Those were the days, you see, when there was no moral pressure on MPs to have a �home� in the constituency; and even in those days�perhaps particularly in those days�the Midland Hotel was the ne plus ultra of luxury. It was just three years old, and had cost �1 million to build; it had its own auditorium, and it made a hell of a contrast with some of the areas of Manchester that the thirty-one-year-old Churchill proposed to represent.

One cold winter evening he sauntered out in the company of his faithful secretary, Eddie Marsh. They found themselves in a slum, not far from the Midland, and Churchill discharged himself of the following aper�u: �Fancy living in one of these streets,� he said, looking around him, �never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury�.�.�. never saying anything clever!�

A lot of people have taken exception to this remark. They say it shows condescension to the poor. He seems to reveal himself as a man so out of touch with the real world that he can�t imagine people on low incomes ever saying anything worth hearing; and so ignorant of their lives that he can�t believe they have anything worth eating.

We don�t know whether these were his exact words, though Marsh is unlikely to have made it up; but there is no doubt that this quotation has helped build the case that Churchill was always a bit of a reactionary old elitist.

This is the man, after all, who believed in eugenics; a social Darwinist who at various times wanted penal colonies for vagrants and sterilisation of the unfit. He certainly spoke of humanity being divided into qualitatively different �races��in a way that we find intellectually very dodgy today�and used vocabulary to describe foreigners that was standard for the time, but these days is taboo.

He wrote to Clementine boasting that the children were working �like blacks� to get Chartwell ready for her return; he ignored the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s, saying he had �no interest in the quarrels of the yellow peoples�.

He wanted to �bomb or machine-gun� Sinn Fein, whose representatives are now feted at banquets at Windsor Castle. He said the Bolsheviks were �baboons�, and that communism was a �horrible form of mental and moral disease�. Indeed, he once said that �one might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks�; an observation that looks a bit topsy-turvy today.

No one would appoint Churchill to any public office in modern Britain, not unless he toned it down a good deal. He said that making concessions to Mahatma Gandhi�now venerated as the father of modern India�was like �feeding cat�s meat to a tiger� (especially inapposite, given that Gandhi-ji was a devout veggie).

How much more right-wing can you get? Well, try this: as Home Secretary in 1910 he was alleged by the Labour Party to have sent armed troops against striking miners at Tonypandy in Wales; and in 1911 he certainly did authorise the troops to fire on striking dockers in Liverpool. During the General Strike of 1926 he used a scab battalion of printers and journalists to produce a work of stirring government propaganda called The British Gazette; he proposed that the BBC be closed down for the duration, said that �a bit of bloodshed would not go amiss� and that he wanted to get the transport workers �by the throat�. His �whiff of grapeshot� approach was condemned by Labour and the unions, and by his fellow Liberals.

Now take all this together and ask yourself�does this man sound like a lefty-liberal milquetoast? Banning the BBC? Shooting at striking dockers, just for rioting and smashing things? There are aspects of Churchill that make him sound like a chap who has had a few too many at a golf club bar. And yet this is the same Churchill who was the begetter of some of the most progressive legislation for the last 200 years. Together with Lloyd George, he deserves the title of Founder of the Welfare State.

His achievements in the Second World War are so famous that they have all but eclipsed his record as a social reformer: a record that deserves to be burnished and celebrated today. Churchill was heavily influenced by Lloyd George�indeed, the Welsh solicitor was one of the very few human beings to whom he deferred�but the measures he produced were his own, and driven by his own frantic energy.

He began in 1908 with a Trades Board Bill, designed to help low-paid workers�mainly female�who were engaged in �sweated labour�. They were working making garments in the East End of London, in Leeds, and in Manchester. Their wages were being undercut by immigrants, notably from eastern Europe (plus �a change); and the Trades Boards were there to set legally enforceable minimum wages for certain jobs. It was a concept that was alien to the theories of the classical Liberals�the Gladstonians who were still to be found in the cabinet. But Churchill and Lloyd George were New Liberals�or Radicals.

Explaining why the measure was necessary, Churchill said:

War is the father of all things, said Heracleitus. War certainly fathered Churchill the hero. But was Churchill himself the father of wars? And was he as rampantly and gleefully philoprogenitive as some have suggested?

Let us go back to the end of the war to end wars. It was 9 August 1918, and though no one could quite see it at the time, the most shameful war yet recorded was about to enter the last convulsions of slaughter. With the help of 600 tanks the British Expeditionary Force had made dazzling gains at Amiens, surging through the barbed wire and grinding over the mud and the mangled corpses for a distance of, wait for it, eight whole miles in a single day. Thousands of Germans had been killed, thousands captured.

As so often in those days, we find Churchill in France, staying at the Ch�teau Verchocq. Ostensibly this was so he could observe the distribution of munitions�his job as Minister for Munitions�at first hand. In reality, one suspects, it was because he could not bear to be far from the centre of the action. He was driving towards the headquarters of the Fourth Army, and he passed some five thousand captured Germans: their eyes vacant with shock, their heads down, their skin still blackened with explosive. As he went by, Churchill noted that he �could not help feeling sorry for them in their miserable plight and having marched all those miles through the battlefield without food or rest, and having been through the horrors of the fight before that�.

This was perhaps a bit odd. The British successes had been remarkable�but there was no reason, as far as he could tell in August 1918, to think that they would be decisive. He had been gloomy about the prospects of the war, and had predicted that it wouldn�t end before 1919 at the earliest. The Germans were capable of inflicting continued mayhem on the British. Indeed, they would do so until the final whistle.

The sight of so many defeated and captured enemy soldiers should therefore have filled him with exhilaration, a fierce pleasure that the Boche was finally on the run. Instead�he felt for their misery. It became ever clearer that this was no false dawn. Germany was really losing the war, had all but lost; and Churchill was unlike many other lesser politicians.

He was radiantly unvindictive. Where they were petty, he was great hearted; where they proposed retaliation, he was eirenic. By November 1918, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Germans had signed the armistice. The country was in chaos. The Kaiser had fled; influenza raged; communist insurrections were paralysing the cities�and partly as a result of the British blockade on German ports, there were huge numbers on the verge of starvation.

One November night Churchill found himself at dinner in London with his chums�F. E. Smith, the Attorney General, and Lloyd George, the Prime Minister. News was brought to them of the German hunger. Lloyd George wanted to leave the former enemy to suffer; Churchill said twelve ships full of food should be sent over immediately.

Lloyd George said they should shoot the Kaiser. Churchill said no. Four months later, in 1919, the German position was worse�and we find Churchill complaining in the Commons that it was repugnant to use starvation as a weapon against women, children and the elderly. He wanted the blockade lifted as soon as possible, and a peace deal done with Germany.

Finally they agreed the terms at Versailles�with their demands for vast and unpayable reparations from Germany. Churchill was at odds with Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, the US President, in seeing the essential folly of what had been done. The terms were too harsh. �The economic clauses of the Treaty of Versailles were malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile,� he said later. This is not only prescient; it tells us something about character and instinct.

In the preface to his history of the Second World War, Churchill gives us his famous maxim that a nation should show �in war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill�. This is not just cant. It is really how he was. One of the biggest calumnies that has been directed at Churchill is that he was too warlike, bellicose, va t�en guerre, that he almost literally snorted and snuffed and stamped the ground and rolled his eyes like a mettlesome steed at the very thought that there might be the chance of a dust-up.

It is quite easy to see why people make this charge. Scrunch up your eyes and look back at the really big events of the first half of the twentieth century�what might be called the Churchillian epoch. It is dominated by the First and Second World Wars, the two most disgraceful and destructive conflicts humanity has ever engaged in. The First World War left a total of 37 million people dead across the world, including about a million British. A generation of talented young men was liquidated in the fields of Flanders�many of them pulverised or left in gigantic anonymous ossuaries like the one at Verdun.

The Second World War killed even more�60 million dead, and half a million British. Britain had been physically and emotionally pounded. The nation had lost a quarter of its wealth. When you look at the scale of those catastrophes, you have to ask yourself who was at the wheel at the time. To an extent that we have half forgotten these days, Churchill was integral not just to the management of one conflict, but both of them. Indeed, as they recede from us in time, they look more and more like a single event; fought over the same ground, with the same patterns, the same sorts of causes, and at least in one giant case the same personality at the top. Throughout those eleven years of butchery he was the shaping political and military intellect of the nation that began the century as the greatest military power on earth; and which ended the Second War with just about everything cruelly reduced except the reputation of the Prime Minister. He was the man who got the fleet ready for the First World War, and who conceived and promoted Britain�s only original strategic contribution (which ended in further catastrophe). He personally directed the action in the Second World War, in a way that seems bonkers to us today.

He was a warlord, and the suggestion is that he was also therefore a warmonger�someone who so relished war that he actually helped to provoke the conflict that made him famous. That was the suspicion of that Tory wife, who wrote that he was another Goering, pumped up with bloodlust. That was the fear of a Conservative MP who wrote in 1934 that he was an extraordinary personality��a man with such power that he constitutes a definite menace to the peaceful solutions of the many problems with which this country is confronted�.

Today we think of him as the incarnation of moral rectitude�a man who had the courage to stand up to tyranny and yet to remain good natured, humane, democratic, rubicund, fundamentally benign and English in his moderation. That is broadly right; but in the run-up to the war he exuded for many people a dark charisma, a satanic optimism about the possibilities of violence; and even today there are those who believe that beneath the jovial image is more than a touch of Darth Vader�or possibly even the Emperor Palpatine.

It is not so long ago that the New York Times best-seller list featured a curious diatribe by Pat Buchanan, in which he accused Churchill of a �lust for war� in 1914, and argued�if argued is the word�that Britain should simply have stood by in 1939 and watched the Nazis enslave the rest of Europe. Buchanan said that Churchill was far more militaristic than the Kaiser or any of his heel-clicking Junkers, adding (perhaps correctly) that by 1914 �Churchill had seen more war than any soldier in the German army�.

Or take the views of another palaeo-conservative, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, a former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who recently wrote: �seldom has there been a statesman as good at glorifying war, and as indecently eager to wage war, as Winston Churchill. All his works demonstrate his love of war, glamorise its glories and minimise its horrors.� Sir Peregrine is entitled to respect; he actually fought in the Second World War. But I am afraid his views just do not square with reality, or with the complexity of Churchill�s nature.

Agreed: he was excited by war. He had a naturally emotional and romantic reaction to the drama, the scale of the event. When Sir Edward Grey made his speech to the Commons on 3 August 1914�on the eve of the First World War, when the lamps went out across Europe�Churchill wept. Asquith the Prime Minister noted his mood, and with some disapproval. �Winston has got all his war paint on and is longing for a sea fight�.�.�. the whole thing fills me with sadness.� Slightly more indulgently, Asquith�s wife Margot said, �Winston is longing to be in the trenches�dreaming of war, big, buoyant, happy even. He is a born soldier.� Churchill even blurted to Margot that he found war �delicious��instantly pleading with her not to repeat the remark�and was heard to say that peace was the last thing we should pray for. Many others noted his energy, his bounce, and the gleam of purpose in his eye.

It is unquestionably true that Churchill loved war in this obvious sense, that without war he knew there could be no glory�no real chance to emulate Napoleon, Nelson or his ancestor Marlborough himself. He knew how war and its risks had lifted men and painted everyday deeds with fame. That was why, as a young man, he had plunged himself so headlong into battle�while watching the newspaper accounts out of the corner of his eye. War sent the adrenalin spurting from his glands, and of course when he was fighting�when his blood was up�he wanted to hit the enemy as hard as he possibly could. At Harrow the fencing judges had noted his lunging attacks. Churchill believed, correctly, that if you get into a fight, you have got to let your enemy know that they are losing, and you have got to make the point with whatever tools you have available. He was ruthless in the application of violence.

We have just had a high-minded international debate about modern Syria�s use of chemical weapons, a practice that everyone has rightly abominated. During the course of this debate hardly anyone sought to mention the role of our national hero in encouraging the use of gas in the First World War. He wanted to gas the Turks at Gallipoli, and one of his biggest contributions as Minister for Munitions was to ensure�within the space of a month in 1918�that a third of the shells fired by British guns contained mustard gas. He was so keen on mustard gas, in fact, that his generals positively had to restrain him from using it in the Second World War as well.

Churchill not only sent thousands to die at Gallipoli (�your father killed mine at the Dardanelles�, as one Eton boy said to his son Randolph when he arrived at the school). He ordered the destruction of the French fleet in 1940, he unleashed area bombing on Germany�he took decisions that a modern politician would find unthinkable, and he did it all with brio and self-confidence. And yet it is surely obvious that there is still an overwhelming difference between a person fighting hard when he comes under attack, and a person being so belligerent that he is himself the cause of conflict. There is a difference between aggression and resistance; or at least, between attack and counter-attack.

Of course he wanted personal kudos in the late Victorian imperial wars. That doesn�t mean he approved of the causes in which he enlisted. Remember his disgust at Kitchener�s treatment of the Mahdi�s tomb, or his attack on the �criminal and cowardly� war on the North-West Frontier. He detested unprovoked imperialist aggression and jingo. He didn�t believe in war for the sake of mere colonial expansion. He took these liberal views from the Victorian battlefield into Edwardian government.

One morning in February 1906 he was at work as a junior minister in the Colonial Office when he was interrupted. A visitor was outside. Eddie Marsh had tried to give her the brush-off, but she was having none of it. She was a tall, rather handsome woman called Flora Lugard, and she was a kind of Boadicea of the British Empire. A former Colonial Editor of The Times, she had actually coined the name �Nigeria�, so baptising that vast country, and was known to be as hard as nails. She was lately married to a noted slaughterer of the natives by the name of Sir Frederick Lugard, and her mission was to tell the young �boy� (as she described Churchill) how he should damn well run West Africa. Her answer was that he should give it as a satrapy to her husband and herself, so that they could run it the way they wanted: sometimes from London, sometimes on the spot, and always with lavish use of the best and most well-oiled modern weapons.

