The Truth About Winston Churchill - Andrew Roberts

He was involved in three car crashes, two plane crashes. He went into no-mans land in the first world war some 30 times. He got so close to the German trenches he could actually hear them speaking in their trenches. He once said that there's nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot out without result. The Conservatives tried to deselect him and every single thing that he said turned out to be right and everything that they said turned

out to be wrong. If you value honesty, integrity and diversity, all things that are increasingly lacking in established media then consider supporting us at TRIGGERnometry. As a member you'll get ad-free and extended interviews, plus exclusive content. Click the membership link on the podcast description or find the exclusive episodes link on your podcast listening app to join us. And Rob, it's such a delight to have you on the show. You are, of course,

author of many, many books. But the one we really want to talk to you about is one that in internet terms has gone viral and selling continues to sell thousands, tens of thousands of

copies every year is Churchill walking with destiny. And we wanted to spend some time, a long time actually, talking to you about here in Westminster where we're sitting, about a man who shaped the destiny of this country, the history of this country, about whom actually people in my generation, we've got a couple of young guys here, having been educated in this country, we know very little about, very little about.

Well, that's partly because he's not taught in the schools any longer. He used to be, but now he isn't. You can get through your entire history syllabus and only learn about Winston Churchill for 14 seconds on a video. Yes, well, we are going to counteract that by spending some time doing it. So I suppose the best place to start would be right at the beginning. We really want to spend some time with you talking about Churchill's life from the beginning

to the end. I went to Chartwell, which is the house, the, yes, it's a beautiful man a house in Kent, which he bought when he was about 60 and lived in for the rest of his life. Yes. And when you go there, you suddenly realize, and educated as I am. I mean, this guy, he lived about seven lives worth of lives in like one section of his life. We'll get to all of that later. But from the beginning, where was he born, how did he grow up, what

was the kind of beginnings of Churchill's? Well, he was born in a much grander place even than Chartwell. He was born in Bleningham Palace, which is the grandest of all the duke or palaces, the Spencer Churchill's magnificent palace in Oxfordshire. And he was born there because his grandfather was the Duke of Mulbra. And his father was a very successful politician, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Round of Churchill. And his mother was an American

aero's, called Jenny Jerome. And so, yes, he grew up as an upper class Victorian, essentially. Not exactly humble beginnings. But then he actually, having been educated and I'm understanding, he wasn't particularly successful student, is that right? Well, actually, he made out that he was less successful student than he was. In fact, he was pretty good at, he came in the top third of all his classes. He came top of history and English quite a lot

in his classes. So when you read his school report, there are a lot better than he made himself out to be. But he certainly wasn't a class student. He wasn't going to go to Oxford or Cambridge, for example. And why did he do that? Why did he paint himself as intellectually mediocre? Surely that's not the smartest play, particularly if you want to lead a country?

Well, exactly. He was a very unusual person, frankly. His autobiography, and this is where he made himself out to be a bit thicker than he genuinely was, is the most beautifully written book. It's called My Early Life. It was published in 1930. I do recommend anybody read it. But you have to work out the bits where he's playing with the reader, as opposed to just giving them the sort of word for word accuracy about his life. So he was good

at school, but not great. And where did he go from there? Because in my understanding, he tried to go to, I think it's Sandhurst several times. It was a third attempt, wasn't it, that he got into Sandhurst? That's right. And he got in for the cavalry rather than the infantry. The cool kids went for the infantry. The ones he weren't, so successful, went for the cavalry. His father was angry with him about that because it was much more expensive

to put a boy through as a cavalry officer. Of course, you had to buy the horse apart of my life. And he had this belief in himself, that drove him all the way through his life, this sense of driving sense of personal destiny. His father wasn't kind to him. He never seems to have appreciated that there was anything special about Young Winston. His mother loved him, but saw virtually nothing of him in the way that Edwardian parents sometimes did,

especially the aristocratic ones. She was having affairs with the Prince of Wales and the Austrian ambassador and so on, and saw very little of him and his younger brother Jack. But nonetheless, he did do well at Sandhurst because he loves everything, absolutely everything to do with soldiering. And you talk about his parents effectively, either not being present

or not being kind to him. Did he have formative personalities in his life, people who guided him when he was younger, inspired him, drove him, challenged him? Very much, he did. Yes, the first of which actually was when we called Elizabeth Everest, he was his nanny. And she, he loved him, worshiped her and she was kind to him and showed

