Writing the Coattails

Boris Johnson: The Churchill Factor - How One Man Made History

National Review, December 18, 2014 (December 31, 2014 Issue)

About halfway through Britain’s long Blair nightmare, I went to two dinners where Boris Johnson was billed as the guest speaker. Each time he was eagerly awaited: a man on the rise, a gifted journalist, an engaging and eccentric television personality, a Tory MP. Each time he was late. When he eventually turned up — all scarecrow hair and unconvincing excuses — he explained that he’d left his notes behind. He pressed on regardless in that blend of Drones Club and High Table that he has made his own. Both speeches were funny, sharp — and more or less identical. Johnson knows, as Winston Churchill knew, that a spontaneous speech takes plenty of preparation. A book by Boris on Winston — first-name politicians both — ought to make sense. Like Churchill, Johnson is phenomenally ambitious, unusually resilient, and remarkably skilled at using showmanship, élan, and his pen to build, refine, and reshape his image.

It’s a shame, then, that The Churchill Factor is not very good. The grand old stories roll on grandly by, but there’s little that’s new for those who know their Churchill, and not enough depth for those who don’t. But if you’re interested in Johnson, this book is well worth a look. If Boris was someone to watch back when I listened to him make one speech two times, he is much more so today. He has since twice won election as mayor of London — no small feat for a Conservative — and is poised to reenter Parliament in the 2015 general election. From there he will be well placed to run for the Tory leadership in the likely event that David Cameron has just led his party off a cliff.

Johnson’s success owes a great deal to the manner in which he has defused his potentially toxic poshness. Like the hapless Cameron, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson went to the wrong school (Eton) and the wrong university (Oxford), and then capped the whole disgraceful gilding by joining the Bullingdon Club, an Oxford gang of the rich and sporadically destructive brought to politically tricky national attention some years ago when an ill-wisher leaked the club’s 1987 photo — a snapshot of archaic finery, Flashman attitude, and Sloane Ranger hair, a photo in which both Cameron and Johnson appeared.

Cameron has tried to deal with this embarrassment of privilege by recasting his public persona (very) gently downscale. The more charismatic Johnson, gambling that Brits take more pleasure in eccentricity than in reverse snobbery, has moved in the opposite direction, putting on a display of wild toff rococo — a bit of Wooster, a spot of Biggles, a touch of Raffles — that has left class warriors too amused to be chippy.

It’s a performance that rests heavily on Johnson’s way with words. His speeches are punctuated by slang, dated terminology, and madcap verbal construction. An accusation of infidelity was famously, if inaccurately, dismissed as an “inverted pyramid of piffle.” But what works in a sound bite palls over the course of a book. Tootling, monstering, wonky, squiffily, tosser, prang, perv, titfer, snortingly, bonkers, bunging — crikey, Boris, hold the shtick already. Unnecessary adjectives and superfluous adverbs run wild. Metaphors meander. A promising description of Churchill’s house — crammed with researchers, writers, and secretaries — as “one of the world’s first word processors . . . a gigantic engine for the generation of text” dragged on so long that all I wanted was the delete button. To be sure, there are splendid moments (“the French were possessed of an origami army: they just kept folding”), but they are swamped by verbosity.

So it’s ironic that the best section of the book is Johnson’s superb analysis of how Churchill’s oratory was put together, what it was meant to convey, and why it worked as well as it did. Sadly, Johnson himself ignores two key Churchillian tricks — short words over long, “Anglo-Saxon pith” over intruders with Latin and Greek origins — burdening the readers of this book with such treats as chiasmus, philoprogenitive, and eirenic, words that probably played little part in the small talk of Alfred the Great.

But these ten-guinea words are sly demonstrations of erudition, deployed for political, not literary, effect. Boris may play Wooster to beguile the plebs, but he wants them to understand that he is no upper-class twit. At the same time, he needs his audiences to feel that he is an inclusive sort of fellow, with them if not necessarily of them. So he brings his readers alongside him on trips to the sacred sites — to Chartwell, to the House of Commons, to kind Nurse Everest’s grave — while throwing in glimpses of a life that he invites them to share, if only by proxy: lunch at the Savoy, a birthday bash for a hedge-fund “king” at Blenheim Palace. Condescending, yes, but cleverly disguised. Only rarely does the mask slip, and the text sprouts tics more typical of history books written for the late-Victorian nursery: “Those were the days, you see, when there was no moral pressure on MPs to have a ‘home’ in the constituency.”

“You see”? Well, I suppose I do. Thank you, sir.