She found that the �boy� knew exactly who she was, and he knew all about her husband. He had already noted the way the walrus-moustached Sir Frederick conducted himself�the grass huts torched, the thousands of defenceless tribespeople he had killed with shells and bullets. Churchill had written that the �chronic bloodshed� was �ridiculous and disquieting�. �The whole enterprise is likely to be misrepresented by persons unacquainted with imperial terminology as the murdering of natives and the stealing of their land,� he said. He told Flora Lugard�fairly politely�that he did not approve of her approach. So began an ideological feud. He quashed the Lugards� plan to be the tsar and tsarina of a �sultry Russia� in West Africa. Lugard was sent packing to Hong Kong. Flora Lugard protested, to anyone who would listen, that Churchill was wrong; that power flowed from the barrel of a gun, and that hers was the only way you could run a place like Africa.

Churchill said that there was no point in holding on to large chunks of Nigeria, and that he was all in favour of pulling out. Churchill certainly believed in the empire�and annexed a bit of Kenya when he was there in 1907. But he did that with a pencil, rather than a Maxim gun. He did not hold with wars of conquest, or wars of aggression�and no such aim can possibly be ascribed to the British in either 1914 or 1939.

He was indeed responsible for the build-up of the navy in the years immediately preceding the Great War; and quite right. But he didn�t go into politics as a militarist. In 1901 his maiden speech caused a good deal of Tory tut-tutting, because it seemed to be so oddly pro-Boer. �If I were a Boer, fighting in the field,� he said, �and if I were a Boer, I hope I should be fighting in the field�.�.�.� I say, said the Tory benches, rolling their eyes. He wishes he were fighting against us, does he?

From the outset he was sniffy about excessive military expenditure�just like his father before him�and by 1908 he was campaigning against more spending on Dreadnoughts�so as to be able to spend more on social programmes. When he got to the Admiralty he certainly changed his tune on defence spending: like all ministers, he was captured by the need to boost his department; and by then the problem of German expansion was obvious. But it was Churchill who tried to slow down the race to war. He was the one who proposed naval �holidays��a moratorium on both sides in the building of battleships.

Even on the brink of war, it was he who tried to go over and persuade the German naval supremo, Admiral von Tirpitz, to cool it. The Foreign Office wouldn�t let him go. On the very eve of catastrophe he was to be found arguing for a meeting of European leaders�what he would later call a summit�to sort things out.

Churchill neither yearned for war, nor gloried in slaughter. When he came back from the trenches in 1916�having seen unimaginable horrors�he spoke to the Commons with the ashen disgust of a Wilfred Owen or a Siegfried Sassoon. He had seen the squalor and the graves dotted higgledy-piggledy in the trenches. It had been his task to write to the widows of those who were killed. He had seen the metronomic rhythm of killing. �What is going on, while we go away to dinner or home or bed?� he asked his fellow MPs. �Nearly 1000 men�Englishmen, Britishers, men of our race�are knocked into bundles of bloody rags.�

Churchill never wanted another war; he had seen enough. In 1919, as Secretary of State for War, he tried to trim military budgets by instituting the ten-year rule: that the British government would act on the assumption that there would not be another war in Europe for ten years. When he was Chancellor, in the 1920s, he again campaigned against spending on defence; and this time he had the direct authority to make the cuts. Indeed, by the late 1930s the Chamberlainites were still (unfairly) trying to blame him for the country�s lack of readiness.

By the late 1930s he was of course urging his colleagues to spend more on defence, to match the expansion of the Luftwaffe. But you could not conceivably describe his attitude as bellicose, or lip-smacking, or warmongering. He spoke as a Cassandra, as one who had glimpsed a charnel-house of the future. In the Czech crisis of 1938, after Eden had resigned, he spent a night unable to sleep. �I saw the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of death.�

Historians will continue to debate the causes of the First World War, and the truth is that no European power emerges well from that catastrophic episode. What we can safely say is that Winston Churchill was not one of the culprits, and that the blame lies substantially�though of course by no means entirely�with Germany, and with German militarism and expansionism. Whatever happened at Sarajevo in 1914 was no excuse for an attack by the Kaiser on Belgium and France. Britain had absolutely no choice but to follow the rules of 500 years of foreign policy�and try to prevent a single power from dominating the continent.

The Second World War was caused almost exclusively by a maniacal German leader, and a paranoid desire for revenge. They are flying in the face of the evidence, those polemicists who posit some moral equivalence between Churchill and the Kaiser, or Churchill and Hitler. Churchill tried to avert war. He fought against it.

One of the most interesting and attractive features of his mind is that he spent much energy not only trying to avoid war, but in producing innovations�technical and scientific�to try to minimise its impact on the human frame.

War is the father of many things, but in Churchill�s case, compassion was the mother of invention.

It feels weird walking through the wood this afternoon�and in a way that is because it is so easy. There is nothing to stop me. I just lift the wire loop on a makeshift gate and I am strolling through the haunted grove.

The birds are in good voice, the trees are pushing out their tender leaves. There isn�t a soul in sight. I am here at Ploegsteert wood in southern Belgium, not far from the French border; and as I meander over the mossy forest floor I think of how things might have looked a hundred years ago.

This wood was once famous in Britain. Almost every newspaper reader would have known the name�or rather the name the soldiers gave it. This was Plugstreet, on the Western Front. A century ago the trees were shot to stumps, the branches shredded, the birds silent, the soil contaminated with explosive and other toxins. This was where Lieutenant Colonel Churchill came out on his nocturnal prowlings, terrifying the rest of the patrol by making a noise like a �baby elephant�. I can see the remains of the trenches they might have snuck through on their way to the front, now full of black and slimy water. They would have tiptoed to the edge of the mutilated wood, and then on some nights their commanding officer would have gone on�sometimes alone�to no man�s land, and the very edge of the German lines.

That�s no man�s land, there. I can work out from my map where it was�an absurdly narrow strip running north�south through the fields. On one side there are some of those famous Belgian Blanc Bleu cows, with the dikbil, the double buttock that makes for the finest steaks. The far field is ploughed, a heavy brown corduroy that has been sown with whatever Brussels has decided pays the most this year. Between them is a little metalled track that leads�according to my map�to the German lines. I decide to get back in the old Toyota.

It is time to perform a military manoeuvre, a feat that it took Churchill and the British army five terrible years to achieve. I am going to do it in not much more than a minute. I fire up the people carrier. I engage drive. A quick swig of Stella for the nerves�and we�re trundling slowly forward.

First I am bouncing over some ruts; now we�re on the tarmac. I must be doing 15 miles an hour, now 20, 25. I am going over the trenches and the craters; I am passing irresistibly through the barbed wire. The shells, the bullets�nothing can stop the lunging Toyota and its 2.49-litre power plant.

On either side of the lines, weary and broken men are peering from their muddy foxholes and staring at each other with a wild surmise, then breaking into whoops. And then we have done it, almost before you can register the achievement. I have reached the German lines; and as they struggle to react I am through them�slicing effortlessly past the reserve lines and the hospital tents, and the terrified Germans are grabbing their rifles in panic and stampeding from the latrines.

I give a little toot of triumph, and quite unmolested I execute a U-turn. I leave the Kaiser�s army and drive back from east to west, the same 500 pathetic yards, towards Ploegsteert wood. On the way back I stop somewhere in the middle. I park on the verge and go out into the ploughed field. This is the bit where no human being could venture and survive.

Here�s why. There�s one here, and here, and here. Every ploughing season thousands of fragments of ancient and rusty metal make their way to the surface from the past.

This one looks like a bit of fuse, a large knob that is corroded into a cancer of iron and rust and still amazingly heavy. This could be some shell casing, and some more here. I don�t know what they are but they eloquently explain why neither side could win. There is no cover beyond the wood, just these wide fields under open Flemish sky.

No matter how much pluck or spunk or �gallantry� they showed, the young men were cut to pieces every time. They happened to be here at a moment of asymmetry in the evolution of warfare, when mankind had lately invented metal projectiles that could penetrate human flesh, from a distance, with huge velocity and explosive power. No one had yet come up with a defence. For three awful years the position was unchanged.

You can imagine Churchill�s frustration as he saw his men dying�with not an inch of territory to show for it. As soon as he got here he tried to find out what had happened to his plan.

In November 1915 he wrote a long memo to the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, in which he unburdened himself of all sorts of tactical proposals. Some of his ideas sound frankly a bit whacko. He wanted men to be issued with special shields, made of steel or composite, that reached from the helmet to the hips. He proposed that they should form up on the edge of the trench, lock shields, and march forwards, fifteen abreast. He seemed unaware that he was asking twentieth-century soldiers to advance towards machine guns in a defensive posture that was well known to Greek hoplites.

He suggested that soldiers be equipped with oxyacetylene torches�of a kind he had seen cutting through sheet metal in the docks�in order to make their way through the barbed wire. It was not clear what he thought would happen if the gas tank was hit by a bullet. But his main interest was in what he described as a new type of vehicle. He said they were �moveable machine gun cupolas as well as wire smashers�, and that they were capable of �traversing any ordinary obstacle, ditch, breastwork or trench�. There were about seventy of such experimental vehicles already being built, he informed General French.

Sir John should go and see them, he urged. �The spectacle of such a machine cutting wire entanglements has only to be witnessed to carry conviction. It resembles the reaping operations of a self-binder��by which he means a primitive version of what we would now call a combine harvester.

Alas, Sir John never had the chance to inspect this mutant farm machinery. He was sacked by Asquith, who was beginning to panic, not surprisingly, at the lack of progress being made under his leadership. So in January 1916 Churchill tried again.

He took his paper�with its proposal for a new type of armoured combine harvester�to French�s successor, Douglas Haig�a man who is traditionally blamed for much of the paralysis in British strategy. Haig seemed interested. A little later Churchill was asked to go to the British Operational Division at St Omer, to explain his ideas. The general there said he had heard from Haig that there were some new contraptions being devised by the Admiralty, for use in trench warfare.

Did Churchill know anything about it? He certainly did. Indeed, he could have been forgiven for being stupefied and appalled by the continued slowness of the army top brass to pick up his idea. It was over a year earlier, in December 1914�when he was still at the Admiralty�that he had first grasped the nightmare of the stalemate, with trenches and barbed wire stretching intermittently from Switzerland to the Channel.

Churchill had been partly inspired by the science fiction of H. G. Wells, and his description of ironclad �landships�. On 5 January 1915 he wrote to Asquith, suggesting that it was time for some kind of technological breakthrough. We needed a machine that could deal with the trenches, he said; and if we didn�t develop one, the Germans certainly would. Asquith responded quite quickly, for him, and asked the War Office to look into it.

The army formed a committee to investigate the matter, and decided that any such machine would just sink under the weight of its own armour. Too impractical; dismissed.

There matters might well have rested, with unthinkable consequences. But Churchill did not let it drop. He was at the Admiralty, remember. He was in charge of ships, not the tactics of the army. This was theoretically none of his business. But on 18 January 1915 he wrote to his colleagues at the Admiralty with what sounded like a bizarre request. He wanted an experiment performed.

Someone�he did not specify who�was to take two steam rollers and yoke them together with long steel rods, �so that they are to all intents and purposes one roller covering a breadth of at least 12 to 14 feet�. Then he wanted his officials to go and find a �handy� site, near London, and dig about a hundred yards of trenches, as they did in France. The ultimate objective, he said, was to allow the monster machine to run along the length of the trenches: actually on top of them, with a giant wheel on either lip. The objective would be to �crush them all flat and bury the people in them�.

This is Churchill at his dizzying best. There are flaws in his idea. What if the two rollers are running at different speeds, or in different gears? Surely the rods would just snap or shear? He hasn�t worked out that the machine will need a single engine. But you can almost hear the crunching of his giant mental cogs as he grips the problem; and the problem of grip.

The mud, he is thinking now. The hellish seas of mud. The machine will slip and slide unless�.�.�. aha�.�.�.

�The rollers of these machines will be furnished with wedge-shaped ribs or studs, which can be advanced beyond the ordinary surface of the wheel when required, in order to break the soil on each side of the trench and accentuate the rolling process.� It�s like peering through a telescope at some distant nebula, and seeing the clouds of interstellar gas as they resolve and harden into a planet.

An idea was being born. Perhaps without even knowing it, he was describing caterpillar tracks. All it needed, he concluded, �was a big enough pair of steam rollers and an unscaleable bullet-proof house for the crew�. He signed off with a superbly peremptory order that the whole thing should be achieved within two weeks: �WSC�.

You can imagine the reaction of the naval engineers. He wants us to bolt or solder some steam rollers together? And he wants us to muck up some park with a load of experimental trenches? But they did it.

So began what came to be known as the Landships Committee, and you can see why it was convenient for Churchill to adopt the H. G. Wells terminology. There was no particular reason why this project should be led from the Admiralty, unless they pretended they were discussing a form of ship. On 22 February 1915 this small group met for the first time, under the direction of one of several heroes of the story, Mr Eustace Tennyson d�Eyncourt, the Director of Naval Construction. He reported to Churchill.

The first discussion was mainly about the very point that the First Lord of the Admiralty had raised: how to make sure that the great beast did not just skid in the mud. They discussed the potential of cleated wheels, and also of �pedrails�, a peculiar device by which lots of little feet were fixed to the rim of the wheel, each gripping the ground in turn as the wheel turned. Two days later, Tennyson d�Eyncourt wrote to Churchill with news. They had made cracking progress.

They were proposing to make a 25-tonne model that would be �a tractor of real military value carrying 50 men with machine guns and capable of negotiating enemy trenches�. They were getting closer. Churchill wrote back tersely, and on the same day: �As proposed and with all despatch. WSC.�

By 3 March they had two designs�one with a big wheel at the back, and one with a caterpillar track. It was time to spend money. With no authorisation from the War Office, and certainly without consulting his cabinet colleagues, Churchill placed an order for the prototypes. He hadn�t a clue which would be more effective: so he ordered both�a dozen caterpillars and half a dozen big wheels. In the hope of encouraging a spirit of competition, the Admiralty engaged two contractors. They were called Foster and Foden, and they were given a 10 per cent profit margin. The overall cost was �70,000��5 million today, which strikes me as being pretty cheap by the standards of modern defence procurement, and when you think of the military history that was being made.