him the love and infection that he wasn't frankly getting from his parents. And then there was a man who was a great orator, an American politician called Bert Cochran, who was one of his mother's lovers, who also became a sort of father figure to him. After his own father, an old Randolph died in 1895 when his father was 45 and Winston was 20. And the other thing I wanted to pick up sort of going away from the story of his life for

just one second, you mentioned that he was a Victorian. And there'll be a lot of young people who don't really know what that means exactly because this was a society of people who, different values and different viewpoints and different approaches to many things to what we have today. What did it mean for someone to be a Victorian? Well, to be an aristocratic Victorian in the, in the period that he was growing up, which

was essentially the 1880s and the 1890s meant that you were a believer in the empire. He was born in 1874 and he believed that the British Empire was a good thing for civilisation and the world in a way that obviously is not taught in any way today.

But a very mildly. To put it very mildly. And at this had the very positive aspect of essentially he thought he was recreating a combination of ancient Greece and ancient Rome where Britain was going to be able to teach the native peoples of the empire development in many, many areas

of human development. And it had the negative side also, of course, of a belief that you were the very top of the apex of the sort of human condition that you were racially superior to everybody else because you were white and you were also racially superior to every other white because you were British. And this meant that there was a sense, you get

it very much of course from Darwinism. Charles Darwin was still alive whilst Churchill was a boy that there was a sort of a pinnacle and that key being upper class and British and white was at the absolute top of the pinnacle. Now what this meant was that he had deep responsibilities to everybody else. This is something that's often misunderstood or ignored that because he was this at the top of the pinnacle essentially, it was his duty

to spend the rest of his life doing good things for everybody else. Privilege had a deep sense of responsibility attached to it which sometimes we forget about that aspect of Victorian chivalry. And coming back to the story now, by the way we should say for our American and other viewers, Sanhurst is of course the military academy. It's their West, our West Point to Charles. Just better. You're going to get all the

haymeltes. Now from a very angry American who have guns. But so he goes to hand San hurst and is that part of why he wants to go into a military career because it is a career of service to your country? Yes, very much. The ethos of Sanhurst, like West Point in fact, is this concept of giving back to society because of the privileges that you yourself have enjoyed in life. And he did have huge privileges as I mentioned earlier

about his family. However, actually both his parents were terrible spend-thrifts. They spent his inheritance, certainly his mother did after his father died. He had to work very hard. He wound up becoming the best paid war correspondent in the world when he fought in the Boa War in South Africa. So it wasn't as though he actually was rich. He never was actually. He was pretty much broke all his life until he wrote the war memoirs

for the Second World War when he was in his early 70s. Wow. So he, money was always an issue for him. And you wouldn't think that by just a superficial glance at the man himself? No, but that's because he always bought the best of everything. And the reason was that he was always in debt. And he could afford things because he was constantly getting into debt. There were two points in the 1930s where he nearly had to sell that beautiful house

chart wall that you visited because he was always broke. And this is a good thing as far as historians like Mia concerned because what it meant was that he had to write 37 books and write over 800 articles. And the way, of course, that's the best way to get into the mind of a man like Churchill is to read what he wrote. And as a result, we have an awful lot of it. Many millions of words. He wrote more than Shakespeare and Dickens put together. Wow. And what is career in the military

successful? It was, it was after fashion, but the trouble was, of course, he did need to make money and be a walker respondent. So the soldiers always thought of him as a journalist and the journalists always thought of him as a soldier. And that meant he could never really get to the top in the British army. The highest he got was to be a colonel in the

First World War. But he fought on five campaigns on four continents. It was an amazing, amazing military career he took part in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire at the Battle of Ombdomon where he charged with the 21st Lancers. He went into no man's land in the First World War some 30 times and doing trench raids and so on. So he showed tremendous courage. And the people talk about his courage and they talk about his, particularly

when it comes to his military career and obviously afterwards. How did that shape the way he viewed war and conflict? Well, he hated war. He was not a war man. He was accused all his life of being a war man. But because he'd come up close and personal to death, seen so many of his friends killed from the age of 21 onwards. He had seen his close friends die in war. He never was a war man. He believed in, in deterring war by, by military strength. And so that was his immediate feeling about war.