Notionally, Johnson has written this book to revive ebbing memories of Churchill and to remind his readers that, whatever some cruder Marxists might have to say about history’s being driven by “vast and impersonal economic forces,” one man can make a difference. Based primarily on a fine retelling of the events of 1940, Johnson makes a strong, if unsurprising, case that Churchill was such a man.

But Boris’s real objective in writing about Churchill is to promote Boris. Wisely, he doesn’t try to push Churchill comparisons — hosting the London Olympics doesn’t quite rank with seeing off Hitler — but there’s enough there for a satisfactory subliminal message. So Johnson tells the story of a man comfortable in his unorthodoxies, a statesman who was larger than life, and, like a certain twice-elected mayor of London that I could mention, larger than party.

In recent years, Johnson has positioned himself as offering a more robust, less politically correct version of David Cameron’s “modernized” conservatism, more libertarian, not so committed to environmentalist piety, pro-immigration (for its purported qualities as an agent of economic growth), and a booster of London’s cosmopolitanism, too, but not so respectful of multiculturalist orthodoxy. Johnson portrays Churchill, not unreasonably, as an early-20th-century Whig, an optimist, a Progressive of sorts.

But the old imperialist is not safely pigeonholed. Johnson defends his hero against the accusation that he was a warmonger and — as he should — places some of Churchill’s rougher views within the context of his times. Occasionally (not as uncharacteristically as fans of the allegedly plain-speaking Johnson like to believe), Boris simply dodges the issue: There is nothing on Churchill’s response to the Bengal famine of 1943, startlingly callous then and now.

Johnson — clearly conscious that times have moved on for the island race — takes care to signal that, despite his obvious admiration for Churchill, he himself is no reactionary. He distances himself from some instances of the more “unpasteurized” Churchill, but not too far. The last lion is still idolized by many of those who will be picking the next Conservative leader, an election evidently on Johnson’s mind. Why else tread quite so carefully on the question of Churchill’s complicated views on a united Europe, that most treacherous of Tory topics?

But tread carefully Johnson does. He has his eyes on the prize. Churchill would have understood.

Walking With Destiny

Paul Johnson: Winston Churchill

National Review, December 9, 2009

One of the most remarkable aspects of Winston Churchill’s sprawling epic of a life was the way that he was able to cram it all in — to do all that — in a mere 90 years. It is only marginally less miraculous that Paul Johnson has now managed to make an excellent job of summing up that life — and, no less important, offer up a good measure of the man who lived it — in a book of a little under 200 pages.

This is not a “definitive” Churchill. For that, turn to the massive official biography begun by his son and taken to a triumphant conclusion by the indefatigable Sir Martin Gilbert. Nor is it a full-length (if not Gilbertian in size) work on the lines of Roy Jenkins’s Churchill (2001), a fine, feline interpretation (Johnson rates it as the best single-volume account of Churchill’s life) made all the more interesting for having been written by a man who had, like Churchill, been Britain’s home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, although not, mercifully (he was a socialist of sorts, and a Europhile of conviction), prime minister.

Paul Johnson’s take is something else, a deft, brisk, admiring Life of a Great Man, a book for a country-house weekend, perhaps, crafted in vintage style and best read, I’d think, in the company of some vintage port. A distinguished journalist (and a regular NR contributor) and successful popular (in the best meaning of that term) historian, Johnson writes in a slightly archaic rhythm, a lavish, lively prose that is sometimes old-fashioned (“At this moment providence intervened”) and occasionally orotund (“the two worked together to bring the great fleet of measures into harbor, wafted by the winds of their oratory”). This is an author who cares about narrative, and who relishes grand, sweeping (frequently, very sweeping) judgments, faintly irritating pulpitry (“It is a joy to write his life. . . . None holds more lessons, especially for youth”), well-chosen anecdotes, and neat, shrewd observations (“Churchill had always used clothes for personal propaganda”). The resulting mix comes as a rich treat after the dense jargon and denser preoccupations that characterize the efforts of so many contemporary academic historians. Readers looking for an attempt to squeeze Churchill into the straitjacket of early-21st-century attitudes will be disappointed, as will those looking for some rote revisionism, but then they probably should not have been reading Johnson in the first place.

