How Churchill fought the spirit of the age to snatch victory from Diana
FRANK JOHNSON
So many people seem not to realise how close Diana, Princess of Wales, came in that fateful autumn of 2002 to conquering these islands. Only Isambard Kingdom Brunel stood between Churchill and her. We take for granted that Churchill would have won in the end. But it did not look so certain at the time. Some 222,000 people believed that she was the Greatest Briton.
The forces which Diana had at her disposal seemed about to overwhelm us. She had the personal trauma counsellors at her disposal. She had the colonic irrigators. She had the dress designers and the hairdressers — straight as well as gay. She had the aromatherapists, and the makers and eaters of Caesar salads. She could deploy the terrifying Burrell, with all the tears and sobs at any distance that that entailed. All were under the command of the ruthlessly compassionate Rosie Boycott. Against Diana, Churchill had the much-loved, but obsolete, Mo Mowlam. Somehow, thousands of people had to be found who thought that Churchill, not Diana, was the greatest Briton. Given the locust years of comprehensive education, this at first looked impossible.
Unlike Hitler before he conquered France, Diana did not have to install a collaborationist government in Whitehall. She already had one. The Dianiste Blair regime was in place. Blair had made clear his Dianism at her funeral. Should he falter, she could also rely on the equally sensitive Portillo. It was generally thought that he would never have become prime minister; but he would have worked through the lazy, easily manipulated Clarke. Bercow was a potential Dianiste minister of the interior. Not that Blair was in any danger of falling. It was effectively a one-party state. Only the week before Diana's expected victory, what was supposed to be the leading Conservative weekly magazine, edited by a Conservative member of the puppet Parliament, sought official approval by naming Blair Parliamentarian of the Year. Later, the editor denied that he had anything to do with the award. The implication was that it was the work of the Blair regime's stooges on the awards committee.
I myself was in the resistance at the time. I remember thinking the editor guilty of defeatism and simple fear rather than treason. At the time, it looked as if Blair ww, going to be in power for much of his lifetime. The British people had not heard of lain Duncan Smith. I also remember think
ing that it would need all my influence with my resistant comrades to prevent the editor having his hair shaven off come the liberation, or indeed to save him from a Conservative firing squad after a show trial it la Laval. It was a terrible time.
But Churchill saw us through. Somehow he made the British believe that they could defeat this woman. Probably, what told against her in the end was Britons. fear that, if she won, Blair — voice quivering once more — might read a lesson again in Westminster Abbey. The British would not tolerate such a thing twice in a generation.
Fortunately, on the two occasions I tried to vote by dialling the relevant BBC number in the Great Britons contest, the line did not work. It gave out a whine, and went dead. I say 'fortunately' because I was torn between voting for Churchill and voting for Shakespeare. Had I voted for one, I would immediately have regretted that I had not voted for the other.
I say this even though I am susceptible to much of Churchill revisionism, provided that it is convincing and well written. Shakespearean revisionism, however, has never been convincing. Not that there has been much of it. There was Tolstoy. But in his essay against Shakespeare he is reduced to accounting for Shakespeare's repute by saying that it is merely a mass delusion of humankind. But he does not explain why, in that case, humankind chose Shakespeare to adulate, and not some other writer.
There was also Shaw on Shakespeare. He wrote that he knew of no author whose mind was so much more inferior to his own except Sir Walter Scott. But Shaw's antiShakespeareanism was a lark, intended to make us think. I find Churchill's greatness harder to account for than do the unquestioning Churchillians. He did not Vitt' the war in any literal sense. Britain ended the war on the winning side, a very different matter. Nor did he seem to know how to win it. How he thought it would be won was not how, in the event, it was won. From what he is recorded as having said privately at the time, he thought that the German economy would collapse, and that the resistance movements in the occupied countries would drive out the Germans. He thought that the United States would enter the war, and install itself in France, much as it did in the first world war.
But the American-led invasion of France was only possible because France was denuded of the German forces which instead were on the eastern front. Had so many Germans not been in the east, there would have been enough of them in the west perhaps to ensure that an Allied invasion of occupied France from Britain would have resulted in a western front which would have been as much of a stalemate as before 1918. Had that come about, we may suspect that British and American public opinion would not have stood for another bloodletting on that scale. There might, therefore, have been at best a compromise peace with Hitler, at least until the atom bomb had been usable on Germany.
Perhaps Churchill's achievement was to prevent Stalin — had he thrown back the German invaders of the Soviet Union — from reaching the Channel in 1945 or thereabouts. Stalin could not do that because the Anglo-Americans were in western Europe, and had the bomb. The reason the Americans were there was that Churchill had kept Britain in the war in 1940 and provided them with an offshore island from which to invade the Continent. If there had been no force between him and the Channel, it is reasonable to assume that Stalin would have reached it. A hostile Continent — as in 1940 — would have confronted a Britain alone. Yet in 1940 Churchill could not have envisaged that.
We sense, however, that at the deepest level Churchill — unlike Chamberlain, Halifax and most of the others — knew in 1940 that Britain would be rescued by something turning up. Like a true Englishman. the strategist who inspired him was not Bonaparte or Clausewitz, but Micawber. That is why it is fitting that he should be the Greatest Briton.
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