However, once war had started, he believed in winning it and he was absolutely fascinated by every aspect of war. He would go out of his way to use scientific knowledge to try to ensure that Britain was at the absolute forefront, the cutting edge of all the new war technologies. Of course, in a sense, he's the godfather of the tank, which completely all to the whole nature of war and still has. And Andrew, just flesh out the military

career for us first. So he goes to Sandhurst, goes to Sandhurst. And then what happens from there? And then he gets sent off to India, fights in the Northwest Frontier of India, where he fights against the various, various clans and tribes, such as the Talib, the Grandparents essentially of the Taliban, and the Afridi tribes that were attacking the

Punjabi farmers. So he defended the Punjab is up in the Northwest Frontier. Then he went off to Cuba and fought on the side of the Spanish in Cuba, really more watching than fighting. But nonetheless, on his 21st birthday, he heard bullets fired. He was tremendously lucky that he was never hit. He once said that there's nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot out without result. And he was shot out without result of a great deal. He then fought

in the Sudanese campaign. So he went back to Northwest Frontier. Then the Sudanese campaign, what's called the River War in 1898 when he took part in this great cavalry charge. And then he fought in the Boa War in 1899 and 1900. And then he got elected to Parliament. So he had fought in all of those wars prior to, of course, later on fighting in the First World War.

And the Boa War in particular, I think, is a moment when his courage really comes through, because there is this incredible story about him having to work his way through without any escape to the story. He essentially escapes from prison. He gets captured after taking part in the defence of a train which has been ambushed by the Boa's, the Afrikaans, white South Africans. He gets put in a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria and then escapes and makes his way 300 miles

through enemy territory. At one point he has to sleep down in a mine and the candle gutters out that he was given. And you could feel the rat scurrying over his face down in the depths of his mind. And he manages, at another point, he's actually followed by a vulture. And nonetheless, he manages to escape to freedom in Mozambique. So this is the thing really that A tells him that he's got something special. He always thought he had anyhow, but this actually does give him

the sense that he's special. And also, of course, it makes him a hero of the British Empire, because he has escaped and he did it in the same week as a series of disastrous victory, of defeats for the British Empire. It's called Black Week because there are three serious military defeats in one week. And the only really good news at that time was Winston

Churchill successfully escaping from prison. Wow. As we journey through the life of Winston Churchill, it's evident that his legacy is marked by moments of resilience and vision. Speaking of vision, let us tell you about how the Galaxy projector 2.0 will transform a space with vibrant galaxies and constellations creating an immersive cosmic stop, stop, stop, May. Did you just try to segue from Winston Churchill to the Galaxy projector 2.0?

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sale is on. Don't miss it. Go get your Galaxy projector 2.0 at GalaxyLabs.coldslashtrigger. You can also follow the link in the description, scan the QR code below. And now, back to the interview. Wow, so he almost became a celebrity of his time, then, really? Not almost. He was. He was the first great modern celebrity, a war celebrity, is it? Yeah. Oh, wow. So, did he, did that then help with his transition into becoming a politician?

Precisely that. Yes. He, he'd already stood for Parliament once, for Oldham in Lancashire, and could fail to get elected. But now, when he came back after this extraordinary prison escape, his celebrity status did help him get elected with a decent majority. So, he was a politician, and then he decided to enlist during the First World War.

During the war. During the war. Absolutely. But he'd already fought in the war. So, he came back in order to stand, and he'd already stood for Parliament before he went out to the war war and had lost. And then he went back having fought in the war and won. And then, I guess what Francis is getting at is what happens when World War One breaks out. He's, I'm assuming, an MP at this point? Well, this is 15 years later. Yeah.

So, yes, he's a, he's actually the First Lord of the Admiralty. So, by this stage, he, in 1915, he become, he'd become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. By the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he was still First Lord of the Admiralty, and he managed to get the whole of the British expeditionary force. Over 100,000 men across to France without losing a single

man from German new boats or any other, any other disaster. So, he was very successful in that. He had the British Navy ready for the First World War, and then the catastrophe of the Dardanelles struck. And this was largely his fault. He was the person who believed that if you could get the British Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Eastern Mediterranean up through the Dardanelles Straits and anchor it off Constantinople, modern day, modern day, anchor it.

