“BRITAIN THINKS” is a polling organisation which on 22 November asked Britons what they considered the most important qualities of leadership and who best displayed them. Great communication, decisiveness and and integrity were the qualities they plumped for. And, in their opinion Winston Churchill had them in spades and all other contenders came nowhere near him.(THE BRITAIN THINKS/OBSERVER LEADERSHIP POLL, reported 6.12.2015)
Churchill lived 91 years and appears never to have impressed his contemporary Britons quite so favourably. Within the parties he served or dominated he was distrusted and even despised. R.A.Butler described him as a half-caste American, believing his mother had Cherokee blood. Following the First World
War Churchill wrote an account of it. Arthur Balfour remarked that Winston had written a book about himself and called it “The World Crisis.” He incurred
the hatred of Trade Unionists and during the General Strike of 1926 wrote a propaganda sheet claiming striking coalminers had returned to work in a mine that had closed down some years before.
The recently deceased Piers Brendon was keeper of the Chuchill Archives and a Fellow of Chuchill College, Cambridge. His “The Dark Valley – a panorama of the 1930s” describes the general view of Churchill and his circle in those days –
“It was not surprising that Churchill should have provoked mistrust. For although he was brave, eloquent, witty,industrious,dogged,versatile and supremely talented,with most great offices of state under his belt and many gorgeous feathers in his cap, Churchill had given more hostages to fortune than any politician of his day. Britain’s leading parliamentarian had changed parties twice and policies so often that, Lord Beaverbrook declared he had held every view on every question.”………………………..
Churchill’s friends “were high-living and often hard-drinking freebooters who dwelt on the outer edge of respectability”. F.E.Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was considered to be ‘a fluent and plausible bounder’ early in his career, while later, to his fury, he was represented as a ‘crapulous and corpulent buffoon’. Lord Beaverbrook was aptly nicknamed ‘Been-a-crook’ and seemed to be ‘a kind of Dracula, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one’. Brendan Bracken, the red-haired financial and political chancer who was (wrongly) rumoured to be Churchill’s illegitimate son, appeared to be a charlatan incarnate: ‘Everything about you is phoney’ said a journalist, ‘even your hair, which looks like a wig, isn’t’.
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