Despite going a little easy on his subject over what were, at least arguably, his two most notorious (and very different) blunders — the Gallipoli campaign and his 1925 decision to put Britain back on the gold standard at too high a parity — and making no mention of some of the more harebrained schemes Churchill dreamt up in World War II, Johnson shows that he is prepared to criticize, at least on occasion. Thus he takes aim at Churchill’s quixotic, last-ditch defense of the poisonous Edward the Abdicator, and at more serious, if lesser known, errors of judgment, such as the role that Churchill played in carelessly pushing 1920s Japan on a path that was eventually to transform the Japanese from allies into antagonists. There was, Churchill told the then–prime minister of Britain, not “the slightest chance” of a war with Japan in their lifetimes. The eerie intuitive sense that enabled him to be one of the first Englishmen to understand the true nature of both Nazism and Bolshevism was, this time, nowhere to be seen. Less than 20 years later, Singapore fell.

But if Johnson has (for the most part) avoided the temptations of hero worship, he has an appreciation for the heroic qualities of Churchill’s life. This is only underlined by the obvious pleasure he takes in demonstrating how far Churchill could stray from more conventional notions of how heroes should behave, perhaps most charmingly in the story of when, in 1946 and aged 17, Johnson (lucky fellow!) had the opportunity to ask the greatest of Britain’s leaders to what he attributed his success in life: “Without pause or hesitation, he replied: ‘Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.’ He then got into his limo.” A seasoned veteran both of dusty, sand-blown imperial campaigns and of the mud of the Western Front, who had, as prime minister and aged nearly 70, to be dissuaded from showing up for the D-Day landings, Churchill was a warrior as much as he was a warlord, yet somehow I suspect this is not the sort of reply, self-deprecatory and sly, that an Achilles would have given.

What Achilles would have recognized, however, was Churchill’s relentless pursuit of glory and fame. Along with his romantic ideal of nation, and his gargantuan appetite for excitement, it is as close as we can come to finding a key to understanding what drove this complex man. With the idea of an afterlife appearing as unlikely to Churchill (for all practical purposes an atheist, but in a very English way: he was, he once said, a buttress of the Church of England, “support[ing] it from the outside”) as to the heroes of the Iliad, his achievements could be the only sure route to the immortality that he craved.

In bidding farewell to the outgoing Labour members of his wartime coalition, Churchill told them “the light of history will shine on all your helmets.” To make sure that it shone on his, he became his own Homer. “Words,” he had once remarked, “are the only things that last forever.” The sole reward he requested for his services during the war was that a large quantity of Britain’s wartime papers be classified as his personal property. By effectively gaining exclusive access to so much of the official record, he was able to be among the first to get in his word (or, more accurately, more than 2 million words) on the topic of the war; and so, aided by a dedicated team, he did. The six volumes of his The Second World War were to shape our understanding of the conflict for a generation, and in no small respect they still do. They also made Churchill a great deal of money ($50 million, at today’s value, not including serialization rights), something that was never a small consideration for a man so skillful at turning ink into gold.

His account is highly partial and, even allowing for what was known at the time, it leaves out much of the story, but, as Johnson explains, “by giving his version of the greatest of all wars . . . he was fighting for his ultimate place in history. What was at stake was his status as hero. So he fought hard and took no prisoners. On the whole he won the war of words, as he had earlier won the war of deeds.” But then, given Churchill’s way with language, a talent so profound that there was a time when it seemed only his speeches stood between the island race and defeat, this could not have been an entirely unexpected result.

And it’s a mark of Johnson’s sensitivity as a writer — and his keen eye for good material — how often he is prepared to let Churchill speak for himself. If there’s a drawback to this biography it is that it doesn’t contain much fresh detail for those already familiar with the story: The only two things new to me were the revelation that Churchill couldn’t stand the sound of whistling (by contrast, Johnson relates that Hitler was “an expert and enthusiastic whistler: he could do the entire score of The Merry Widow, his favourite opera”) and the claim that Churchill’s liver, “inspected after his death, was found to be as perfect as a young child’s,” something that might suggest that this peripatetic and famously bibulous statesman regularly included Lourdes in his wanderings.

But this lack of new information, almost inevitable in a brief summary of a well-known life, is compensated for by the pleasure of rereading the quotations from Churchill, familiar, well-loved friends for the most part, that Johnson weaves through his text as the best of all guides to the man who first said them. There are the jokes, the asides, and, of course, extracts from those great, rolling, resonant speeches. To read them is to hear again that voice, a voice (in this case speaking on the threat to British India) capable of conjuring up imagery that has not yet lost its power to chill or, in what may be our own coming age of Western retreat, sound the alarm: “Greedy appetites have been excited and many itching fingers are stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict Empire.”

And then there’s this, from 1940, on the Anglo-American “special relationship”: “The British Empire and the United States will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. . . . No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant [regrettably, Johnson omits that splendid ‘benignant’], to broader lands and better days.”

If I admit that rereading those words in the age of the EU, of Gordon Brown, and of Barack Obama left me sad, I hope that you will understand.