That's right, that's what I'm saying, that's what I'm saying. You would be able, through the threat of shelling, to take the Turkish Empire out of the First World War. And if that had happened, it would have been one of the greatest strategic victories of modern warfare. But it didn't. And on the 18th of March, 1915, the Anglo-French Flatilla lost no

fewer than six ships, either destroyed or sunk. So, we had to pull back and then they attacked five weeks later on the 25th of April 1915 and got horribly stuck on the Glippoli Peninsula, which is on the west and side of the straits. And in the end, no fewer than 147,000 men were killed or wounded in that campaign. And it completely wrecked Churchill's career because it had been his idea. And he decided that he was going to leave the government and fight in the trenches. He didn't

need to. He was 40 years old. We weren't calling up married 40-year-olds at that stage, but he did because he wanted a form of redemption. And that's why he went to join the... That's absolutely incredible. Can you imagine any politician doing that today? God. No, the blonde way of putting it. But also as well, in many ways, that was facing certain death because many men who went to fight in World War One didn't come back. Officers in some stretches of the same front that he was fighting on

had a six-week long survival rate. Their longevity for fighting the trenches was six weeks. So when he went to fight, how long did that career last being? He was there for a year. He was fortunate. It was one of the quarter sides of the front, however. As I mentioned, he went on 30 trench raids. And he got so close to the German trenches he could actually hear them speaking

in their trenches. So you can imagine how dangerous that was. There was one occasion when a German whizbang, high explosive shell, came and hit his dugout and decafated everyone inside it, but he left five minutes earlier. And he said on that occasion that he felt as if he could hear invisible wings beating over him, a real sense that he was being kept for something important,

you know, in life. And he had that sense about him. This is why I called my book Walking with Destiny because although he, of course, himself said that he felt as if he were walking with destiny and that all his part of life had been about a preparation for this hour and for this trial, all the way through his life he thought he was walking with destiny. It wasn't just in May 1940 when Hitler invaded Europe. He was born two months prematurely, which in Victorian England could be a

death sentence. He nearly died of pneumonia when he was 11. He nearly, he was involved in three car crashes, two plane crashes, nearly drowned in late Geneva, very nearly died in a house fire. It's incredible how close he came to death on so many occasions and the event, including, of course, that time when he left the dugout and it got hit. And the result was that he felt that he

was being specially kept back for a great occasion. That's so interesting. And one of the things I was going to ask you, we've got past it now, but I can't imagine being somebody in charge of tens of thousands of men ships your country's war effort and making a cock up that costs men lives that causes your country to suffer into fee in a major war in public. And then you're so gutted by that experience you go into the trenches to fight. I imagine that's a bit of a setback

in terms of your self image. I imagine that's really difficult to preserve that sense of destiny in that moment. He must have been destroyed. He was destroyed. His wife said it was the only time that he ever seriously considered committing suicide. He took up painting, which helped, in fact, helped him emotionally and psychologically. But yes, I mean, people would still, even in the 1930s, so 15-plus years later, would still shout, what about the Darden L's at him when he was making

speeches in public addresses. And in one, in fact, funny enough, he stood for Westminster, just here, this constituency, and people would shout at him, you know, what about the Darden L's? And so you do have a real sense that he understood this setback. But one of the great things about

Winston Churchill was that he learnt from his mistakes. And never in the Second World War, when he was Prime Minister in the Second World War, never once did he overrule the Chiefs of Staff in the way that he had done in the First World War in order to pursue the Darden L's expedition. So he actually learnt from that mistake. And it was a very important lesson to learn, of course. Oh, so I got through it. I was going to say he taught frequently, he gave it a term, which his

depression was the black dog. Was that, do you think that stemmed from the experience with the Darden L's in Constantinople? The only time he ever used that phrase black dog, he only used it once, was in a letter to his wife in July 1911 when he was talking about a particular moment of depression. He was not a black dog depressive, as in, it didn't suddenly strike him for no reason. He got depressed

for the same reason that anybody would get depressed under those circumstances. The classic examples being the fall of Tobruk in June 1942, the fall of Singapore in February 1942. These are moments when anyone would have got depressed. He wasn't somebody who had a sort of chemical imbalance. And as we know with actual manic depression, which black dog is, a terrible, terrible disease, that you can't chair over 900 meetings of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet,

at all times of day or night, if you are suffering from that kind of depression. So it's a misunderstanding to think that he was a manic depressive. He got sad when sad things happened. Precisely. Which happened a lot in his life, because his whole life was a total rollercoaster

up and down the entire time. Well, right. And so he fights in World War One. And World War One, many people have argued, Peter Hitchens, who's been on our show, you wrote a whole book about it, was really the moment when the British Empire starts to feel like it's on the downslope. Was he aware of this at the time? Did he feel this? Did he say anything about it? He was acutely

aware of it. Absolutely. He was. And of course, it was in his great 1942 speech that was made at the Guild Hall when he said, I did not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. He was very, very aware that Britain was becoming weaker. This was obviously clear with regard to the Quitt India campaign in the Congress Party in

India. He was very much stood up against Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s. He saw the way in which the United States was becoming richer and more powerful and was likely one day to take the place of the British Empire. And he didn't like it. He preferred the Americans to take over from anyone else. Certainly the Germans or any fascist power. But nonetheless, he didn't like the idea of

Britain's place in the sun being taken by anybody else. This was a natural reaction, of course, of the British imperialist of his age and class and background. Well, quite. And so he fights in World War I. And what happens then? Is he, by the way, is he from a public perception? You mentioned people continue to heckle him about the Dardanelles, etc. But does his decision to go and fight, rehabilitate him in the public consciousness?