While the men continued to be massacred in Flanders, Tennyson d�Eyncourt and his team beavered away at the problem. Which was better? The cleats or the pedrail? And how could they overcome this basic problem: making the occupants of the vehicle safe, but without encumbering it with so much armour that it would sink in the mud? From his vantage point at the Admiralty, Churchill continued to chivvy and encourage; and then, in May 1915�disaster.

His own career went off course. He ended up in the ditch with all his wheels in the air, and no hope of getting him out. He lost office over Gallipoli, hounded out, effectively, by Tories who wouldn�t work with him in government. He tried, rather tragically, to keep a role in the Landships project. He asked Balfour, who succeeded him at the Admiralty, whether he could continue to chair a small joint committee between the Admiralty and the War Office. Nothing came of it.

He took his mentor, Lloyd George, who had become Minister for Munitions, to see the muddy open-air laboratory at Wormwood Scrubs, where belching, roaring iron scarabs were being hurled at ramparts and ditches, with mixed results. Alas, the project was no longer his baby: he had no role, formal or informal. Without his creative drive, the Frankentractor languished. On the Western Front, men continued to go over the top, with hideous consequences. As far as the military top brass were concerned the plans for a new machine were all but buried.

By the autumn of the year Churchill was himself at the Western Front, performing his unique act of penitential soldiering, and the following year he took over as lieutenant-colonel in command of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He saw the horror and the pity at first hand. He wrote his long memo; and it was only after he had been to see Sir Douglas Haig�and found Haig so worryingly vague�that the project seemed to come to life.

On 14 February 1916 Tennyson d�Eyncourt wrote him a joyful letter. He was sorry it had all taken so long. The whole enterprise had become bogged down, metaphorically as well as physically. �After losing the great advantage of your influence I had considerable difficulty in steering the scheme past the rocks of opposition and the more insidious shoals of apathy.�

But he was thrilled with the result, he told Churchill. The latest war-hog was positively athletic. It would easily clear a 4 foot 6 perpendicular parapet and then cross a 9-foot gap. It had 6-pounder guns in �sponsons��bulges on the side�like a battleship; and it could fire broadsides as well as forwards. It went through wire entanglements, he boasted, �like a rhinoceros through a field of corn�.�.�. It looks like a great antediluvian monster, especially when it comes out of boggy ground. I hope it will scare the Bosches.�

He ended with an awkward but heartfelt tribute to the humiliated Churchill. �Allow me to offer you my congratulations on the success of your original project, and wish you all good luck in your work at the front.�

Production of the Landship began. In the interests of secrecy the factory workers were told to call them �water tanks�, with the vague suggestion that they were gigantic bowsers, destined for the thirsty battlefields of Mesopotamia. Tanks they became, for short, and tanks they still are, even in Russian.

In the history of British breakthroughs, the tank is unusual. It is not just that some of the key ideas were British�that is quite common. The development was British and the practical application was British, in the sense that by 1917 Britain was producing hundreds of them�more than any other belligerent nation.

By now Churchill himself was once again responsible for their production�because in July of that year Lloyd George had him back in the cabinet, as Minister for Munitions. The press freaked out. The Sunday Times said any such appointment would be �a grave danger to the administration and to the empire as a whole�. The Morning Post warned, �That dangerous and uncertain quantity, Mr Winston Churchill�a floating kidney in the body politic�is back again at Whitehall.�

They could not have been more wrong. Churchill was indispensable to success. Frantically he worked to equip the forces with the devices�planes, gas shells and tanks�that he believed were essential to break the deadlock; and still the slaughter intensified. That autumn the Haig strategy of head-on assault plumbed new depths of madness. In spite of the anxieties of both Churchill and Lloyd George, the general launched the Ypres offensive�in which almost 850,000 men were to die, including 350,000 British soldiers. It was carnage on a scale never yet seen by men�an industrialised version of Cannae.

And then, at last, the tanks were ready�and in numbers. There were 400 of them in action at Cambrai on 20 November 1917, where they made significant gains. Now Churchill went into overdrive. He set up a Tank Board, with a target to deliver 4,459 by April 1919. When tank factory workers got uppity, he threatened to send them to the front. That sorted them out. Then came the great psychological moment: it was at that Battle of Amiens, on 8 August 1918, when the armoured leviathans really rattled the Germans.

Six hundred British tanks burst through German lines, grinding over the trenches, gripping the mud with their tracks and with the enemy�s bullets flattening themselves on their hard metal hides�just as Churchill had imagined. It is true that the Germans learned quite fast not to be so scared�just as the Romans overcame their terror of Hannibal�s elephants. In the following weeks they were to become efficient at taking out the tanks. But the damage to German morale had already taken place. General Erich Ludendorff called day one of the Battle of Amiens a �black day� for the German army; and it can be seen as the beginning of the end.

It was the tank which was decisive on that day. Think of all those disconsolate captured soldiers Churchill saw on the 9th. They had been routed with the help of machines that he co-invented. Everywhere he went, he reported, he saw the tracks of the beasts.

Let us be clear about the exact nature of his role. It is true that he had, personally, a great natural flair for invention and improvisation�and he loved thinking about things in a practical and mechanical way: from the �bellybando�, a brown paper tube he devised to stop his cigars disintegrating, to the question of how to stop the bobbing of the prefabricated ports of Mulberry Harbours on D-Day. As a small child he loved building forts, and he and his brother Jack made a trebuchet with which they successfully fired apples at a cow.

He loved painting and bricklaying, and creating ponds and earthworks. He was not only one of the first of his generation to fly a plane; he was one of the first to drive a car (so scarily that his fellow Hughligans refused to be his passengers); and, indeed, to imagine the possibility of the atomic bomb; and to wonder what would happen if you fitted a torpedo to a plane. His enthusiasm for technological innovation�and its potential to advance the human race�was of a piece with his Whiggish personality. He had a marvellous ability to visualise, to articulate, and to fire the imagination and confidence of others.

He was certainly no scientist, but his endlessly fertile and playful intelligence legitimised the boffins in their desire to experiment, and to please him. Some of the resulting wartime ideas were brilliant but barmy, like the plan to create gigantic floating aircraft carriers by mixing ice with sawdust. This substance was known as �pykrete�, after its inventor, Geoffrey Pyke of the Royal Navy, and there is a story of how Mountbatten demonstrated its astonishing rigidity to Churchill and Roosevelt.

Mountbatten brought a great block of frozen pykrete to the Quebec conference in 1943, and shot it with his service pistol. The guards outside the room rushed in, thinking there had been an assassination, while the bullet whanged off the pykrete and almost killed the British Air Marshal Charles Portal.

That is the way of scientific experiment. Pykrete might have been a triumph, but wasn�t. The tank might have been a flop, but worked to devastating effect. And it might have been a flop had it not been for Churchill�s imaginative drive: his ability to hold an idea in the forefront of his mind and then work away at it�like the process of getting his mental vision to appear in oils on a canvas�until he had made the idea a reality.

His interest in machines was of course partly aggressive: he wanted planes, tanks, gas and bombs because he wanted to win, and as fast as possible. But again the underlying motive was compassion, to reduce the mayhem and misery that he saw. �Machines save life,� he said at the beginning of 1917, before the tank had yet proved its worth. �Machine-power is a great substitute for manpower. Brains will save blood. Manoeuvre is a great diluting agent to slaughter.�

That was why he went for the great flanking operation at Gallipoli; that was why he pioneered area bombing even in the First War, and that was why he personally oversaw the production of huge quantities of mustard gas. That was why he wanted the tank�to reduce the mortality rate of men who were asked to walk or run into a hail of metal projectiles.

Dotted in the fields and lanes around Ploegsteert are the cemeteries with their rows and rows of white stone crosses�witness to the criminal waste and stupidity of those tactics. For his role in pioneering the tank, Churchill surely deserves credit not just for saving lives but for shortening�and, arguably, helping to win�the First World War.

And not just with the tank, of course. When Germany eventually capitulated, it was very largely thanks to the slow boa-constrictor-like strangulation of the Royal Navy blockade, protracted over five years, and which by 1918 had brought the Germans to the brink of starvation. It was thanks to Churchill, as pre-war First Lord of the Admiralty, that the oil-fuelled fleet was ready in 1914 to do the job. We owe him, then, for ships on land and sea.

�

I WANDER BACK to the wood he used to frequent, and I stand there with my almost empty beer can and a cigar, communing in a kind of daze with the shades of those who died. My meditation is shattered. A Belgian farmer has seen the car parked by the wood, and he is advancing towards me with the air of one who wants me off his land.

I almost point out that a lot of British soldiers died terrible deaths to defend the title of Belgian farmers to these very woods; but I think better of it. Has he heard of Winston Churchill? I ask him. He looks thoughtful. Did Churchill fight in the war? he asks. I confirm this.

�One must always respect those who fought in the war,� says the farmer. Well, I will drink to that. I drain the Stella and leave the ghostly wood. No one else in the First World War had anything like Churchill�s record, of risking his life at the front, and simultaneously originating and promoting wholly new directions in the grand strategy of the conflict. How did he do it?

There is a reason why Churchill drove forward so much new technology, why they didn�t just remain in some naval designer�s sketchbook. I have by now read a large number of his memos and notes, and I have been amazed not just by his bureaucratic stamina but by his phenomenal attention to detail.

Of all the politicians of his generation, Churchill was not just the best speaker, the best writer, the best joke-maker, the bravest, the boldest and the most original. It was crucial to the Churchill Factor that he was also the biggest policy wonk you ever saw.

That was an essential feature of his handling of the war effort in 1940. Of course he could do the big picture, and the great sweep of history; none better. But there was one aspect of Churchill�s character that consistently surprised his biographer Roy Jenkins, and that was his work rate.

Come on, girl,� says Inches the butler. �He�s asked for you and he doesn�t like to be asked twice.� He points up the stairs and you feel your heart thud.

Let�s say you are in your early twenties. You are a pretty Home Counties sort of girl in flattish shoes with a sensible skirt and nothing too fussy about your jewellery or make-up. You haven�t been to university, but you have good shorthand and can type like the wind.

You could be any one of the dozens of secretaries or literary assistants�of both sexes�that have stood trembling at the bottom of these stairs, over the decades. But let�s say you�ve found a position in the great man�s entourage some time in the 1920s or 1930s; it doesn�t really matter when.

The big red-brick house is always a scene of immense activity when Churchill is there, and the grounds look a bit like a zoo�or a zoo under construction. There are pigs and goats and dogs and cats and mandarin ducks and black and white swans and geese and fishponds, with giant ornamental goldfish, and men with diggers at work on what looks like a hydroelectric project, with a series of dams being constructed down the slope of the hill.

When you get inside, it is like the opening scene of The Marriage of Figaro. There are people rushing everywhere: maids and chauffeurs and footmen and cooks, and smooth young men with an air of scholarship who are carrying sheaves of paper, and a lovely little child with golden hair who seems to be the youngest of the family.

Now you have to go upstairs and attend to the needs of the mind that somehow powers all this motion, and without which it subsides as though turned off by a switch.

�Hurry up,� says Inches, and you go up the blue lino stairs with rubber nosing and you knock on the door of what you have been told is the study. There is a muffled shout from somewhere within, as though from a prisoner in a cupboard.

You enter a large high-beamed room, with a black and empty fireplace at one end, beneath a rather gloomy picture of Blenheim Palace. There�s a stand-up desk against one wall, and a sit-down desk against another, and an old pinkish carpet on the floor. There�s a faint smell of cigar�but of Winston Churchill there is no sign.

�Sir?� you quaver.

�Here!� comes a shout, and then you see a little door in the far corner, which looks as though it might be the entrance to an airing cupboard, or a large drinks cabinet. You go through. You can�t quite believe that these are the sleeping arrangements of one of the most powerful men in Britain.

Someone has whispered that Mrs Churchill likes to spend the night elsewhere, because the couple have radically different biorhythms. This is certainly no bedroom for a lady. It is more like a monk�s cell.

There is a sepia picture of Lord Randolph Churchill on the wall, and a tiny bathroom off to one side; and there in the low bed is a terrifying sight. He is surrounded by books and papers and dispatch boxes strewn all over the place; and by him a big chromium-plated cuspidor, with something nasty at the bottom of it, because a cuspidor is a glorified bowl for spitting into.

There is a glass of what looks like a weak whisky and soda on the bedside table, a marmalade cat on the coverlet, and he is sitting up in bed wearing a red silk kimono and a fierce expression, with his greying strands of hair askew. He champs his cigar and you realise he is saying something to you.

�I beg your pardon, sir,� you say.

�Get it down,� he snaps, and you twig that he has already begun dictating.

Quickly you compose yourself, and whip out your notebook or letter-paper, and start recording his words. He breaks off. A terrible scowl comes over his face, like that of a bull meditating whether to charge a rambler in a fluorescent cagoule.

His toes twitch under the bedclothes, and he is making little sibilant noises like a kettle or a saucepan of porridge.

You keep your pen poised above your work, your head down. Then he speaks again, and his tone is startlingly seductive, even lubricious.

�Daarling�.�.�.� he says.

You look up in alarm to see that it�s OK: he�s talking to the cat. He goes on, switching from Tango the marmalade cat back to you, and you realise you�re having a slight problem.

Owing to the cigar, and the way he says �sh� instead of �s�, you find yourself asking him to repeat things.

�God�s teeth, girl!� he exclaims, and you find yourself overcome. It�s all too much. You can�t help it.

The tears begin, and instantly he is transformed. All his attention is focused on you, and he smiles and fixes you with his merry blue eyes. �Don�t mind me when I snap,� he says, and explains that he is not cross with you, not at all; he is just trying to think of what to say, and hates having his flow disrupted.

Now he is off again. The toes are twitching as he crafts every sentence so as to find the natural cadence of the language, rhythmical, musical; and now it is over. He brings his hand crashing down, like a conductor signalling the end of a Beethoven symphony.

�Gimme!� he says�and you hand over the memo or letter.

He reads it, and then takes out a fountain pen and�holding it quite high on the barrel�he initials it; and that�s it. You are gone, dismissed�until half an hour later you are mysteriously summoned again. It seems he has thought of something else.

