Churchill, World War 2 and Brexit

First the Maisky Diaries and now Kevin Myers (PM Boris Johnson is too high a price to pay for Ukexit, Sunday Times, 17th April 2016). Churchill’s reputation was always going to come under scrutiny at some point but, typically, the scrutiny is not coming from orthodox British historians. Myers is wrong about the British public not liking Churchill. They had good reason to dislike him but his absolute determination not to make a deal with Hitler in 1940 was the basis of his popularity ever afterwards. Indeed, had it not been for the British public (particularly Labour supporters) he would probably have lost office by 1943 (not least because his penchant for military disasters in WW1 continued in WW2) and replaced by Halifax, Cripps, Eden (an utter weakling as Myers says) or Lloyd George (the only one of the four who wasn’t a weakling), who would have done a deal with Hitler but regretted it afterwards. As his funeral cortege was going down the Thames in 1965, dockers, many of them war veterans, I suspect, lowered their cranes in salute. (Some upper class woman told Maisky that Churchill, whose mother was from the southern states of the US, had negroid features. I think that is worse than saying he was Irish!)

 

Myers’ comments about Churchill’s blood lust against German cities (which are absolutely spot on) raise an interesting issue. There is at least one programme per day (usually many more) about WW2 on at least one of the many British channels I have. Apart from the fact that the programmes are a total bore, they must be getting up the noses of the Germans big time at this stage. If the British vote for Brexit, the nonsense about job losses will be disappear off the papers immediately but what the media forget (both here and in Britain) is that the Germans are going to use Brexit as an opportunity to express their frustration at the wall-to-wall programmes on British TV channels about WW2. They are likely to anyway – you can imagine a state visit to London by the German President where he politely but firmly calls time on these boring programmes – but Brexit will be seen by the Germans as an opportunity to demand an end to WW2ism by the British. And they will be typically Germanic in how they demand it, i.e. not diplomatic. Something to look forward to.