In a sense, it does. And he does come back to become Minister of Munitions for the rest of the last part of the First World War. And there he does a fantastic job. And you look at the graphs of output of shells necessary and all the various other munitions necessary to win that war. And they go straight off the charts. He works so hard. And that's appreciated too. Then he became Minister of War and was in charge of demobilization of the army. He did a very good job there

as well. But he also put his reputation, essentially, damaged his reputation again because he was tremendously in favour of strangling in his words. And he had the most extraordinary mastery of the English languages, you can imagine. Strangling Bolshevism in its cradle. He wanted to send the British army, or at least a proportion of the British army, to help the white Russians try to destroy Bolshevism. And he's been criticized a lot for that. He's been attacked. There's just a

book last week that was published saying how terrible this was. But frankly, I think it was it was a brave thing to do. If you had managed to strangle Bolshevism and you hadn't had Soviet Communism, about a hundred million people would be who their lives would have been saved, who were murdered by Communism of various types in the 20th century. So actually, I think it was a very far-sighted thing to have done. But at the time, it was another thing that he was accused of having

been disastrously wrong about. When we look at his political career, he had a very interesting political career because there were many times he was actually criticised by both the conservatives and Labour. And the Liberals as well. Well, he changed sides twice as well. He started off as a Conservative like his father and then in 1904, over free trade, he became a Liberal. And then in 1924, again over free trade, he went back to the Conservatives. He kept his belief,

but the parties changed theirs and he stuck to his beliefs. But it looked very much as though he was just jumping ship because each time he jumped ship just before that party gelled into government. And so he was thought of very often as being just an opportunist. And he did make mistakes. That's the other thing. He wrote to his wife when he was in the trenches. He said, I should have made

nothing if I had not made mistakes. He got loads of things wrong. We've already got the Russian Civil War, the Gallipoli campaign, just the biggest of them, but he was opposed to female suffrage. At the beginning, he wanted to bring Britain into the gold standard at the wrong time, at the wrong level as it turned out. He was in favour of the black and tans trying to put down the Irish uprisings of the early 1920s as well, which horribly boomerangued on the British.

And so all in all, he did make mistakes. But as I mentioned earlier, from each of those that I've mentioned, he learned his lesson. We'll be back with our guests in a minute. We've discovered a fantastic way to stay on track with your nutritional goals while saving time. If you're in America and you're looking for dietician approved chef prepared fresh, never frozen meals to fuel you on

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as well. He was the father of the RAF. Actually, the Royal Air Force was very much his idea. Then after that, in 1924, he became the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was not much of an economist, frankly, but nonetheless, he presided over the most difficult period because it coincided with the outbreak of the General Strike in 1926. He wanted to be as generous as possible to the mineworkers who led that strike, but nonetheless, it was a terribly difficult period. By 1930, he was out of

office. The Conservatives had lost the Sub-Scon General Election and he fell out with the front bench with the Conservative leadership over Independence for India and resigned from the front bench. Let's go into that because obviously that's a huge part of the story here. Where did he lie when it came to this particular issue? He very much thought that the British should not move towards

what's called dominion status, which is essentially self-government for India. He thought that India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, that if you gave the majority Hindu population of India, essentially the power over all Indians, then it would be disastrous for the Indian princes, which ruled about a third of India at the time, also very bad for the Muslim minority in India and also bad for the untouchables, who he feared would be kept down even more than they were by

Indian society at the time. He opposed it and did everything he could to stop Indian self-government, but failed. The Indian self-government act of 1935 passed against his opposition. But will his fears actually realise, obviously it was inevitable that India was going to self-govern? Will his fears actually correct as to what would happen?