This time both the study and the bedroom are empty, and there is a sploshing from the little bathroom. Golly, you think. In between his spongeing and sluicing he instructs you to draw up a little chair next to the door and begins dictating another letter, and then you muffle a shriek as he emerges, with a tiny towel around his waist that seems to fall off him as you close your horrified eyes�.�.�.

When you open them, he�s half decent, and dictating again. �KBO�, he concludes this letter�which you later discover means �Keep Buggering On�, an injunction he often uses to his colleagues.

So it goes on throughout the day, with Churchill dictating streams of material to his helpers of both sexes. He seems to be working on several books at once, not to mention newspaper articles, speeches and further memoranda.

He has a generous booze-fuelled lunch, and then a nap, and then he is either painting or doing a spot of bricklaying with his bricklaying tutor, Mr Kurn, or even playing bezique, a card game with which he has become almost obsessed. Then it is announced that he has to go to London, and you sit crushed in the back of the brown Daimler, with your noiseless typewriter on your lap, and on one side the dispatch boxes, on the other a large tan-coloured poodle called Rufus, with his tongue in your ear, and the cigar sending gusts of smoke backwards in your direction.

For the next two hours he proses away, and you marvel at the lushness of his vocabulary, the endless synonyms, the tautologies, the pleonasms. He goes to Parliament, he goes to the Treasury; he deals in the course of the afternoon and evening with huge quantities of text and produces thousands more words of every kind and every one of them minutely conserved by his helpers, as if they were worker bees collecting royal jelly from the queen.

By now you are beginning to flag. He is not. He is still at it after dinner�though you have gone to bed, relieved by another secretary. He whirrs on into the night as though his battery is made of some superior mixture of chemicals, unknown to other men. By the time he finally gets his head down in his London flat, it is as late as 3 a.m. And he is going to repeat the whole thing the following day; and by then you realise what they say about him is true: that the closer you get to Winston Churchill, the more convinced you become of his genius.

�

PERHAPS THE BIGGEST mistake you can make about Churchill is to think that he is some kind of orotund frontman, a mere impresario of ideas�a Ronald Reagan with a cigar. Reagan once famously joked of his own approach to life, �They say hard work can�t kill you�but I figure, why take the chance?�

That was emphatically not Churchill�s maxim. It is not just the books�he produced thirty-one of them and of those fourteen were �proper� or original publications, rather than compilations of material already published. Try counting his innumerable entries in the parliamentary record: dozens of speeches and interventions and questions every month, in a career that lasted almost uninterrupted for sixty-four years. His published speeches alone run to eighteen volumes and 8,700 pages; his memoranda and letters comprise a million documents in 2,500 boxes.

He presented five budgets as Chancellor, and would speak for three or four hours (modern Chancellors do no more than an hour). And he had no speech writer. He did it all himself; and when he wasn�t dictating, or writing, or dominating some conversation, or painting, or laying bricks, he was putting on more intellectual weight.

He had read at least five thousand books, and had committed so much poetry to his elephantine memory that people took him to be a kind of jukebox. You just pushed his button and out it came. When he was staying with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at Shangri-La, he impressed the US President by being able to give him the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear.

Then Roosevelt quoted some famous lines from the patriotic American poem �Barbara Frietchie� by John Greenleaf Whittier: �shoot if you must this old grey head/ But spare your country�s flag, she said�.

Churchill stunned the presidential couple by giving them the whole darn thing�astonishing, since it is a conspicuously American poem, and hardly the kind of poem he would have learned at Harrow; and masterfully diplomatic it was of Churchill to pull it out of his hat. �My husband and I looked at each other,� said Eleanor Roosevelt, �for each of us could have quoted a few lines, but the whole thing was quite beyond us.�

The Aga Khan had the same sort of floaty feeling when Churchill began quoting huge chunks of Omar Khayyam. Had this man learned it to impress him? No, he just happened to have it in his head. He kept and stored these literary delicacies for years, perfectly pickled in the alcohol-washed runnels of his brain. He could pull them out at any moment: the Lays of Ancient Rome for the cabinet, Shakespeare for his children. Even in his eighties he was able suddenly to summon obscure lines of Aristophanes for Sir John Colville.

If you have a spare fifteen minutes, go on YouTube, and look at the sublime out-takes of Churchill�s only televised party political broadcast, from 1951. He sits there gazing at the camera with utter savagery, while they make him repeat his script over and over again. Finally, he breaks off from being tormented by the producers and gives them what for by reciting a long section from Gibbon about the spread of Christianity.

This is important, this gift of memory, because it meant that he could hold the data in his head that enabled him to win arguments and dominate his colleagues. In 1913 Asquith complained to his love-object Venetia that they had just had a three-hour cabinet, two and a quarter hours of which were occupied by the remarks of Churchill. He became the natural go-to man for a complex negotiation, partly because of his charm and friendliness but mainly because he grasped the subject so deeply that he was fertile in expedients and compromises. He handled the negotiations on everything from the partition of Ireland to the creation of Israel to the General Strike; and the reason he was so central to these formative twentieth-century events was not so much that he muscled his way to centre stage, but that his colleagues simply recognised that he was the man with the wattage to do it.

His wasn�t a notably mathematical or financial brain. As he admitted during the controversy over whether or not to go back on the Gold Standard, he had �limited comprehension of these extremely technical matters� (like his father, also Chancellor, who complained about all these �damned dots�); and after a session with a load of bankers he complained that they were all �speaking Persian�. For this he can surely be forgiven. The history of the last 100 years is full of occasions when it is perfectly obvious that the bankers themselves haven�t the faintest understanding of what they are trying to say.

What he had was stamina, power, sheer mental grunt. �There comes Winston Churchill, with his hundred horsepower mind,� said someone before the First World War, when 100 horsepower was a lot.

Some people have very quick analytic brains, but no particular energy or appetite for work. Some people have loads of drive, but limited talent�and most of us, clearly, have our own moderate portions of each. Churchill had the lot: phenomenal energy, a prodigious memory, a keen analytic mind and a ruthless journalistic ability to sort his material so as to put the most important point first. He also had the zigzag streak of lightning in the brain that makes for creativity.

His psychological make-up (need to prove himself to father, partial megalomania, etc.) meant that he had to work; he was incapable of idleness. Much has been made of his so-called depression or �black dog�, as he called it�using an expression that already existed at the time. Others think this has been overdone, and I am inclined to agree.

He certainly got a bit blue in the 1930s, when he was out of office, but in general he was well used to managing what is for many people the creative cycle: depression�exertion�creativity�alcoholically enhanced elation�depression and so on. He just spanned the cycle faster than anyone else, as though he had a higher RPM, and his output was consequently enormous. He was like Dr Johnson, in that he made tremendous demands of himself, with his superego flagellating him onwards. He explained what it was like: �You know, I hate to go to bed at night feeling I have done nothing useful in the day. It is the same feeling as if you had gone to bed without brushing your teeth.�

He was in one way archaic in his attitudes�driven by a lust for glory and praise, and a fear of public shame. But there was also plenty of post-Christian guilt in the mix. Whatever the exact composition of the fuel, the Churchill engine was perfectly suited to the complexities of government. He was a Whitehall warrior, and he was a details man, sometimes maddeningly so.

At the Treasury he would busy himself with such minutiae as the cost of Foreign Office telegrams. When he arrived back at the Admiralty in 1939 he was making inquiries about the number of duffel coats issued to individual ships. He took it into his head to order that backgammon, not cards, should be played on Royal Navy vessels.

If you want an example of his love of �minutes��dictated messages on government, of which he would produce dozens a day�look at this amazing document that is framed on the wall at Chartwell. It is a testy response to what seems to have been a very moderate Foreign Office suggestion, about respecting the names people give their own cities.

It hardly bears thinking about, really. Winston Churchill had plenty of narrow squeaks�but when he agreed to loiter in the tearoom of a Munich hotel, he had no idea of the risk he was running. He was almost caught in the photo-opportunity from hell: the one handshake that was likely to prove most damaging to his long-term reputation.

It was July 1932, and he had come to Germany to research the battlefield of Blenheim, with a view to adding some colour to his life of Marlborough. He was staying at one of the swishest hotels in the city, the Regina Palast�the same place, incidentally, that was to accommodate Neville Chamberlain and his wretched delegation when they came to the summit of 1938.

Already there were parades of fascist youths down the streets of Munich�right outside the hotel. Conjure up in your mind brown leather shorts and rippling thighs; oom-pa-pa marching bands and red and black swastika bunting floating in the breeze. Think beaming girls in dirndl serving foaming steins in the hotel biergarten, their blond hair whorled in strange pastry shapes around their ears.

Then add Churchill with his lively eyes and puckish curiosity, watching it all from an open window, drinking it in, working it out. His journalist son Randolph was with him on the trip, keen to find out about the Nazis; and he introduced his father to a curious geezer by the name of Ernst �Putzi� Hanfstaengl. This Putzi was a tall, gangling German-American businessman in his mid-forties. He had been educated at Harvard�so he spoke excellent English. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt he had been a member of the Hasty Pudding club, where he had developed his talent for the piano. Indeed, he was the author of some of the famous Harvard songs.

He was talkative, jokey, sardonic, with tweeds and a kipper tie that came, in the fashion of the day, only halfway down his shirt front. He was also a leading Nazi and intimate of Hitler, for whom he acted as a kind of international spin-doctor.

One night Winston, Randolph and Putzi Hanfstaengl stayed up round the piano; and though it is not clear whether Churchill followed his normal practice of singing lustily and tunelessly along, he was certainly pleased to find that Putzi knew many of his favourite tunes. At the end of this enjoyable recital, Putzi started rhapsodising about Hitler, and his successes in revitalising Germany.

Churchill immediately asked about Hitler�s anti-Semitism. Putzi tried to allay his fears. As Hanfstaengl later wrote: �I tried to give as mild an account as I could, saying that the problem was the influx of eastern European Jews and the excessive representation of their co-religionists in the professions.�

Hmmm, said Churchill: �Tell your boss from me that anti-semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.� This is a racing expression. It is a polite, upper-class English way of saying that in bashing the Jews, Hitler was backing the wrong horse.

I tell you what, Putzi told Churchill. He should meet Hitler. It would be a piece of cake, perhaps literally. It seemed that Hitler came to this very hotel, every afternoon at 5 p.m. They could bond over a couple of slices of Black Forest gateau. Putzi was sure that the F�hrer would be �very glad� to meet the English party.

Churchill�s natural journalistic curiosity was aroused�and indeed Randolph was almost certainly angling for just such a meeting. As Churchill said later in his memoirs: �I had no national prejudices against Hitler at this time. I knew little of his doctrine or record and nothing of his character.�

For two days Churchill and Randolph waited; sometimes in the American bar, sometimes in the sunny biergarten outside. It is eerie to think of our hero, kicking his heels like a stringer correspondent in some Munich hotel, and waiting to be favoured with an audience by a man fourteen years his junior who was to go on to become his bitterest enemy.

Imagine if they had met. Churchill would have joined the embarrassing roll-call of British MPs and aristocrats to be pictured with a leader who was to become a universal by-word for evil. Halifax; Chamberlain; Lloyd George; Edward VIII; they all made that goof.

(The only man to come through it with colours flying was Churchill�s parliamentary aide Bob Boothby, MP, who famously replied to Hitler�s megalomaniacal greeting of �Heil Hitler!� with the only logical response: �Heil Boothby!� said Boothby.)

If Hitler had come into that hotel tearoom or bar, Churchill would have been forced at the least to be courteous, if not cordial�and that would not have looked good in 1940.

The interesting question is why Hitler chose not to come. He met plenty of other people in Munich. He dazzled Unity Mitford, for instance, and even bought her tea. Why shouldn�t he have seen a man who was famous throughout England, had held most of the great offices of state, and who had a formidable reputation for foreign affairs?

Before Putzi went off to fix the momentous encounter, he asked Churchill to give him something to go on. Were there any questions that the Englishman wanted to ask, so as to serve as the basis for their discussions? Yes, said Churchill. He returned to the point that exercised him.

�Why is your chief so violent about the Jews?� Churchill asked Putzi Hanfstaengl. �I can quite understand being angry with the Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I can understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in any walk of life; but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?�

With these unimpeachably liberal, humane and Churchillian sentiments in his ears, Putzi returned to the F�hrer; and got nowhere.

�What part does Churchill play?� sneered the Nazi leader. �He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.�

To which Hanfstaengl replied: �People say the same about you.�

I reckon Hitler decided to swerve Churchill not just because he thought he was washed up, kaput, finito. It was because he didn�t like the sound of this boisterous and opinionated English fellow, who was so fervent about democracy and so mysteriously squeamish about anti-Semitism.

He avoided the Regina Palast hotel until the Churchill party was gone; and for the second time in history�they were apparently only a few hundred yards from each other in the trenches in 1916�the two men came close, but never met. Later, of course, Hitler was to issue plenty of invitations to meet Churchill in public, when such a meeting would have been obviously to the Nazis� advantage; and Churchill always declined.

Right at the beginning of Germany�s nightmare, before Hitler had even become Chancellor, Churchill spotted the evil at the heart of Nazi ideology. There is something innocent in the way he phrases the question to Putzi: �what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth?� In the months and years that followed, Churchill�s puzzlement was to turn to outrage.

While Nazism remained obdurately fashionable in some parts of British society, Churchill campaigned with growing vehemence against Hitler�s mistreatment of minorities. It helped that he had been to Germany. He had drunk in the atmosphere: he had actually seen the files of young men and women, fit, tanned, full of revanchist excitement.

On 23 November 1932 he made a prescient speech to Parliament. He observed that �all these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons.� When they had the weapons, he prophesied, they would use them to ask for the return of their lost territories. France, Belgium, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia�they were all in peril, said Churchill. A �war mentality� was springing up across Europe. It was time to tell the British people the truth about the danger, he said. They were a tough people, a robust people, the British: they could take it, he said. Others, of course, said he was being alarmist: a warmonger.

Six years later he was to be proved crushingly and overwhelmingly correct in his analysis. That was the basis of much of his prestige in 1940�that he had made the right call about Hitler, almost from the start. He put his shirt on a horse called anti-Nazism, and he did it early, at a time when no one much fancied the nag, and his bet came off in spectacular fashion.

