Anyone sentient at the time remembers how the nation stopped at the news of Sir Winston Churchill’s death, and engaged in an act of homage to the man who had led the salvation of Britain from Hitler and the Nazis. In many ways the act of homage has never ended, and there are, indeed, perfectly good reasons why it should not. Britain did face a mortal threat in 1940. Churchill, whose career up to that point had been littered with catastrophic mistakes and misjudgements, and was then aged 65, had nonetheless led the minority that correctly understood the menace of Hitler and the dangers of disarmament and appeasement. The two British prime ministers of the late 1930s, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, chose to disregard him: partly because they had inherited a sense of Tory isolationism that made them want, above all things, not to involve themselves in quarrels with Hitler, but partly because they thought Churchill was simply on another of his bizarre hobbyhorses, and that his latest cranky obsession would end in the usual personal humiliation for him.
However, the humiliation would, in this instance, be theirs. Churchill had read Hitler and the Nazi threat exactly right, and the urgent need for national survival was perfectly suited to his greatest talents—those of the showman and orator, rather than the strategist. Once he had faced down his rival for the premiership, the appeaser Lord Halifax, he used those talents to articulate the spirit of anti-defeatism on behalf of the British people more effectively, passionately, and sincerely than anyone else could possibly have done.