Victory at All Costs

Lynne Olson: Troublesome Young Men

The New York Sun, April 11, 2007

If there is one thing, and one thing only, to be grasped about Britain's failure to head off Hitler in time, it's that it was almost certainly inevitable. Unfortunately, this is something that readers of "Troublesome Young Men" ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $27.50), a new book that explains how Winston Churchill rose to power and appeasement fell, will have to discover from another, more balanced source.

What's more, to describe "Troublesome Young Men" as a "new" book in anything other than the most literal sense is to be too kind. Yes, the additional, if occasionally rather gossipy, focus that Lynne Olson puts on some of the critics of appeasement who rallied around Churchill is welcome (she's particularly good on the studied ambiguity of Anthony Eden, the former foreign minister who had resigned from Neville Chamberlain's government in early 1938), but for the most part, the story she tells is as dated as Chamberlain's frock coat. More morality play than serious study of the past, and riddled with the clichés of class warfare, it's a version of events that had already found its definitive form by 1940 with the publication of "Guilty Men," a fierce, best-selling tract by the pseudonymous "Cato" (in reality, a triumvirate led by Michael Foot, a young journalist who later became leader of the Labour Party).

"Guilty Men" was brilliantly written, brilliantly persuasive, and brilliantly unjust. Designed to saddle Britain's Tories with responsibility for the mess in which the country found itself after the collapse of France, while at the same time carefully exonerating the Left from any meaningful share of the blame, this cunning polemic succeeded to an extent that even its shrewd, deft, and manipulative authors cannot have expected. It helped pave the way for the crushing defeat of the Conservative Party (even with Churchill at its head) in the 1945 election, and it shaped the way that Britons thought of the disastrous run-up to the war. More than six decades later, it still does.

It's no surprise that it played so well. By making scapegoats of toffs and Tories, Cato spared the rest of the British people the embarrassment of asking themselves what exactly they had been doing while the threat from the Third Reich grew. It was, after all, a period in which Britons in their millions had not only participated in 1935's unofficial "Peace Ballot" (collective security, "effective" sanctions, you know how it goes), but had also, after three more years of Hitler, taken to the streets to celebrate the deal Chamberlain cut at Munich. Tellingly, Ms. Olson has nothing to say about the former. The latter she attributes to Chamberlain's manipulation of both the press and his own party.

To an extent she's right. Some of the most interesting passages in "Troublesome Young Men" are those that show how the prime minister was nothing like the ineffective weakling of popular legend, at least when it came to domestic politics. Despite that, Chamberlain could not (even had he wanted to) afford to ignore the concerns of an electorate ready to pay almost any price to avoid a fresh European war. Any price, that is, other than spending money soon enough on the rearmament that might have made a difference.

Might? Part of the appeal of "Guilty Men" was that it had no room for such shilly-shallying. To the armchair strategists that wrote it, all was clear. This should have been done. That should have been tried. It was an approach, helped by hindsight and the luxury of the hypothetical, which came with an additional advantage. Suggesting that the solutions to the conundrum posed by Hitler were obvious implied that the failure to adopt them (until too late) must have been the result of stupidity, stubbornness, naïveté, or something more malign. In essence, it presumes some sort of guilt. Like many before her, Ms. Olson has gratefully applauded that verdict.

In reality, the situation was far more complicated. There was indeed plenty of stubbornness, naïveté, and the rest of it to go round in the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments, but the idea that there were any easy answers to the problems that Britain faced is nonsense. For example, there was no significant political constituency for military action against Germany until at least the Anschluss, and even if there had been, how would it have been paid for? A few years after the worst of the Great Depression, there was little money to spare, especially for a nation already burdened by bills for the defense of an empire. As for the failure to cooperate with potential allies against Hitler (another key element in Chamberlain's rap sheet), one, the USSR, was a hostile, genocidal dictatorship with, as the Finns were shortly to demonstrate, a feeble army; another, France, was thoroughly demoralized; and a third, Poland, was to last less than three weeks when the panzers struck. And America, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

Even if we put moral considerations to one side, none of this necessarily justifies what was done at Munich, but it helps explain it. That Ms. Olson has largely chosen to ignore these issues is a shame. She's a skilled and lively writer, quite capable of handling complex topics in a way that would not deter the popular audience at which this book (with its occasional lapses into Harlequin baroque) is clearly aimed. As it is, "Troublesome Young Men," which finds itself on much firmer ground when its author turns her attention to the Phony War and Chamberlain's fall, is a fair read, but, all too often, an unfair history.