Well, if you look at Mr Modi's way of ruling India at the moment, and especially where the princes, where the Muslims and where the untouchables are in Indian society, actually Churchill may have had a bit of a point, frankly. And Andrew, it strikes me that this isn't strictly a Churchill question, but I think it's important to flesh this out for all of us, including myself, to understand Francis, set something which may or may not be true, but Indians and self-governments was inevitable.

Which begs the question really, why was the British Empire at this point starting to essentially decline and all of these conversations about self-governance here, independence there? Why were they taken off? The major problem for the British Empire, off of the First World War, was a financial one. It was broke. It had spent an enormous amount of money fighting that war. And compared to countries like America, it had no resources.

It had sold off a lot of its assets during the war to continue fighting the war. It was also morally demoralised because of the loss of an entire generation of essentially young men who'd been killed, three quarters of a million of them in the war. It got bigger, actually, physically up until 1921, but it was hollowed out, essentially.

And then when the threats to India started, it seemed very much that the whole organisation essentially was being run by wilderness of mirrors, really, than an empire of the kind that had been there 20 years previously. Was there also a rising cynicism from the working classes to the upper classes because of the debacle of the First World War, lines led by Donkeys, etc?

There was a very strong yes. That was an important aspect, was that although the actual offices in the trenches themselves had been incredibly brave and the working classes of mad their offices of their own units who died in greater proportion than the working classes did in that war, also the high offices, the generals who had come up with the grand strategy were not respected because of the disastrous grand strategy that was adopted.

Now, there are a lot of historians and to an extent I'm amongst them that tries to look at any other kind of grand strategy that could have won that war, frankly. But nonetheless, yes, there was a sense that the officer class had let the working classes down, but not the officer class in the trenches, but the ones back in the shadow.

So the Empire is morally weakened, financially bankrupt, not bankrupt, but also one other aspect of it, which I didn't mention also strategically outmaneuvered because you have Japan in the far east, Italy in the Mediterranean and Germany all coming up in the 1930s and all, of course, joining with each other in the anti-common turn, pact of 1937 and posing three separate threats to the British Empire in three separate geographical areas. So a very difficult position. Churchill is in

the Conservative government, he resigns over India. This is 1931, did you say? 1930. 1930. And this is just about Hitler and his Nazi party are about to take over in Germany. So how does the next three years play out in the early 30s? Well, the whole of the 1930s can be seen really as one decade of what he called the trawling tides of Drift and Surrender, when the Locusts et. He was opposed to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He made the most magnificent speeches warning about

exactly what was going to happen. He tried to stop it from happening and no one listened to him. He was ridiculed. He was shouted down in the House of Commons. He was attacked in the press. They tried to take away his seat. The Conservatives tried to deselect him for his parliamentary seat. On the basis, he was warm-ungering? On the basis that he was warm-ungering exactly. And every single thing that he said turned out to be right and everything that they said turned out to be wrong.

And you see that long time from the accession of Adolf Hitler to becoming the chance of Germany in January 1933, then through obviously the anti-Semitic laws that he passes, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss of 1938, the Munich crisis, of course, over the Sudetenland in 1938, and then the horrors of marching into Prague in the March of 1939. And by the end of 1939,

after a whole decade of Churchill saying this is what is going to happen. Finally, when he was proved right on the 15th of March 1939, and everybody else was proved wrong, finally the British people did actually start listening to Winston Churchill. Andrew, I wanted to ask a question which is how many of those people were just incorrect and read the situation wrong, which we can all do? And how many of them were Nazi sympathizers? Not many Nazi sympathizers, frankly. There was some,

of course, the British Union of Fascists was a party, but it was never an electoral force. It never got anybody elected to Parliament, under its own steam. But a lot of people were good-natured people who hoped for the best. They'd fought in the First World War and didn't want to see another war. Couldn't believe that the Germans would ever start another war. They were people who couldn't believe that Hitler could be so evil as to want another war. A lot of them were Christians

who believed that the phrase appeasement was actually a positive thing. There were people who thought that business was much more important and the Germans would never go to war and destroy the capitalist economy and so on. It was extraordinary. There are a number of people who were willing to just assume that the government was right, and that Winston Churchill was an insane war monger. Andry, you alluded to earlier, and I'm being someone who was born in the Soviet Union, I'm likely to

bring this up naturally. But you mentioned Churchill's pressions about fascism and the threat of Nazis and Germany. And you also earlier talked about his pressions when it comes to the other terrible ideology that came out of the early 20th century. During the 30s, the true horror of the communist regime in Soviet Russia is starting to become difficult to ignore. Let's put it like this. And Churchill is one of the people who is openly speaking about this at the time.

