There was one thing the public could say for certain about Churchill: that there was nothing that he was going to ask the British armed forces to do that he would not have done himself.
This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for self-doubt. It is a moment of hope.
This is our chance to build a Britain where everyone benefits from the success of the economy.
Our friends in America will be at the front of the queue for trade deals.
I’m afraid Sadiq Khan is completely wrong. The European Court of Justice is the supreme legal authority in our country.
When my father began his work in the 1970s it was a very different EU. I pay tribute to what he did. But it has now become a very different proposition: the United States of Europe.
Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity. It has been said that the difference between Hitler’s speeches and Churchill’s speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.
There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
The key thing is to be “Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy”.
London is – after Athens and Rome – the third most influential city in history.
Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.
He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.
Take the one about the time he was sitting next to a clean-living Methodist bishop – at a reception, allegedly, in Canada – when a good-looking young waitress came up and offered them both a glass of sherry from a tray. Churchill took one. But the bishop said, ‘Young lady, I would rather commit adultery than take an intoxicating beverage.’ At which point Churchill beckoned the girl, and said, ‘Come back, lassie, I didn’t know we had a choice.
Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?
Churchill decides from very early on that he will create a political position that is somehow above left and right, embodying the best points of both sides and thereby incarnating the will of the nation. He thinks of himself as a gigantic keystone in the arch, with all the lesser stones logically induced to support his position. He has a kind of semi-ideology to go with it – a leftish Toryism: imperialist, romantic, but on the side of the working man.
Churchill knew instinctively what was wrong with communism – that it repressed liberty; that it replaced individual discretion with state control; that it entailed the curtailment of democracy, and therefore that it was tyrannous.
It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn’t get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.
Accident, agree, bagpipe, blunder, box, chant, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, femininity, finally, funeral, horizon, increase, infect, obscure, observe, princess, scissors, superstitious, universe, village: those are just some of the everyday words that Chaucer introduced to the language through his poetry.
The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.
These days we dimly believe that the Second World War was won with Russian blood and American money; and though that is in some ways true, it is also true that, without Churchill, Hitler would almost certainly have won.