Churchill & Son by Josh Ireland

Author:Josh Ireland [Ireland, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Bob Boothby, who despite his long loyalty to Winston during the thirties claims never to have really liked him, would have been sympathetic to this suggestion. He thought Winston was too ruthless, too fond of war and power.

“I could never take the streak of cruelty in his nature,” he said. Winston would cry over the death of a cat or a swan but had little regard for human life—least of all his own. “When he sacked or broke people, and he broke many, he never thanked and seldom saw them. He simply didn’t care. And in some cases he did it with relish.”

Desmond Morton, Winston’s neighbor and one of his chief sources of intelligence during the wilderness years, and who was also cast aside by the prime minister,* saw something of this when the prime minister ended General Wavell’s command in the Middle East.

Wavell, who Winston believed lacked the charisma necessary to be a good commander, had made the decision to evacuate Somaliland and carried out a brilliant retreat, but the prime minister claimed he had sustained too few casualties. Wavell sent back a telegram saying only one thing: “Butchery is not the mark of a good tactician.” This defiance did him no good.

“I think that the first time I ever deeply disliked Winston,” Morton told Boothby, “and realised the depths of selfish brutality to which he could sink, was when he told me, not only that he was getting rid of Wavell from the Middle East, but why.”

After they had spoken about his destruction of Wavell, Morton described how Winston walked up and down his room, chin sunk into his chest, glowering and muttering over and over again, “I wanted to show him my power.”

Winston was certainly capable of being ruthless—one could argue that it was precisely this quality that made him such an effective war leader—and there was immense value to be gained by anything that helped improve Anglo-American relations at such a crucial point in the war. Moreover, he had always had an easy facility for convincing himself that any course of action that suited him was not just the most convenient but also the right thing to do.

Pamela believed that even once her parents-in-law had found out about her affair, they did not disapprove of what she had done. After all, she reasoned, they knew how appalling a husband their son had been.

There is only one recorded incidence of Winston making any sort of criticism of Pamela. Talking to an old friend, the Countess of Rosslyn, he said, “Why, I cannot understand it. I went out of my way to be kind to her.” But if he was upset, he had a strange way of showing it. As Pamela remembered, “If anything, Winston made it easier for the two of us to see each other outside London by inviting both of us to Chequers nearly every weekend.”

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