And again, there are quite a lot of people here in England and in the Westmore Broadly, who would quite like to ignore that. That's right. It's exactly no, no. He was the leading voice of anti-communism in British politics in the 1930s. Some of his greatest speeches were given about the horrors of what had been unleashed by Lenin and Chotsky, and he personally attacked

Stalin and so on. And he was a great anti-communist. And of course, this continued all the way up until he recognized that the greater threat, the more immediate threat at least, was from the more dangerous threat, was from Hitler. At that point, he was in favor of having an alliance with the Russians. But the trouble is that Poland was in between Russia and Germany, and so the only way in which the Russians could be brought to bear in an anti-Nazi involvement essentially

was if the Poles agreed to it, which of course they would not do. They'd fought against the Russians in 1920 and 21, and they didn't want Russian troops on their soil and understandably so when one sees the rest of European history. So it was an incredibly difficult situation at the time.

But Churchill did foresee the Nazi Soviet act of August 1939. And of course, when Hitler did invade Russia, Churchill was the first person to say we must immediately ally with Russia, even though he knew that Stalin had done the most appalling crimes, including of course killing the Polish officer Korakateen in 1914. So he was very much a pragmatist? He had to be. In wartime,

rail polity, if you're to survive, is the only way to go forward. But to give him his due, of course, after the Second World War, he was also the first person to have the guts to actually say that what Stalin was doing in Eastern Europe was a threat to democracy there. And he was in his great iron curtain speech in Fulton Missouri on the 5th of March 1946, the first person to actually warn against Stalin. And let's just touch on Neville Chamberlain, because he's painted now as this

weak, myopic, slightly pathetic figure. Is that unfair? Very unfair. Yeah, he was a very tough and in his day, incredibly popular politician. He probably would have won a landslide victory at any time, had he called the general election in 1939 or late 1938. He, as a domestic politician, had been a really tough minister in the government. He'd been a senior minister for 20 years. He was the son of Joseph Chamberlain, one of the great Victorian politicians. So, yes, no, it's wrong

to think of him as some kind of weak, vacillating character. It might have been better if he had been, by the way, because he might have been able to have been pushed off the policy of appeasement, which he clung on to even after it became obvious that it wasn't working. When he came back from Munich and waved the piece of paper in the air, he truly believed that he had, personally, through his own diplomacy, managed to save peace for his time and told the cabinet as much.

He was a very vain man in that sense and delusional as well. Well, ultimately, yes, because by the time of the move into Prague in March 1939, he still had to be forced into giving the guarantee to Poland, which they gave on the 1st of April 1939, which, of course, was the trigger that started the second world war. So, Andrew, if you wasn't motivated by weakness, what was the basis of the policy of appeasement? Well, first of all, it was the sense that we couldn't

fight Italy, Japan, and Germany all at the same time without any allies. The Americans were in full on isolationist mode. The America First movement was tremendously powerful at that time. That's from the Russians. The Russians at the time, of course, from the August of 1939 onwards were allied to the Germans. The French didn't want to go to war at all. So, we saw the strategic danger of actually going to war against three big powers right the way around the world from the

far east to the channel, essentially with no allies. That was one of the major reasons behind appeasement. The other one, and we have to give Neville Chamberlain his due, was that major advances were being made in terms of radar and the latest types of hurricane and Spitfire. We needed to make as many as we possibly could before war broke out. That period, the year between Munich and the outbreak of war, between the September of 1938 and the September of 1939, we did build

enough hurricanes and Spitfires to win the Battle of Britain in 1940. We didn't know that that was going to happen, of course. It was pure luck, frankly, but it was very much a plan to try to create as much as we could in terms of armaments. It's worth pointing out, of course, that the Germans created much more in that year than we did. Nonetheless, that was an important aspect of it as well. So, I have to say, I suddenly find myself rather persuaded by the argument for appeasement,

particularly on the first point. If you've got a yes, the British Empire, but as we've discussed, bankrupt and morally quite weakened, no allies. Well, no, the thing was that, of course, they should have got allies. They should have done much more. The Chamberlain government was totally uninterested in trying to sway the Americans. It was totally uninteresting in trying to get the Russians on board. Now, that would have been difficult because the Russians wanted the Baltic states.

We were in no position as a democracy to hand over the Baltic states in the way that Hitler obviously could do, but we should have been rearming so much earlier in the 1930s, getting all the latest cutting edge weaponry and also obviously making much more of a forward movement in Europe itself. We didn't send any troops to the European continent until after the war broke now.

