Not quite Churchill

President Trump’s recent slur, that Keir Starmer is no Winston Churchill, struck me as singularly ill-judged. The context was Starmer’s refusal to allow the United States to use British bases for the initial strikes on Iran. A war of more than questionable legality, a war with no clear endpoint, and a war into which the President of the United States apparently expected Britain to be dragooned by the invocation of a name.

Not unexpected but wrong-headed.

It sent me to a lecture I had not previously read: Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and Bombing Policy, delivered at the Churchill Centre in Washington in October 2005. Gilbert, as Churchill’s authorised biographer, was not someone disposed to diminish his subject. And what the lecture reveals is a man of such profound moral and strategic contradictions that to deploy his name as a simple taunt for military restraint tells you either that the person doing the deploying has never seriously engaged with Churchill’s actual record, or that they simply don’t care.

Both possibilities are, in their different ways, alarming even if not surprising.

There is a Churchill in Gilbert’s lecture who would have pleased Mr Trump no end. In July 1940 – with France fallen, America neutral, and invasion seemingly imminent – Churchill wrote to Lord Beaverbrook that the only path to victory lay in ‘an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ Bomber Harris later told Gilbert that it was the origin of the idea of bombing the enemy out of the war: ‘It originated with Winston.’ In Moscow in 1942, Churchill told Stalin that Britain ‘sought no mercy and would show no mercy’ and that if necessary they ‘hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city.’ These are not the words of a man plagued by restraint.

But there is another Churchill in the same pages.

At Chequers in June 1943, after watching an RAF film of the bombing of Wuppertal, Churchill turned to the Australian representative Richard Casey and asked: ‘Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?’ Before the Normandy landings, when Portal advised that between 20,000 and 40,000 French civilians might be killed in railway bombing, Churchill told his colleagues he ‘felt some doubts as to the wisdom of this policy’ and wrote to Portal: ‘You are piling up an awful load of hatred.’ He asked Eisenhower to cap civilian deaths per raid at around a hundred. Eisenhower declined. He put the matter to Roosevelt. Roosevelt declined too. And so the bombing went ahead – but it was Churchill who had tried to stop it going further.

After Dresden, Churchill minuted that ‘the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.’ ‘The destruction of Dresden,’ he wrote, ‘remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.’

And in his final retirement, asked to look back on a life of extraordinary consequence, Churchill said that his only regret was that ‘mankind ever learned to fly.’

Gilbert closes his lecture with four quiet words: ‘It would seem that the “beasts” had prevailed.’

What are we to make of a man who could write ‘exterminating attack’ to Beaverbrook and ‘are we beasts?’ to Casey? Who boasted to Stalin of shattering German cities and then tried to limit French civilian casualties to a hundred per raid? The honest answer is that he was a figure of genuine moral complexity, caught in a war of genuine existential stakes, wrestling, not always successfully, with what total war required of those who prosecuted it. He does not reduce to a symbol of uncomplicated martial courage. He never did.

Which brings us back to Mr Trump’s taunt.

Starmer declined to commit British bases to initial strikes in a conflict whose legal basis is contested, whose strategic endgame is opaque, and whose regional consequences are unpredictable. For this he was told he was no Churchill. But then, Churchill himself – the man who wrote ‘exterminating attack’ and who also asked ‘are we beasts?’ – spent considerable energy trying to restrain bombing he considered disproportionate, unjustified, or counterproductive. He was overruled, more than once, by Americans.

There is something almost poetically appropriate in that.

The question isn’t whether Starmer resembles Churchill. The question is whether anyone invoking Churchill as a standard of unthinking bellicosity has bothered to read about him.

It would appear not.

Collecting

My experience is that most people are generous. Not showily so, not ostentatiously generous – but quietly, reflexively open. Present them with a collecting bucket and a good cause and something in them responds before the rational mind has finished its cost-benefit analysis.

A Saturday afternoon earlier this month bore this out yet again. I was one of about thirty volunteers collecting for The Exeter Chiefs Foundation at the Chiefs’ match against Gloucester. The Foundation supports several charities across Exeter, including Citizens Advice, who organised our team. So it was buckets, card readers, and enough layers of clothing to survive a February afternoon outdoors.

The response was overwhelmingly warm. People gave. People smiled. People paused to ask which charities the Foundation supports. Taps of cards, clinks of coins, words of encouragement. The generosity of strangers.

At half-time, we took our buckets into the hospitality boxes.

In one, we were immediately welcomed. Wallets appeared, phones came out, a young boy dropped his change into the bucket with quiet concentration. Generosity as reflex.

