Churchill's 'Temple of Peace'
From Mr Andrew Roberts Sir: I wonder how many more times it needs to be stated that Winston Churchill did not envisage Britain joining the United Europe of which he spoke in a series of speeches between 1946 and 1951 at Zurich, the Albert Hall, Strasbourg and elsewhere?
In his review of Geoffrey Best's and David Irving's books on Churchill (Books, 11 August), Professor Vernon Bogdanor — indulging his talent and passion for intellectual perversity, for all I know — made the incorrect claim that Churchill wanted Britain to join Europe because he realised 'that Britain could no longer be a great power on her own'.
In fact, Churchill was perfectly clear and consistent in saying that he saw Britain as being in a separate pillar from United Europe in what he called 'the world Temple of Peace'. At the Albert Hall on 14 May 1947, he said that in the future:
United Europe would form one major regional entity. There is the United States with all its dependencies; there is the Soviet Union; there is the British Empire and Commonwealth; and there is Europe, with which Great Britain is profoundly blended. Here are the four main pillars of the world Temple of Peace. Let us make sure they will all bear the weight that will be imposed and reposed upon them.
Since 'profoundly blended' is so bland as to be meaningless, any Eurosceptic could sign up for that statement even today, if one substituted Russia for the Soviet Union and excised the now defunct British empire.
Bogdanor complains that 'currently fashionable opinion persists in seeing Churchill as a Eurosceptic'. If so, for once it is right.
Andrew Roberts
London SW3
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