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.