Wartime leader Winston Churchill has long been the focus of attacks from the Left but his biographer warns that a new breed of “Right-wing revisionist forces” are out to destroy his reputation. The Policy Exchange think tank claims the new wave of attacks are “designed to rewrite history and rehabilitate appeasement to justify new Western isolationism, including withdrawing support for Ukraine”. It has published a new report by Lord Andrew Roberts – “Defender of the West: A response to attacks on Churchill’s life and legacy”.
Lord Roberts, known for his acclaimed biographies of Churchill and Napoleon, said: “It is all of our duty to stop this poison spreading to British politics and defend the memory of our greatest statesman.”
There is concern false accounts of Churchill’s wartime leadership will take root both in the President Trump-supporting MAGA movement and on this side of the Atlantic. Policy Exchange warns of a “pact from the fringe Left and fringe Right to distort the legacy of Winston Churchill that must not be exported into UK politics”.
Lord Roberts tackles claims Churchill “loved war”; that the British Government should not have offered a guarantee to Poland in 1939; that Churchill was wrong to refuse ‘a deal’ with Hitler in 1940; that he escalated the conflict; and that his “pursuit of glory clouded his judgement”.
In his report, co-authored with Zachary Marsh, he writes: “The attempt to portray Churchill as a war-obsessed moralist fundamentally misinterprets both Churchill’s outlook and the historical record. In many respects Churchill was a consummate realist.
“He advocated rearmament throughout the 1930s as deterrence, not war-readiness, in response to the resurgence of Germany. Churchill consistently argued his decision to support war in 1939 and to continue the conflict in 1940 was premised on the continuation of a British policy to avoid the domination of the continent and the channel ports by a single European power.
“He understood that Hitler could not be trusted to keep his word, as it proved, and that continuing the war was the only way to prevent Britain’s ultimate reduction to a ‘client state’.”
He expresses concerns that “some of the new anti-Churchillism on the Right also overlaps with the resurgence of antisemitic tropes on the American fringe Right”.
Defending the reputation of both Churchill and Britain, he states: “Suggestions that it was Britain, as opposed to Germany, that initiated civilian bombing ignore its use by the Nazis from the outset of the war at Wieluń and Rotterdam and Hitler’s promise to erase British cities.”
He warns of fringe Right-wingers making an “unholy alliance with the political Left”, stating that while on the Left “it has become commonplace to criticise Churchill for ‘racism’ or ‘imperialism’, the new revisionists on the Right view Churchill as a warmongering idealist who pursued personally glory at the expense of Britain and wider western civilisation – or even as ‘the chief villain of the Second World War.’”
Lord Roberts adds: “This new wave of criticism is driven by more than a desire to historically critique Churchill’s legacy as part of an ongoing historical debate. Its proponents share a broad isolationist foreign policy outlook that is deeply sceptical of international intervention, even to the extent of questioning the choice that Britain made to confront Nazi Germany.”
