Why is churchill so important

We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Winston Churchill was an inspirational statesman, writer, orator and leader who led Britain to victory in the Second World War. He served as Conservative Prime Minister twice - from to before being defeated in the general election by the Labour leader Clement Attlee and from to Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in for his many published works.

More information including archive footage can be found at the Churchill War Rooms. Winston Churchill was born on 30 November , in Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire and was of rich, aristocratic ancestry. Although achieving poor grades at school, his early fascination with militarism saw him join the Royal Cavalry in Churchill was a decent and honourable man, as well as a charming one, and it was these qualities, not just his famous defiance, that made him prime minister.

He never actually quite said "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it", but that turned out to be the case. His historical works were so good, they earned him the Nobel Prize for literature. No other British prime minister can remotely match the scope of Churchill's achievement. When he died in the historian Sir Arthur Bryant said: "The age of giants is over.

Bryant was right - and yet that, in a way, is a measure of Churchill's success. Ever since he destroyed Hitler's despotism, our political leaders haven't needed to be giants. The UK is marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill.

He is regarded by many as the greatest Briton ever, but for some he remains an intensely controversial figure. The 10 greatest controversies of Winston Churchill's career 22 January The nature of Churchill's depression. Did Churchill's words help win the war? Image source, PA. At this time of crisis and doubt in Britain, there is no prominent leader who can, to paraphrase Leo Amery, speak for Britain. That kind of ability seems much rarer in the fraught Brexit Britain of than it was in the summer of , and therein lies the contemporary problem; and this is what underpins the yearning for an age where everything seemed much more certain.

Churchill is alive and present in debates around Europe. He is cited both by pro-Europeans for his support of European unity, and by Eurosceptics who claim to be the living equivalent of his defiant upholding of British independence. The memory of Churchill is also used to invoke different interpretations of Conservatism: as with Hardie and Attlee in the Labour Party, every perspective within the Tories tries to lay claim to the great man.

But there are parts of his legacy in which none of them are interested. Churchill accommodated with organised labour not only in wartime but in the aftermath of the Attlee government. He reluctantly accepted the principles and framework of the Beveridge Report, laying the basis for the moderation of Conservatism between and , which accepted the post-war consensus.

Instead, because of his wartime leadership, determination and principle, Churchill is invoked by the most radical Tories as proof of the power of human will, not compromising, and being prepared to stand out against the prevailing groupthink.

As moderate Conservatism has declined over the last forty years, so — first under Thatcher, then by her disciples — Churchill has been appropriated to invoke a belligerent, and ultimately triumphant, country. This view of Churchill is now being mobilised to invoke a radical Toryism, domestically and internationally, that is far removed from the man.

He has been recruited as a figure who would have supported marginal and fringe views about dramatically shrinking the state, ending social welfare supports, ripping up social rights and protections, and creating a deregulated nirvana for cut-throat anti-social capitalism.

The battle for a different kind of Churchill in the Tory Party seems lost for the near future, underlining the apparent hopelessness of any battle for a different kind of modern Tory Party.

All of these factors are being played out in the ongoing debate around the terms on which the UK leaves the European Union in a conflict which will continue long after the UK formally leaves. A key figure in this is the ex-UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who clearly sees himself in Churchillian terms and as the natural inheritor of his mantle of leadership and greatness. In his account, Churchill is responsible not only for saving the world but also for inventing it and bringing it into being.

Perhaps most tellingly, Johnson believes that the calling of leadership, the possession of class confidence, and the belief in your own effortless superiority to others together constitute a Churchillian template which runs between the two men, endowing each of them with the ability to champion national renewal in times of doubt and uncertainty. Both men enjoy the good life and believe in the power of the word: while Johnson has not shown any great capacity at Churchillian spellbinding oratory, he has shown a sort of anti-gift for the printed word.

And neither man is a natural organisational type, adopting instead an impulsive, devil-may-care attitude, often driven by the big picture more than detail. But it is here that any real comparison stops, for Churchill the wartime leader in World War Two was well aware of his many inadequacies, listened to colleagues, and ran a collective government in numerous areas, including the domestic front.

These words, linking as they do the Nazi dictatorship and the overly bureaucratic, rules-based EU, are jarring: such sloppy comparisons are now commonplace in frothy, easily excitable right-wing circles, but it is shocking to see them in what is meant to be a serious book. For Johnson and his acolytes, Europe is always beastly, domineering, and out to get dear old Blighty — whether by military means or via executive orders and procedures.

Boris Johnson, famously, became a Brexiteer only when he made the judgment about what would most help his political ambitions, a motivation as far from the Churchill myth as is possible. But underlying his interest in the man is his desire for mobilising people, and aspiration to tell a set of national stories in which people believe and see themselves.

And this is where they run into major problems which no amount of wordplay can overcome. Churchill invoked a particular idea of Britain, as a place of purpose, moral certainty and national calling. And this kind of perspective managed to maintain itself throughout the twentieth century, through good times and bad, under Labour and Liberal governments; it did so partly because its rationale extended out beyond the Tory Party into circles that included progressives.

It has been an enduring credo of the English-British ruling classes — from commerce to religion, to private education and the House of Lords — and it has contributed to shaping and blunting Liberal and Labour radicalism down through the ages. Forty years on from the onset of Thatcherism, and a decade after the banking crash, the normative assumptions of British politics are now under strain and question.

Underneath the public crises of the Conservative Party sits a longer-term set of issues: what constituencies and social forces is it giving voice to and representing? What sort of Britain is it championing? This has left the Tory Party unsure of its moorings, anchorage and direction. It can no longer get away with the English-British conceit: it long ago lost Scotland, and, more importantly, has not had an uplifting narrative about the union of the United Kingdom for quite some time.

Throughout much of his life, Churchill opposed any form of autonomy for India. A master orator, he did his best to rally the nation in the face of near-certain attack, giving six major speeches in four months. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.

We shall never surrender. In July , after Germany had surrendered but not Japan, Britain held its first general election in a decade.

That is what we have been fighting for. Churchill wrote volumes of books over the course of his life, the first of which detailed his army experiences in India, Sudan and South Africa. He later penned a biography of his father, a biography of the first Duke of Marlborough, numerous volumes on World War I and World War II, a history of English-speaking peoples and one novel that he urged his friends not to read.

As a youth, Churchill once suffered a concussion and ruptured a kidney while playfully throwing himself off a bridge.