To some extent all politicians are gamblers with events. They try to anticipate what will happen, to put themselves �on the right side of history�, to show off their judgement to best advantage. In 1902 Churchill observed that a politician needs �the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability to explain afterward why it didn�t happen.�

He loved staking his reputation in the way that he loved all risky activities�flying a plane, riding along the front at Malakand, crawling around no man�s land. It gave him the chance to test his egocentric thesis that he was special, that somehow the bullets would whistle past him; that a guardian angel or daemon hovered over him, that Lady Luck was on his side and really rather doted on him. He gambled for money, at the tables of Deauville or Le Touquet, and one of his secretaries describes him leaping out of a taxi and rushing into the casino at Monte Carlo�shirt-tails flapping�and returning a short time later with enough to buy their rail fare home.

No other politician had taken so many apparently risky positions; no other politician had been involved in so many cock-ups�not only living to tell the tale, but flourishing in spite of them. The surprising thing, by the time he lounged in that Munich hotel in 1932, was that he had any reputation left to wager.

�

NOW IS THE moment to look in a bit more detail at the lurid series of disasters that traditionally landmark accounts of his pre-1940 career. We need to consider the interaction between Churchill and these events: the extent to which he was responsible�and, indeed, the extent to which they were really disasters. Let us begin with:

The French sailors had no time to get angry and barely a moment to prepare their souls for the end. When the bombardment began at 5.54 p.m. on 3 July 1940 the dominant feeling was surely one of total disbelief. Those were British ships�the very ones they had cheered when they arrived in the morning. They were British sailors; allies�the same people they had been out with on shore leave in Gibraltar, painting the town red.

They were meant to be friends, for God�s sake�and yet for ten minutes those friends sent down a rain of death: a shelling that is still recognised as one of the most concentrated big-gun naval barrages in history. Out of the 15-inch muzzles of HMS Hood�then the largest battleship ever built�came the first salvo, and at 2,500 mph those three-quarter-ton projectiles described their elegant arcs across the azure sky.

The light was ideal. The targets were motionless. The conditions were altogether perfect. Then the other British ships joined in, and the explosions became so loud that the Frenchmen who survived reported a bleeding from their ears. HMS Valiant fired her guns, along with HMS Resolution.

The gunners toiled in the heat, sweat running down their half-naked forms, firing and firing until the colossal steel tubes were red hot. Soon they were getting their range, starting to find the French ships nicely. Since the mouth of the harbour had just been mined by British planes, there was nothing the French could do. As one British sailor said many years later, it was like �shooting fish in a barrel�.

On the French side, witnesses spoke of sheets of flame, and balls of fire landing in the sea; of men with their heads missing, and men so badly burned or maimed that they called to their colleagues with the terrifying plea of �ach�ve-moi!�: finish me off! Then a British shell hit the magazine of France�s most advanced warship, the Bretagne�and the noise was like the death of Krakatoa.

A mushroom cloud rose over the harbour and within minutes the Bretagne had capsized. Some of her crew leapt into the evil black sea, bubbling like chip fat, where they held their breath and swam underwater to escape the burning oil. Most of the complement was drowned.

Altogether the British shot 150 shells into the fortified harbour at Mers-el-K�bir, near the Algerian town of Oran, on that cloudless day in 1940. By the time their guns fell silent, five French ships were crippled and one destroyed; and 1,297 French seamen had been killed. A massacre had taken place; and there were plenty who were willing to call it a war crime.

Across France there was a sense of indignation, a hatred that the Nazi propaganda machine scarcely needed to fan. For the first time since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the British had fired on the French and with murderous intent. Posters were circulated everywhere of a French sailor drowning amid the inferno, or of the British war leader as a bloodthirsty Moloch. Relations between London and the new Vichy regime were ended, and to this day the memory of Mers-el-K�bir is so toxic as to be taboo in discussions between Britain and France.

If it had been left to him, said Admiral James Somerville, he would never have given the order. The British sailors were sick at heart as they saw what they had done; incredulous that these were really their instructions. Generations of French schoolchildren have been taught that there was one man who decreed that massacre and whose busy fingers wrote out that murderous ultimatum. Those teachers are right.

When Churchill rose to explain his actions the next day in the House of Commons, he expected to be assailed on every side. He had unleashed the most lethal modern weaponry on effectively defenceless targets�and on sailors with whom Britain was not at war.

As he later admitted, he felt �ashamed� as he stood up to speak, before a packed Chamber. His typed notes trembled in his hands. He gave a full account of the events that led up to the disaster. He wound up by saying that he would leave the judgement of his actions to Parliament. �I leave it also to the nation, and to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.�

With this he sat down; and something peculiar happened. To his surprise, there was no disapproving silence. On the contrary, they were cheering. They were on their feet and waving their Order Papers in scenes of jubilation such as the Commons had not seen for years. His cabinet colleagues were clustering around and clapping him on the back�in what seems to us a bizarre and tasteless response to the deaths of almost 1,300 Frenchmen.

Amid the rejoicing sat Churchill, a hunched figure in his black jacket and striped grey trousers, with his chin in his hands and tears flowing down his cheeks.

To understand this tragedy, you must appreciate how much Churchill loved France. As his doctor Charles Moran once observed, �France is civilization.�

He had grown up in France�s belle �poque; Paris was the city where his parents chose to get married, the city of lights and infinite diversions, the place he went to spend his gambling winnings�on books and �in other directions�. Even for an Englishman as patriotic as Winston Churchill there was no shame in acknowledging the superiority of the French quality of life: the wine, the food, the cheese; the elegance of the chateaux; the fun and style of the casinos; the pleasure of bathing on the C�te d�Azur, and of trying to capture its outstanding natural beauty in paint. French was the only foreign language in which he even attempted to make himself understood. But it went deeper than that.

Churchill believed in the greatness of France, and it came as a terrible shock, in the opening weeks of his premiership, to see the humiliation of the army that had once been led by Napoleon, the man whose bust reposed on his desk. He had done everything in his power to keep France in the war, to put some lead in the pencil of the French politicians and generals. As the news got worse and worse, he flew out to France himself�on four occasions�where he tried to revivify the despondent French leadership with his manful Franglais. He risked his life just to get there.

On one occasion he was flying back in his Flamingo when the pilot had to dive suddenly to avoid two German planes that were strafing fishing boats near Le Havre. That was on 12 June�and thirty-six hours later the French telephoned again, this time to demand an urgent meeting at Tours. He turned up at Hendon to find that the weather was too bad for take-off.

�To hell with that,� said the sixty-five-year-old aviator. �I�m going, whatever happens. This is too serious a situation to bother about the weather.� They duly arrived at Tours in a thunderstorm�a pretty hairy experience even today, and which must have been unnerving for Beaverbrook and Halifax, who had come with him on the mission.

The runway had been freshly cratered by the Germans, and there were some French ground crew lounging around who had no idea who they were. Churchill had to explain that he was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and that he needed a �voiture�.

When they got to the prefecture they found that there still didn�t seem to be a welcoming party; still no one recognised them. They wandered around the corridors until eventually the British delegation were taken to a nearby restaurant for cold chicken and cheese. Poor old Halifax: I don�t suppose it was his style of diplomacy.

At last the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, turned up, and asked miserably whether Britain would release France from her obligations, and allow her to surrender. Churchill tried one last time to apply his patent morale-boosting electro-convulsive Franglais therapy to the recumbent French. There was no response.

The patient had expired; and on 14 June the Germans were goose-stepping down the Champs-�lys�es. Marshal P�tain�hollow eyed, snaggle toothed and utterly defeatist�was in charge. The capitulation was complete; the French had passed up the chance to fight on from North Africa, and the British were now alarmed about what they would do next, and in particular about what would happen to the French fleet.

This was the second biggest in Europe after the Royal Navy, bigger than the German Kriegsmarine. Some of the French ships were state-of-the-art, better equipped even than the British vessels. If they fell into German hands they could be lethal to British interests. And what, frankly, could stop them falling into German hands? Everyone had seen the speed with which the Germans had overwhelmed the Maginot Line. Nowhere was safe from the panzers.

If Britain was to fight on, Churchill had to eliminate the risk those French ships embodied. And there was a further consideration. If Britain was credibly to fight on he had to show to the world that the country he led was truly made of fighting stuff; that Britain would do whatever it took to win. This was crucial, because there were sceptics at home and abroad.

Remember how frail his position still was, how distrusted he was by the Tory Party. The Leader of the Labour Opposition, George Lansbury, had resigned because he objected to war, and there were plenty of others who took the same view on both sides of the House. The Lords was full of Stilton-eating surrender monkeys�arch-appeasers such as Lord Brocket, the Earl of Londonderry, Lord Ponsonby, the Earl of Danby, as well as Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, a flamboyant and charming personality who said that �the war was part of a Jewish and Masonic plot�. Those were the days when Tory prime ministers had to pay more attention to the views of dukes and earls.

These would-be quislings were not alone. Rab Butler, then a junior Foreign Office minister, was caught telling a Swedish diplomat that he thought Britain should do a deal�if Hitler offered the right terms. Even Churchill�s buddy and supposed ally Beaverbrook was in favour of a negotiated peace. The city was full�as it always is�of people who preferred to make money than go to war.

There were sceptics in the ranks of his own closest officials; perhaps not surprisingly, since they had all until recently been serving Neville Chamberlain. His Private Secretary, Eric Seal, muttered about his boss and his �blasted rhetoric�, and indeed he was among the few who remained immune to the new Prime Minister�s charm (�fetch Seal from his ice floes�, Churchill would say).

Worse still, there were doubters among the most important audience of all�in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The American electorate opposed involvement in the war by a huge majority�thirteen to one, according to one poll. President Roosevelt had promised that he would not �entangle� America in any European conflict, and he knew that if he broke that promise he would be punished at the presidential elections in November that year.

These days there are many conservative American politicians who ritually denounce Neville Chamberlain, and his spaghetti-like refusal to stand up to Hitler. The whole notion of appeasement has become a kind of cuss-word in American politics�and reasonably so. But it is worth remembering that in May and June of 1940, when Britain stood alone against what was by then well known to be a racist and anti-Semitic tyranny, there were some senators of the United States who did not exactly bust a gut to help; and certainly not immediately.

The US Secretary for War was an ardent isolationist called Harry Woodring, who spent the days between 23 May and 3 June deliberately delaying the shipment to Britain of war material that had already been condemned as surplus. He insisted that the goods must be properly advertised, so that anyone could buy them before they were sold to the British. This was while British soldiers were dying on the beaches of Dunkirk, in the biggest military disaster of the last 100 years.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee blocked the sale of ships and planes; the War Department refused to hand over some bombs the poor French had already paid for; and a senator called David Walsh managed to scupper a deal by which Britain was to buy twenty motor torpedo boats: useful things to have, you might have thought, if you were facing the prospect of a seaborne invasion by the Nazis.

Other Americans, of course, were far more sympathetic. They included much of the media and the President himself. But Roosevelt was limited in what he could do by the terms of the Neutrality Act, and by the general climate of the times. He also hesitated by reason of simple prudence. On 15 May�barely a week after taking the reins�Churchill sent him a letter in which he requested military help, in the form of some antiquated American destroyers.

This appeal was not perhaps phrased as judiciously as it might have been. He begged, he pleaded for the destroyers, and he concluded with a veiled threat: that if Britain fell, then there would be nothing to stop Hitler expropriating the entire British navy, and using those ships against the United States herself. In this first substantive exchange of that pivotal relationship, Churchill failed to imagine how his correspondent might react.

Roosevelt took one look at this communication, and concluded from its note of wheedling and blustering desperation that perhaps Britain might indeed be about to go the way of every other European country; in which case what on earth was the point of sending some destroyers, whose guns could simply be turned back on the USA?

Churchill had inadvertently made a point against himself; he had excited and not allayed the anxiety in Washington about a British collapse. Then there was one other international observer who was known to have his doubts about Britain, and her ability to fight on: and that was Admiral Fran�ois Darlan of the French fleet.

This Darlan was a prickly customer, who had become so enraged at what he saw as the inadequacies of Britain�s assistance to France that he became positively Anglophobe. At one stage he had to be calmed down, and reminded that he was fighting the Boche and not the rosbifs. He had met Churchill during those ghastly funereal encounters in early June, and he had assured him that the French fleet would not fall into German hands. But what trust could possibly be placed in the word of Darlan?

He might well be an honourable man; he might believe it was unthinkable that his fleet should be used by the Germans�but then plenty of unthinkable things had already taken place. As long as the fleet was within German reach, there seemed little to stop those boats eventually flying a Nazi flag. That was not a risk that Churchill thought he could run.

Some historians have been strongly critical of Churchill�s behaviour. In a fascinating study, Richard Lamb has argued that he was far too brutal and impetuous; that more time should have been given to his admirals to sort it out with the French; that Churchill sanitised the official history after the war�exploiting the fact that he was Prime Minister again in 1951�and effectively stifled criticism of his �butchery�.

What is certainly true is that Churchill was in charge of the whole process, driving events like a bulldozer. As soon as France had fallen, he became obsessed with the risk posed by those sleek, fast, modern French ships. In the War Cabinet on 22 June he noted the qualities of the Richelieu and the Jean Bart and others. They should be bombed, he urged, or they must be penned in their harbours by British mines. Their captains should surrender or be treated as traitors.

Halifax led the rest of the cabinet in trying to cool him down. �All efforts must be made to make the parleys a success,� he said; but two days later Churchill was at it again. The armistice had come into effect. France was out of the war. What were we going to do about those damn ships?

Now the naval chiefs joined the cabinet in opposing violence against the French. Even the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, normally a Churchill yes-man, said he could not recommend an operation against them.

On Churchill bashed and butted like a bull at a barn door. In Gibraltar the British admirals held a conference, at which every flag officer was invited to give an opinion, as well as all the naval liaison officers from the French ports in North Africa. Was it a good idea to prepare some kind of action against the French fleet?

