Winston Churchill: life, ideas and books

Life

Winston Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace, was commissioned in the cavalry in 1895 and reported on colonial wars as both an officer and a journalist. He was captured and escaped during the Boer War and was elected to Parliament for Oldham in 1900. He moved from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 1904 and held senior posts, including President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty. He resigned from the Admiralty after the Dardanelles failure in 1915.

He returned to the Conservatives, served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929 and spent the 1930s largely out of office, warning of Nazi Germany and urging rearmament. He was prime minister from 1940 to 1945, led the opposition and was prime minister again from 1951 to 1955. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 and died in London in 1965.

Ideas

Churchill combined a belief in free trade and economic liberalism with a strong patriotism, an attachment to empire and a sense of history. He supported some social reform, such as labour exchanges and unemployment insurance, and opposed Irish home rule. In the 1930s he opposed appeasement, and after the war he warned of an "iron curtain" in Europe and supported European cooperation. He is criticised for imperial attitudes, racist remarks and some wartime decisions.

Major works

• The River War (1899).
• Lord Randolph Churchill (1906).
• The World Crisis (1923-31).
• The Second World War (1948-53).
• A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-58).

Why conservatives read him

Churchill stands as the model of resolve against tyranny, and his speeches and histories are read for lessons on leadership, deterrence and the dangers of appeasement. He is cited in debates about alliances, national defence and the defence of liberal democracy, and his writing is admired as prose. His record is complex, which makes him a subject for careful reading rather than hero-worship.