In the next, we managed perhaps half a sentence before one of the party waved us away. No words, no explanation. Just a hand raised and lowered, and the very expectation that we would leave.

As I said to my collecting companion: clearly hadn’t read the manners manual.

To be fair, people decline for all sorts of reasons; and that’s entirely OK. A polite “not today” is a perfectly good sentence; nobody minds hearing it. What stays with you is not the refusal but its texture. The wordlessness, the brevity, the assumption that a gesture would do where even a few syllables were called for.

But proportion matters. One silent wave against an afternoon of open wallets and kind words. The Foundation and its volunteers had a good day. The generous far outnumbered the curt, as they usually do. Most people are decent. I keep finding this out, and it keeps being reassuring.

It’s hard to beat some mornings

Exminster Marshes

Raven, crow, greenfinch, goldfinch, goldcrest, dunnock, robin, wren, blackbird, great tit, blue tit, long tailed tit, pied wagtail, Cetti’s warbler, chiffchaff, widgeon, teal, shoveler, shelduck, pintail, curlew, mallard, Canada goose, mute swan, marsh harrier, sparrow hawk, blackheaded gull, shag, heron, bullfinch, skylark, moorhen, coot, wood pigeon, song thrush, magpie

Two hours, three miles.

A wet Oxford afternoon

It rained all day. Three hours up to Oxford, three hours back in the dark. At the interment last November of Malcolm Oxley’s ashes in the Quad, I shared an umbrella with George Fenton. Except at school he was George Howe and was so cool. I didn’t mention this.

Malcolm taught history at St Edward’s from 1962 to 1999. Thirty-seven years. He was, by every account given that afternoon, a man of deep faith, inspiring teaching, selfless service. The tributes ran long. The praise was unqualified.

I ate three sandwich triangles and a very small square of cake.

Malcolm got me into Oxford. That’s not nothing. He and John Todd lit a fire for history that still burns. I acted in his Beggar’s Opera, joined his singing tours, absorbed a great deal about how to think. The debt is very real. But that afternoon I felt somehow outside the celebration of Malcolm’s life. A memorial service is not the place to raise alternative views. Everyone knows this. So I stood in the rain, and listened, and thought about Dick Bradley. Bradley became Warden of St Edward’s in the same term I arrived: Winter 1966. I was his last Senior Prefect. In March 1971, he was effectively forced to leave. At the end of the Spring Term. He couldn’t even finish the academic year.

Why? His marriage had failed, and he’d fallen in love with someone else. The Governors had, with great reluctance, ruled that a divorced headmaster could remain in post; they were clear that a remarried one could not. With Bradley determined to marry, he was left with no alternative but to go.

We raised £26 for his leaving present. I put in a fiver. A friend who’d recently left put in another. Even now I’m appalled.

Malcolm, from what I recall, did not regret Bradley’s departure.

I have thought about this often – and I recently reread the chapters Malcolm wrote in his history of the school about Bradley’s wardenship, published some forty years after the events. In them, and interrogating memories that are both imperfect and selective after more than fifty years, I think I understand a little better.

My feeling then was that Bradley had lost the respect of much of his Common Room. Malcolm was not alone in this. Was it disappointment in a Warden who seemed to have given up the struggle? Was it mischief – Malcolm undoubtedly enjoyed poking authority, even while being authority himself? Or was it simply that a man in trouble had become inconvenient, and his departure solved a problem? I don’t know. Perhaps all three. Memory is unreliable and motive is opaque, even to those who act. What I do know is that it was so much of its time. A divorced headmaster could stay; a remarried one could not. And so the institution, as all institutions always do, closed ranks.

Blair Worden was there in the rain that afternoon. He’d supervised my special subject – Commonwealth and Protectorate – at the end of my second year at Oxford. I confessed that I was the one who’d invented the story about Major-General Desborough falling off his horse. He roared with laughter. The young don he’d been fifty years ago hadn’t seen the funny side. Some transgressions soften with time. Others don’t.

Five visits to St Edward’s in fifty five years. Three of them memorial services. I was relieved, driving home in the rain, to shake the dust off my feet.

Malcolm gave me a great deal. I owe him. But gratitude and disquiet can sit side by side. They have to. And the disquiet, I’ve come to realise, is less about Malcolm than about Bradley: the abruptness of his leaving, the airbrushing out of his wardenship, the shame I know he and his family carried. That was the wound. Malcolm’s memorial simply surfaced it.

Warm lard has its uses. It soothes. It smooths.

What it cannot do is tell the whole truth.