No, said the experts, the men on the spot; the very threat of force would be �disastrous� and more likely to turn the French against the British. They protested in vain. Churchill trampled their hesitations with autocratic indifference. Lamb argues that at this stage in the war he was virtually a military dictator.

By 1 July the chiefs of staff and the cabinet had been bludgeoned into seeing things the Churchill way. Operation Catapult was launched, to neutralise and if necessary to sink the French fleet. It didn�t matter to Churchill that the French were doing their best to honour what they thought were their commitments. They scuttled ships and submarines in French ports, and the remainder they indeed sailed away from German-occupied France. The Richelieu and twenty-four others sailed from Brest to Morocco; the Jean Bart sailed from St Nazaire; others left Lorient.

In fact the French left not a single vessel in the German-occupied zone�and yet Churchill still felt that �at all costs, at all risks, in one way or another we must make sure that the Navy of France did not fall into the wrong hands and then perhaps bring us and others to ruin.�

Before the armistice the British had assured the French that it would be satisfactory if the French fleet were taken to North Africa, or to Toulon, outside the German zone. Now perfidious Albion was again going back on her word.

On 3 July the British task force under James Somerville arrived outside Mers-el-K�bir, and the French sailors were thrilled�thinking they would shortly be together on the high seas, taking the fight to the Germans. Then the British planes appeared in the sky, dropping mines in the harbour mouth. French suspicions grew.

A British envoy was sent to negotiate with the French admiral Marcel Gensoul. At first Gensoul refused to see him, thinking it was beneath his dignity to parley with a mere captain�but Captain��Hookie� Holland managed to hand over the ultimatum from Churchill.

The French were told to scuttle their ships, or sail them either to British ports or to the West Indies; or face the consequences. The day wore on. The tension grew. Hookie Holland bobbed up and down in his lighter, surrounded by French vessels. Finally at 14.42 Gensoul signalled that he was ready to receive the British delegate for �honourable discussions�. By 16.15 Holland was on board the French flagship, the Dunkerque, and they began to make progress.

Gensoul showed him orders from Darlan, making it clear that if Germany tried to seize the boats, he should sail to America or scuttle them. �If we had known all this before, it would have made all the difference,� said Holland. Gensoul then went farther: he was willing to disarm all his ships, even though this meant exceeding his instructions. But by then it was too late.

Darlan had sent naval reinforcements; there was no saying when they would arrive. A full-scale battle between the British and the French fleet was in prospect. Churchill sent a short telegram: �Settle matters quickly�. The fate of the sailors was sealed. The bombardment began.

As he said later, �It was a terrible decision, like taking the life of one�s own child to save the state.� In its icy logic, Churchill�s decision was also 100 per cent correct.

Whichever way you cut it, the French should have recognised that their ships were now effectively forfeit to the Germans, or at best they were bargaining counters in negotiations with the Nazis. Lamb argues that the Germans merely wanted to �control� the French fleet in the sense of �check� or �supervise���control� as in passport �kontrol�.

That is surely implausible. The Germans had captured Paris; they had their boot on the French neck. Ultimately they could have made the French do whatever they wanted with those ships. The French guarantees were worthless, and they should have recognised as much. Darlan and his admirals should have swallowed their pride and abandoned all pretence of autonomy and done what Churchill suggested: sailed to British ports, or to the Caribbean�and if he had done so, Darlan would have been a hero.

It was Churchill�s duty as Prime Minister to remove any threat to his country�s independence; and he was right to be ruthless at Mers-el-K�bir, because the following week there began the Battle of Britain.

�

THROUGHOUT THAT lovely summer the British craned their necks to watch one of the decisive battles of world history. They watched the destiny of the world written in the vapour trails of the planes that tussled in the skies above southern England. They saw blackened Germans tottering up their garden paths and they found bits of plane on suburban streets.

They watched their RAF protectors as they performed their astonishing aerobatics, sometimes bringing down the enemy, sometimes crashing in dreadful blazes or heaps of tangled metal. Week after week they had a clear sense of what was at stake: that this attack on the RAF was the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Britain. They had every reason to think that they were next on Hitler�s itinerary of conquest.

It is sometimes said that Churchill exaggerated the threat of invasion, to promote national cohesion and get the country behind him. I am not sure that is so. He believed the threat was so imminent in June 1940 that he took to the firing range at Chequers, and began practising with his revolver and his Mannlicher rifle. Every day he would study the tides to work out when the Germans might come.

The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung prophesied on 14 July that London would follow Warsaw, and be reduced to ashes. On 19 July Hitler spoke to the Reichstag and offered Britain a choice between peace and �unending suffering and misery�. He drew up the plans: Operation Sea Lion, he called it, a multi-pronged seaborne invasion of the south coast.

If Hitler had won control of the skies and the seas, there is little doubt that he would have gone for it. He had assembled 1,918 barges off the coast of Holland, and if he had been able to convey his force across the Channel, it is hard to see how Britain could have fought on for long. The army had been routed at Dunkirk; there were no fortifications or fall-back positions.

The country had not been successfully invaded for 900 years�and so London was not only the biggest and most sprawling city in Europe (a great fat cow, as Churchill called the capital). It was also the least defended: the only surviving walls and battlements were made by the Romans, and they weren�t in great shape.

Hitler had a giant strategic imperative in attacking Britain: he had to knock out Britain before he went east, and took on Russia. Even in July 1940, the whole shape and dynamics of the war were clear to Winston Churchill�just as he had foreseen the shape of the First World War as well.

�Hitler must invade or fail. If he fails, he is bound to go east, and fail he will,� he said at Chequers on 14 July. He saw, with his unerring and pellucid understanding of the big picture, that if Britain could survive, if Britain could hang on�then Hitler would lose, because not even the Nazi war machine could fight on two fronts at once.

It was thanks to Churchill�and at crucial moments, thanks to him alone�that Britain did hang on. It is clear that there was something utterly magical about his leadership that summer. With his poetic and sometimes Shakespearean diction he made people feel noble, exalted�that what they were doing was better and more important than anything they had done before.

He mentally elided ideas of Englishness and freedom, and it helped that the weather was fine, because there is nowhere lovelier than England in June; and perhaps that gentle beauty sharpened the general sentiment he encouraged: that the threat must be repelled, and that this was an island to fight and to die for. He gave the people an image of themselves: as a tiny band of heroes�analogous to the tiny band of RAF pilots�holding out against tyranny and against the odds, the story from Thermopylae to the Defence of Rorke�s Drift in the Zulu war�the eternal and uplifting story of the few against the many.

In this mood of adrenalin-fuelled exhilaration the British indeed accomplished extraordinary things. There is only one period that I can discover in the last 120 years when British manufacturing output overtook Germany�s�and that was the summer of 1940. Britain produced more planes than Germany; and by the autumn they had seen off the Luftwaffe. Goering made the fatal mistake of turning the attention of his fighters and bombers to the towns of Britain, and giving up on Dowding�s airfields.

The Germans might so easily have won. There were some evenings when every plane available to Britain was up in the sky, desperate to hold them off. And if Goering had controlled the skies, then that invasion fleet could have made an untroubled crossing of the Channel; and that armada would have been all the more frightening and lethal�and Hitler�s confidence would have been all the greater�for the addition of those French warships.

The German fleet had been badly knocked about in the Norwegian campaign; with the addition of the French, they might have been invincible. What Churchill did at Mers-el-K�bir was indeed butchery, but it was necessary. It was the chilling and calculated act of a skull-piling warlord from the steppes of central Asia.

But that is what he was: a warlord. He was leading and directing military action in a way that is unthinkable for a modern democratic politician. He had done his best for France, right up until the capitulation and beyond; he had made his generals commit men and material to the battle long after it was obvious that the game was up�indeed, he is blamed for needlessly throwing away the 51st Highland Division, many of whom were killed or captured, and for wasting time and energy by trying to create an Asterix-like redoubt against the Nazis in Brittany.

Now that France had fallen, he drew the only logical conclusion�and the real tragedy is surely that neither Admiral Gensoul nor Darlan could see how radically their world had changed. I think I can understand why the House of Commons was so elated by this depressing and in many ways disgusting massacre.

It was partly that Britain had finally done something warlike: after a year of dither, shambles and evacuations�from Norway to Dunkirk�the British armed forces had �won� something, no matter how one-sided the contest or how hollow that victory.

More importantly the MPs could tell from the event that the man they had reluctantly commissioned to lead them had a streak of belligerent ruthlessness unlike anyone else. They knew that no other politician had the guts, the nerve, to do what he had just done. They could suddenly see how Britain might win.

That was why they waved their Order Papers. And that was the message that Churchill sent via Mers-el-K�bir to Washington, where they were still refusing to send the ancient destroyers: that Britain was not going to give in, but would do whatever it took.

Churchill ended that speech on Oran to the House of Commons by saying that he left the judgement of his actions �to the nation and the United States�; and the second audience was crucial. The son of Jennie Jerome knew that he had no hope of eventual victory unless and until he could also embroil his motherland.

From the very beginning of his premiership, he saw what he had to do. Randolph Churchill has recorded how on 18 May 1940 he went into his father�s bedroom at Admiralty House. He found the Prime Minister standing in front of his basin and shaving with an old-fashioned Valet razor.

The King was in a state of agitation, bordering on mild panic. It was 11 p.m. on a Friday night, and he still had not heard from his most important and in some ways his most insubordinate subject. He rang his Private Secretary. Any news from Churchill? There was no news.

The date was 3 June 1944, and in theory there were just two days to go until D-Day. The whole war depended on this operation, the largest and most complex military undertaking in history; the fate of the world seemed to hang in the balance�and Churchill was being utterly impossible.

The sixty-nine-year-old veteran of wars on four continents was insisting on one more hare-brained escapade. He was exercising his right, as Minister of Defence, to be conveyed on HMS Belfast to the coast of Normandy, where he would personally oversee the first bombardment of the German positions. He didn�t want to go on D-Day plus one, or D-Day plus two: he planned to be there with the first wave of ships and men; to see the water roiling with machines and blood; to hear the crump of the shells.

The idea was nuts. That was certainly the view of the King�s Private Secretary, Sir Alan or �Tommy� Lascelles. The first he had heard of it was on 30 May, when the King emerged from a t�te-�-t�te lunch with Churchill at Buckingham Palace. Churchill had confided that he intended to go and watch events from the British battle-cruiser. The King had immediately said that he would go, too; a suggestion that Churchill did nothing to discourage.

�This will never do,� said Lascelles to himself. But at first he tried to be casual. Would it be quite fair to the Queen? he asked the King. It would be necessary to advise the young Princess Elizabeth on a choice of Prime Minister�in the perfectly conceivable event of both the heads of the British state and government ending up at the bottom of the Channel. And it was just unfair, added Lascelles, on the poor captain of the Belfast, who would have to worry about his sacred charges in what would almost certainly be an inferno of fire.

Hmm, said the King, who had no desire to be accused of such selfishness. He could see the point. Within a few minutes the courtier had talked down the Sovereign. But what about Churchill?

Quickly Lascelles drafted a letter for the King�which George VI wrote out obediently, in his own hand�and pelted round to Downing Street.

We have seen the room where he was born. Let me take you now to the room where Churchill spent his last few days as wartime Prime Minister. It is a sad sort of place�like the frowsty lounge of a 1920s golf club or hotel. Outside the sun is shining; there are glorious phloxes and roses in the beds; and yet it is a bit Stygian here at the heart of this bogus essay in supersized steel-framed stockbroker Tudor.

The decor is drab. The accent is on oak�heavy oaken chairs, oaken fireplace, and a great oak banister writhing up to a sinister minstrels� gallery. I stand looking at the table where they sat, the three little flags in the middle all drooping and dusty. I feel the unease and the hypocrisy of the occasion.

It was here that he came on 17 July 1945, to the Cecilienhof, one of the few buildings in Potsdam not damaged by Allied bombs. Originally intended for some minor offshoot of the Hohenzollern dynasty, it looked then as now like a vague German attempt to build an English country house. It was the last and least successful of his wartime conferences. He had tried and failed to hold the meeting in Britain�indeed, he never succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to visit Britain throughout the war. Now the summiteers were in the Russian zone of occupied Germany�in Potsdam, the home of German kings and kaisers.

This was the German Versailles, a place of palaces and pavilions, of lawns and lakes, a suburb of Berlin that today has UN world heritage status. In 1945 the greater part of the site was in ruins.

On the night of 14 April of that year the RAF had sent 500 Lancaster bombers, and dropped 1,780 tons of high explosive. Churchill was the author of this strategy; Churchill had insisted on area bombing�and with the specific and avowed intent of terrorising the civilian population. He pursued the aerial bombing�of doubtful military benefit�mainly because it was the only way he had of attacking Germany.

Short of launching a second front, it was the only means of expressing his pent-up aggression, of showing the Russians and the Americans that Britain, too, could inflict violence upon the enemy. It is true that he was himself seized by doubts. �Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?� he said suddenly one evening at Chartwell when he watched footage of burning German towns.

He was alarmed by the controversy over the Dresden fireball, in which 25,000 were killed and in many cases carbonised by British aerial bombing (and which he denounced in a suppressed memo as a �mere act of terror and wanton destruction�), and he was furious when he found that the RAF had been so culturally insensitive as to attack the palaces of Potsdam. Now he came to see the results of a policy from which he could not easily dissociate himself.

More than 1,500 had died and 24,000 had been made homeless in Potsdam alone. As he picked his way through the rubble of Berlin he was filled with a typical compassion. �My hate died with their surrender,� he said in his memoirs. �I was much moved by their thin haggard looks and threadbare clothes.�

Churchill�s war was never with the German people. It was the �Narzis� that he wanted to smash; and now that he was at the apogee of his success, he found himself in the presence of another enemy, and one he had feared long before Nazism was even born: just as savage; just as ideologically driven; and in some ways more difficult to fight.

The Potsdam table is large and round, about ten foot in diameter, and reputedly made for the occasion by Russian carpenters. The massive oak is covered, as it was then, by a thick red felt cloth: perhaps in honour of the Russians whose red flag had been hoisted over Berlin, and who had organised the conference. It looks like the perfect place for poker; and there was one of the Big Three who seemed to have all the cards.

After four years of savage warfare, in which the Nazis and the Soviets had held each other by the throat like a pair of hydrophobic dogs, it is incredible to think that Stalin could still wield 6.4 million men in the European theatre alone. Russia had lost 20 million�and yet she ended the war as by far the most powerful military force in Europe.

In Stalin, the Soviet Union had a twinkling-eyed tyrant of total cynicism and ruthlessness. We have already seen how he baited Churchill in 1942, sneering at the alleged cowardliness of the British army. That was his style: sneer, flatter, fawn, bully, kill.

Stalin had risen to power by liquidating his enemies, and he maintained power by systematic murder of entire groups of people�the Tsarist officer corps, the kulaks, counter-revolutionaries, Poles, whoever stood in his way. He had the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands before the Second World War had even begun. It was in Tehran in November 1943 that Churchill got a flavour of his homicidal mania; and also of the eerie willingness of the Americans to indulge him.

The discussions of the Big Three had turned to Europe after the war. Stalin was already insisting that Poland should be bisected, and much of that country retained by Russia. Then, at the dinner in the evening, he sketched out his plans for post-war Germany.

Stalin: �Fifty thousand Germans must be killed. Their General Staff must go.�

WSC: �I will not be party to any butchery in cold blood. What happens in hot blood is another matter.�

Stalin: �Fifty thousand MUST be shot.�

WSC (getting red in the face): �I would rather be taken out now and shot than so disgrace my country.�

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: �I have a compromise to propose. Not 50,000 but only 49,000 should be shot.�

At this hilarious sally, the President�s son Elliott Roosevelt rose to say that he cordially agreed with Stalin�s proposal, and that he was sure it would receive the full backing of Congress. Churchill then left the room in fury, and it was only with some difficulty that he could be persuaded to return.

What the Americans did not understand�or did not choose to understand�was that Stalin was only half joking; perhaps not even joking at all. To shoot 50,000 people in cold blood was nothing to Stalin; as he was said to have put it, not a tragedy but a statistic.

Things had been no better at Yalta in February 1945, where Stalin irresistibly and blandly continued to push his agenda: the Soviet domination of eastern Europe. Roosevelt was by now desperately ill, passing in and out of consciousness; and Churchill simply did not have the military muscle to oppose the Russian demands. Stalin was charm itself, comically showing off his limited command of English (�You said it!� and �The toilet is over there� were among the few but surprisingly idiomatic phrases he deployed); but the message was increasingly clear. Russia was to retain all the gains of the odious Molotov�Ribbentrop pact, and to command all of eastern Europe and the Balkans�with the exception of Greece (�This brand I snatched from the burning,� as Churchill boasted, �on Christmas day�).

The Baltic states were to go to Russia. Poland was to go to Russia�Poland, the country whose very sovereignty and integrity had been the cause of the war; Poland was once again betrayed, sacrificed and carved up to please a totalitarian regime. Again and again, Churchill found himself isolated, as Roosevelt sided with the Russian dictator.

When that great American President finally died on 12 April 1945, Churchill took what seems now to be the astonishing decision not to go to his funeral: astonishing when you consider how integral their relationship had been to Allied success; not so astonishing when you think of the gradual estrangement that had begun between them. America was still driving a very hard bargain over British war loans, and had been responsible for such minor vexations as cancelling meat exports to Britain. But the fundamental divergence was on the matter of Stalin, Russia and the post-war world.

On 4 May 1945 Churchill wrote to Eden that the Russian coup over Poland �constitutes an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel�. On 13 May he cabled the new President Truman to say that an �iron curtain� had descended across the Russian front�which shows that the phrase, later to become so controversial, had been used by Churchill almost a year before his Fulton, Missouri, speech. By the end of that month Churchill was so alarmed by the prospect of a communist and Russian-dominated eastern Europe that he proposed an operation that has only recently been disinterred, mainly by the historian David Reynolds. On 24 May he asked British military planners to look into what he called Operation Unthinkable�by which British and American forces would actually turn on the Russians, and push them back from eastern Europe. How would they do it? They would enlist the fighters who had proved most effective of all: the Wehrmacht.

Churchill suggested to Montgomery that captured German weapons should be stored in such a way as to be capable of being conveniently returned to the de-Nazified German troops; and used for an assault against the Soviets. All that remained secret until 1998, and it is probably just as well that it did.

Even if it had been desirable, there was no way Churchill could have persuaded the Americans to take part in such a plan. To understand the comparative American indulgence of the Russians, you have to remember how the world looked to Washington in 1944 and early 1945. The war in the Pacific was by no means over. The Japanese were offering frenzied and suicidal resistance. The Japanese population was being schooled in guerrilla warfare�even to fight with spears. The Americans knew that eventually they would win�but they feared (in spite of possessing the bomb) that the loss of life would be horrific. They hoped that the Russians would come in decisively on their side.

And even if Churchill could have persuaded the Americans, there remains the prior question: what of his own army, and his own British electorate? What would they have said, if they had been told that it was now time to turn on the Russians? It is safe to say that if the British public had heard of Operation Unthinkable, they would have reacted with bewilderment and outrage. They knew little or nothing of Stalin�s purges. In the minds of many British people, the Russians were heroes who had shown a courage and spirit of self-sacrifice that put other armies (including their own) to shame.

In popular imagination Stalin was not yet a blood-soaked tyrant; he was Uncle Joe, with his folksy pipe and moustache. If the British public had been told in 1945 that it was now time to turn their guns on Moscow, I am afraid they would have drawn the conclusion that Churchill had mounted his ancient hobby-horse of anti-communism�and that he was both wrong and deluded. The idea was never a runner, as British military planners made clear in their response to Churchill. Operation Unthinkable would require vast quantities of German troops and American resources; and I don�t suppose that conclusion came as any real surprise to the British Prime Minister.

As ever, he was allowing his mind to roam, to go through all the logical options�no matter how mad-sounding they might be. It says something for his undiminished martial instinct�after six grinding and debilitating years�that he should even contemplate the possibility of such an action. However impractical, Operation Unthinkable also reveals the depths of his anxiety about the communist threat; and here at least he was surely right.

As he looked at the map of Europe, he saw Germany in ruins, France on her knees, Britain exhausted. He saw that Russian tanks were capable of advancing to the Atlantic and to the North Sea�if they chose. They had shown their willingness to engulf the capitals of eastern Europe, and to impose a form of government that he believed to be wicked. What could be done to stop them? That was the big strategic question he posed�and a question that many Americans, for the time being, seemed to have no interest even in asking.

By the time Churchill came to leave the Potsdam conference, on 25 July, he had achieved little or nothing. He had filled the air of the dingy room with some brilliant phrases�which the interpreters had struggled to translate; but it was as if Britain was visibly continuing to shrink in the shade of the two emerging superpowers.

On the American side, Truman revealed that Washington now had the capacity to wield an atomic weapon�and refused to share the technology with Britain: which you might think a slightly offhand way to treat an ally that had honoured scrupulously the terms of the Anglo-American technology-sharing agreements. Most of the early theoretical work on nuclear fission was British, and it was all handed on a plate�along with radar and everything else�to America. In the end, Truman was to take the decision to bomb Hiroshima alone; the consultation of Churchill was a mere formality.

For the Russians, Stalin continued to play his hand with economy and skill. When he spoke, it was to the point. He was never at a loss for a fact (unlike Churchill, who sometimes had to lean back to allow his seconds to whisper in his ear); and when he thought it necessary the Russian tyrant continued to dispense his lethal charm. He told Churchill how sorry he was that he had not been more publicly effusive in thanking Britain for helping Russia. He made a great thing of gathering up the menus and going round to get Churchill�s signature. �I like that man,� Churchill was heard to say�being a bit of an old sucker for flattery.

And all the while the Bear was engulfing eastern Europe, smiling complacently as he chomped away, securing at Potsdam not just war reparations but war �booty�, carting away whatever he could to feed the Russian economy. The puppet Soviet-controlled Polish government appeared before the leaders at Potsdam. Churchill asked whether they might have some non-communists in their ranks. Nyet, was the answer.

Then on 26 July Churchill was back in London, to receive the Order of the Boot, first class, from the British public. It was now that he really showed what he was made of; as if there had been some previous doubt about the matter.

He was seventy years old; he had emerged victorious at the end of the most violent conflict humanity had ever seen. He had his memoirs to write. He had not even been to Chartwell during the war: the place had been under dustcloths. He had his fishponds to restock, his pigs to tend. He could have left public life amid the applause of a grateful nation and of a world in his immortal debt. That was not his way.

It is true that at first he found it hard to cope with the loss of his status. A black cloud descended, as his daughter Mary has recorded. His family did their best to lift his spirits, playing him favourite old tunes such as �Run, Rabbit, Run�. It wasn�t much use. He quarrelled with Clementine, who spoke of �our misery�.

Slowly, however, he began to get himself together. He went for long painting holidays to Italy (where on one occasion he tactlessly painted some bombed buildings, and got booed by the locals). He had his duties as Leader of the Opposition. He continued to denounce the �Bolshevisation� of eastern Europe, and said that the Russians were �realist-lizards of the crocodile family�. Towards the end of the year he received an interesting invitation from Truman, to come and give a speech at a �wonderful school� called Westminster College at Fulton in his home state of Missouri.

On 4 March 1946 he and Truman left the White House to make the twenty-four-hour train journey to Missouri. It is important to note that the themes of the speech had now been long in gestation, and that Churchill had by no means kept his thoughts secret. He had shared the gist with James Byrne, the US Secretary of State, who �seemed to like it very well�. He had discussed it with Clement Attlee, who wrote to him on 25 February to say, �I am sure your Fulton speech will do good.� He had shown a draft before boarding the train to Admiral Leahy, Truman�s senior Service adviser, who was (at least according to Churchill) �enthusiastic�. He continued to polish the speech as they drew into Missouri, and as they chugged by that vast river he gratified his host�s curiosity, and showed the whole thing to Truman. �He told me he thought it was admirable,� reported Churchill. And so it is.

Churchill�s speech at Fulton, Missouri, is unlike anything from modern political discourse. It has not been written on a word-processor. It has not been composed by a committee of speech writers. The thing is almost five thousand words long, and every phrase is redolent of the author.

He swoops from a Thomas Hardy-esque poetic style (the future is the �after-time�, for instance) to various hard-edged if batty proposals for defence cooperation. He at one stage proposes that every nation should commit a squadron to an international air force, to be directed by a world organisation�an idea that I have seen properly taken up only in the 1970s kids� TV programme Thunderbirds. He meditates on ideas that unite Britain and America:

It is a measure of Churchill�s prophetic numen that people will still try to invoke him as the arbiter of various modern political dilemmas. Out of his voluminous sayings a text will be found to legitimate some opinion or validate some course of action�and that text will be brandished in a semi-religious way, as though the project had been posthumously hallowed by Churchill the sage and wartime leader.

There is no question upon which his departed spirit has been more regularly consulted than the intractable business of Britain�s relations with �Europe�. It is a controversy that has bedevilled every one of his successors as Prime Minister. In some cases the problem has become so toxic as to lead to their political assassination, or attempted assassination.

Revolving as it does around the lofty questions of national sovereignty, democracy and British independence in the face of a great continental alliance, �Europe� would seem to be an exquisitely Churchillian dispute: just the sort of thing, you might think, that could be settled by appeal to the example of the hero of 1940.

The trouble is that he is claimed by both sides. Europhiles and Euro-sceptics: both factions believe in him. Both factions hail him as their prophet�and sometimes the argument as to his true meaning and intentions takes on the frenzy of a religious schism.

In November 2013, for instance, Manuel Barroso, then President of the EU Commission, made a speech in which he accurately quoted what Churchill had said in 1948 (and earlier, and passim) about the need to create a united Europe. This provoked a hail of abuse from the myriad denizens of the Euro-sceptic internet.

Some of them attacked Churchill, in one case calling him a �fat, lying scumbag�. Some of them defended Churchill, and bashed Senhor Barroso. Perhaps we could sum up the general mood by quoting one of the anonymous Euro-sceptic correspondents, who on one newspaper website, at least, goes by the nom de guerre of �stillpoliticallyincorrect�.

In her heyday, the pleasure yacht Christina was the most ostentatiously opulent if not downright vulgar private boat that had ever floated on the sea. She had Impressionists on the wall and live lobsters in the pool and barstools upholstered with leather diligently harvested from the foreskins of whales. But of all the exotic items assembled by Aristotle Onassis, the most important were his guests�prize lepidoptera that he caught in his gossamer net.

You might find Marilyn Monroe on board; or Frank Sinatra or Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton�all toasting each other at the taffrail and draping themselves over the deckchairs before going off for whispering marital fisticuffs in the staterooms. Of all the global superstars that Ari assembled, there was one who outshone the rest; and on the morning of 11 April 1961, he had the proof of his renown.

The white-hulled, yellow-funnelled Christina�in fact a converted Canadian naval vessel that had been present at the Normandy landings�had nosed up the Hudson River, towards her mooring point on 79th Street. There was an aquatic festival of welcome. There were blasts from liners and toots from tugs, and a New York fireboat joyfully ejaculated a jet of water to mark the arrival of the most popular Briton in America (the Beatles being still a couple of years away).

Now it was getting on for dinner time on the same day. With the help of two strong maids the eighty-six-year-old Winston Churchill was making his way down the deck. He had sustained another small stroke; his dentition was wonky. But his face was as cherubic as ever. His rheumy eyes were bright, his spotty bow tie was around his neck. He tapped over the polished boards with the same gold-topped cane that Edward VII had given him for his wedding in 1908, and there flickered within him the same old enthusiasm at the prospect of a meal and a spot of alcoholic refreshment.

It was true that he did not always find it easy to make conversation with Onassis, the Smyrna-born shipping tycoon, with his tales of the �sons of bitches� who were interfering with his casinos. But then Churchill didn�t mind much about that. In 1911 he had endured a six-week cruise with H. H. Asquith to the Mediterranean, during which he was heard to grunt that he had been asked to inspect too many ancient ruins. At least Onassis didn�t make him feel bad about his relative lack of a classical education.

No, he liked the sensations of the cruise: the cosseting, the travel, the endless diversions�the landscapes and seascapes; and now he looked out at a scene he had first clapped eyes on in 1895�a lifetime away�when he had come as a twenty-year-old to stay with his mother�s friend, Bourke Cockran, and learn his secrets of oratory.

When he had first seen New York it was physically a humbler place. There were some largish and handsome brick buildings, and there was all kinds of bustle, and smoke billowing from a thousand chimneys�and yet there were children in rags, and immigrant slums where the bodies of horses might lie in the streets for days. It was a city of energy and ambition, yes, but built on much the same sort of scale as late nineteenth-century Manchester or Liverpool or Glasgow. When Churchill first saw it, the skyline wasn�t a patch on London.

Now, though, as he stood in the darkness in 1961, looking out at Manhattan, the transformation was enough to make him blink. The buildings had sprouted to undreamt-of heights, spindles and spires of glass and steel, and their reflections twinkled towards him on the water with the light of a million windows. It was London that now looked dowdy, and dingy, and a shade undernourished.

This New York skyline was the embodiment of the change he had seen in his lifetime, and over which he had very largely officiated. These skyscrapers were not just a new template for urban life: they represented the twentieth-century story of America�s rise to greatness, and her eclipse of Britain. In his famous Mansion House speech of 1942, Churchill said he had not become the King�s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. And yet that, pretty much, was how things had panned out.

He felt it keenly. There is a sense in which Churchill�s obsessive references to the triumph of the �English-speaking peoples� were not just about ensuring a vital military and political Anglo-American alliance, though that was one of his purposes. They were also a psychological trick, a self-defence mechanism. The phrase was a way of masking and rationalising the humiliation of Britain�s position. Britain had declined in relative importance; but that decline was salved by the rise of those close cousins, those fellow-English-speakers who shared, as he constantly pointed out, the same values: the language, democracy, free speech, independent judiciary and so on.

It was as though Churchill was trying to persuade himself (and the world) that the American triumph was somehow also a British triumph, and that the glory of these former colonies reflected on the mother country. It is valiant stuff, and of course not everyone sees it that way.

Many people might say that the story of Churchill�s life was in part the translatio imperii�the passing of one global empire to another. As the Persians gave way to the Greeks, and the Greeks to the Romans, so the British had handed the imperial torch on to the Americans. It was A. J. P. Taylor who once said that the Second World War was �the war of the British succession��and if you accept that analysis it is obvious who won; and seventy years later it is astonishing to see that America, militarily, politically, economically, is still the most powerful nation on earth.

During the meal that night on the Christina, a mysterious phone call came through for Sir Winston. His Private Secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, was asked to dial �Operator 17� at the White House. It was the new President, John F. Kennedy, wondering whether Churchill would like to get in the presidential plane and come down to Washington��to spend a couple of days� with JFK. Browne had to think quickly, and he decided to thank the President very much for his kind offer, but to say no. Churchill just wasn�t mobile enough, and he was increasingly deaf.

It was perhaps a shame that they didn�t meet, because Churchill still had passages of vigour and lucidity. They had met already, but before Kennedy was elected�once aboard the Christina when eyewitnesses said he seemed to mistake the clean-cut Kennedy for a waiter, and once when they had a very friendly conversation about the young senator�s presidential ambitions (Kennedy said he was worried about being a Catholic; Churchill said he could always sort that out and remain a good Christian). This was Churchill�s last chance to sit in the Oval Office and meet a serving US President�and he had met most of them from William McKinley in 1900 onwards.

Here was Kennedy, the leader of the �Free World�; here was Churchill, physically bowed but with the vital spark still occasionally gleaming. Perhaps there was some hint that the old empire might have been able to pass to the new�because the problems confronting John F. Kennedy were certainly familiar to Churchill.

It was Churchill who pioneered the architecture of the Cold War, and the policy of standing up to Soviet communism. Now that policy was to be aggressively taken up by the young President: in Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere. Churchill had been in the vanguard of the movement for a united Europe�a cause still supported by the USA and by Kennedy. Then there was a whole arena of geopolitics where the Americans were obliged to take up the imperial purple, after Britain had faltered after the war, and then collapsed at Suez. It is an arena where Churchill�s role is now only hazily remembered; and yet it was critical.

Winston Churchill was one of the fathers of the modern Middle East. There is therefore at least a case for thinking that he helped create the world�s number-one political disaster zone, and then passed that disaster zone on, like a cupful of quivering gelignite, to be the responsibility of America. It was John F. Kennedy who first provided the American security guarantee for Israel. There are many who would blame the British�and Churchill prime among them�for creating the territorial incoherencies that made that guarantee necessary. Was he guilty? If not, whom do we blame?

As I write these words today, Israel is bombing the positions of Arabs in Gaza; Hamas is firing rockets at Israel; the casualties in Syria mount higher and higher; fundamentalist fanatics have captured large parts of northern Iraq. Churchill�s fingerprints are over the entire map.

Have a look at that map of Jordan�what do you see? The most striking feature is that weird triangular kink, a 400-mile salient from Saudi Arabia into modern Jordan. Some say that this fact of geography can be traced to one of Churchill�s liquid lunches, and to this day it is called �Winston�s hiccup�. That story may or may not be true. What no one contests is Churchill�s role in drawing that boundary. Kinky or not, it has lasted from that day to this.

He was integral to the creation of the modern state of Israel; and it fell to him, at the formative moment in the emergence of that nation, to try to make sense of the abjectly inconsistent commitments of the British government. He was the man who decided that there should be such a thing as the state of Iraq; it was he who bundled together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul�Shiite, Sunni and Kurd. If you wanted to put a single man in the frame for the agony of modern Iraq, if you wanted to blame anyone for the current implosion, then of course you might point the finger at George W. Bush and Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein�but if you wanted to grasp the essence of the problem of that wretched state, you would have to look at the role of Winston Churchill.

His epic career intersected with the Middle East at several key points (and remember that he is credited with pioneering the very term Middle East); but the most important was his role as Colonial Secretary. He was a little surprised to be offered the post, at the end of 1920; but it is easy to see why Lloyd George thought he was the right man for the job. He had shown immense energy and dynamism as Minister for Munitions�equipping Britain with the tanks, planes and other technology that helped win the war. As Secretary of State for War he had been masterly in his demobilisation strategy: quelling mutinies by ensuring that those who had served the longest were the first to be reunited with their families. He had shown his gifts of charm and persuasion in the pre-war Ulster talks�and those gifts would be needed in spades. The First World War had left some snortingly difficult problems, and especially in the Middle East.

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THE POST OF Colonial Secretary might sound less grand than that of Foreign Secretary�a role still occupied by that most superior person, George Nathaniel Curzon. But that is to forget the scale of the British Empire in 1921. The First World War was not meant to be an acquisitive conflict; Britain went in with the explicit aim of not expanding her empire. But as Walter Reid has pointed out, between 1914 and 1919 the surface area of the world ruled by Britain expanded by 9 per cent.

When Churchill took the reins at the Colonial Office, he was at the apex of an empire that comprised fifty-eight countries covering 14 million square miles and he was responsible�one way or another�for the lives and hopes of 458 million people. It was by far the biggest empire the world has ever seen�six times the size of the Roman Empire at its apogee under Trajan. The British flag flew over a quarter of the land surface of the planet, and there was scarcely a sea or ocean that was not patrolled by the might of the British navy�a navy much modernised and improved by Churchill.

When you think about it that way, it is perhaps less surprising that Churchill threw himself into the job. He surrounded himself with the best and most famous experts, notably the Arabists T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell. He boned up on such hitherto abstruse matters (to him) as the difference between Shia and Sunni. His first step was to summon a conference, at Cairo; and here he conducted himself with dazzling skill.

The press was sceptical about this venture. It was said that Churchill wanted a �durbar��a magnificent and ceremonial gathering of the imperial court. He was accused of wanting to govern �on an oriental scale�. The truth was that someone had to take charge, because the situation in the Middle East was a total and utter shambles.

With the best possible intentions and motives, Britain had made a series of promises during the First World War, and those promises were now proving difficult to square with each other and indeed with reality. Perhaps it is a mitigation to say that they were made by a country in desperate straits, and with a population at risk of starvation from the German submarine campaign.

There were three British promises. The first was to the Arabs, in the form of the 1915 McMahon�Hussein correspondence. This was a series of fairly oleaginous letters from Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, to the Hashemite King Hussein�a bearded old worthy whose family claimed to be of the lineage of the prophet Mohammed. The gist of the letters was that the British government was all in favour of a big new Arab state�stretching from Palestine to Iraq and to the borders with Persia, with Hussein and his family on the throne; and the hope was that this promise would encourage the Arabs to revolt against the Turks, who were then allied with the Germans. The letters worked, in the sense that there was indeed such a revolt, a strategically piffling affair immortalised and wildly exaggerated in the film Lawrence of Arabia.

The next promise was to the French, who had been suffering appalling casualties on the Western Front. It was thought politic to paint them a picture of future French glory, once the war was over: and under the terms of the secret 1916 Sykes�Picot agreement, France was to have a zone of influence stretching from Syria to northern Iraq and including Baghdad�a strip of land, incidentally, that bears some resemblance to the �caliphate� proclaimed in 2014 by the fanatics of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It was not at all clear how this secret undertaking to the French could be reconciled with the more public undertaking to the Arabs�and nor, frankly, was it capable of being so reconciled.

The third and most tragicomically incoherent promise of all was the so-called Balfour declaration. This was really a letter from A. J. Balfour to Lord Rothschild, dated 2 November 1917, and contained this exquisite masterpiece of Foreign Office fudgerama�.�.�.

If you were ever tempted to doubt the strength of the love between Winston and Clementine Churchill, you should look at the countless notes and billets-doux they sent each other all their married life. On the day of her seventy-eighth birthday in 1963, he wrote as follows:

The truth is that though I love writing and thinking about Winston Churchill, the old boy can sometimes be faintly intimidating. I hasten to say that he is always brilliant fun�but as you try to do justice to his life you are acutely conscious of being chained to a genius, and a genius of unbelievable energy and fecundity.

For those of us who have tried feebly to do just some of the things he did, it can be a little bit crushing. If you have ever wanted to be a politician or a journalist or a historian�or even a painter�you end up wondering where on earth he got it all from.

By now my long lunch with Churchill�s grandson Nicholas Soames is coming to an end. The Savoy Grill produces the bill�fairly Churchillian in scale; and I try to tackle this last big question. His grandfather was the man who changed history by putting oil instead of coal into the superdreadnoughts. What sort of fuel did Churchill run on? What made him go?

Soames broods, and then surprises me by saying that his grandfather was an ordinary sort of chap. He did what other Englishmen like doing: mucking about at home, hobbies and so forth. �You know, in many ways he was quite a normal sort of family man,� he says.

Yes, I say, but no normal family man produces more published words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined, wins the Nobel prize for literature, kills umpteen people in armed conflict on four continents, serves in every great office of state including Prime Minister (twice), is indispensable to victory in two world wars and then posthumously sells his paintings for a million dollars. I am trying to grapple with the ultimate source of all this psychic energy.

What, indeed, do we mean by mental energy? Is it something psychological or something physiological? Was he genetically or hormonally endowed with some superior process of internal combustion, or did it arise out of childhood psychological conditioning? Or perhaps it was a mixture of the two. Who knows�depends on your answer to the mind�body problem, I suppose.

�Some burn damp faggots,� says William Butler Yeats at his vatic best. �Others may consume/ The entire combustible world in one small room.� If ever you wanted a 12-cylinder, 6-litre entire combustible world consumer, that man is Churchill. I remember when I was about fifteen reading an essay by the psychologist Anthony Storr, in which he postulated that Churchill�s biggest and most important victory was over himself.

What he meant was that Churchill was always conscious of being small and runty and cowardly at school�remember the episode when they throw cricket balls at him, and he runs away. So by an act of will he decided to defeat his cowardice and his stammer, and to be the 80-pound weakling who uses dumb-bells to acquire the body of Charles Atlas. Having vanquished his own cowardice, goes the argument, it was easy to vanquish everything else.

I always thought this analysis was all very well, but vulnerable to charges of circularity. I mean: why did he decide to master his fear? Was he really a coward? Does a cowardly schoolboy kick the awful headmaster�s straw hat to pieces? By now I expect most readers will have picked up quite enough of the data they need to form a pretty good idea of Churchill�s psychology, and perhaps we don�t need to push all the points much farther.

What have we got in the mix? There was the father, no doubt about it: the pain of Randolph�s rejections and criticism, the terror of not living up to him; the need after his timely death (from Winston�s point of view) both to avenge and excel him. Then there is the mother�boy, what a woman. Jennie is obviously crucial in the way she pushed and helped Churchill, his glory being at least partly her glory, after all. We can only wonder to what extent it spurred his derring-do and heroics at Malakand, to think his mother had probably slept with Bindon Blood to get him there.

There was the general historical context in which he emerged. He was born not just when Britain was at her peak, but when his generation understood that it would require superhuman efforts and energies to sustain that empire. The sheer strain of that exertion helped make the Victorians somehow bigger than we are now, constructed on a grander scale.

�They were harder, tougher people,� says Soames. �Mind you, my grandfather always had someone to look after him, wherever he went.�

And then there was the natural egotism that is shared to a greater or lesser extent by every human being, and the desire for prestige and esteem. I have always thought Churchill had a secret syllogism in his head:

Britain = greatest empire on earth

Churchill = greatest man in British Empire

Therefore Churchill = greatest man on earth

Andrew Roberts says this is right, but too modest. The correct syllogism should be:

Britain = greatest empire the world has ever seen

Churchill = greatest man in British Empire

Therefore Churchill = greatest man in the history of the world.

This is in one sense true, but it is also in a way unfair on Churchill. He did possess a titanic ego, but one that was tempered by humour, and irony, and by deep humanity and sympathy for other people, and by a commitment to public service and a belief in the democratic right of people to kick him out�as they did�at elections. Remember his instant forgiveness both at Dundee in 1922 and after the humiliation of 1945.

That is what I mean by his greatness of heart. Just before we go, Soames tells me a last story, to make the point about his sentimentality and generosity.