Yes. I guess where I was going with my question is, I can see why maybe some of Churchill's arguments were falling on deaf ears because the argument that we have no allies, we're in one one yes empire, but we've got all these challenges we're going to have to fight off. It's much wiser to avoid a fight at any cost almost. It must have been quite difficult for Churchill to

try and make inroads against that. It certainly was. And the key moment, of course, comes in Munich because had the checks fought at in 1938 and the French and British invaded or attacked, at least, in the West. Firstly, there's a chance that Hitler might have fallen anyway. Some generals said they were going to overthrow him. Secondly, there's no, certainly, that he would have been able to

have won that war, a 1938 war. And by 1939 and certainly by 1940, he had the entirety of further German Reich up to mobilisation point and of course was able to steam roller Poland and then in the May 1940 crush the British and French and the West. Andrew, I got told this and made this completely wrong, but Hitler also had quite a favourable impression of the British. He could quite like us. He ideologically. I would brag about that. No, it's important. There's a very important

aspect of this. No, he didn't like us because he was jealous of our empire, but he was impressed by our empire and the way in which very, very small numbers of British troops managed to essentially run the Indian empire. There were, there was only a few thousand, tens of thousands in an empire of 300 million people in India. So it was, in that sense, he was impressed. He was also impressed by the sheer scale and size of the empire, which he would be because it was the largest empire

in the world that ever seen. But he didn't like the British. No, in fact, when he went on Rant, he would, he would rant against, well certainly Winston Churchill, as you can imagine, but also the, the British as a people. And so, Neville Chamberlain's pursued this policy of appeasement is becoming quite obvious to everybody that this isn't going to work. How does his political career end considering he's this tough, uncompromising character?

Neville Chamberlain's career ended on the inner debate that called the Norway debate over the defeat that the British and French had suffered in Norway. And it was held on the seventh and eighth of May 1940. And because so few conservatives and supporters, natural supporters of the government actually turned up to vote for Chamberlain, even though he did win a 81 seat majority, usually the majority was much bigger than that. And so he was forced to resign on the morning of

the 10th of May 1940. And Churchill became the Prime Minister on the 10th May 1940. He was called Viking George VI to go to Buckingham Palace in the evening. And that was the same day that Adolf Hitler purely by coincidence invaded the low countries and Holland and Belgium, ultimately obviously also to invade France. We'll be back with our guests in a minute. But first let me tell you

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B-E-E-T-S.com code trig. Now back to the interview. And he wasn't a young man by the way when he became leader of this country, was he at that point? He was 65, which is the retirement age. And he said of that day of that evening that he felt as if he were walking the destiny and that all of his past life had been got a preparation for this hour and for this trial. And in a sense it was, you know, all of the things he'd done in the first world war, all of the amazing jobs that he'd

held up to that point. He held all that one of the great offices of state. His whole career up until that point had in a way been a preparation. And the extraordinary thing was that when he was only 16 years old as a schoolboy at Harrow, he told his best friend, Merlin Evans, there shall be great upheavals, great struggles in our lives. I shall be called upon to save England and save the empire. He said that when he was only 16 and then half a century later exactly

that happened. So I mean, what a story. I mean, it sounds like something out of a film really, which is why so many people have made movies and TV series about him. So he's 65 years old, he assumes a man to have leader, Britain to be honest, he doesn't look like we're going to win. No, it looks very much like we're going to lose. In the first two weeks, we are pushed off the

continent. The German-Belitzkrieg, a completely new form of warfare in which their their bombers and their tanks and their infantry all work together in a seamless whole to cut through the Ardenne and essentially get to the channel ports by the 20th of May 1940 and force the British

expeditionary force to to reenbarc at Dunkirk very nearly captures the holder the Hitler could have captured the holder of the British expeditionary force if he hadn't executed his hault order of the 24th of May and by the 4th of June the British expeditionary force minus 40,000 men who are captured are back in Britain. Again, the Russians are allied to the Germans, the Americans aren't involved, the French have essentially been knocked out of the war, we look as though we've lost.

And what sustained him, and I think I know the answer to this question, through those incredibly dark moments when it looked like Britain was going to fall? His self-belief, his belief in destiny, not just his own personal destiny, but national destiny as well. He believed that Britain was specifically going to see it through and to win. He had a belief in himself in his country that

was not going to be essentially affected by the situation on the ground. He made speeches giving the British people reason to hope, frankly they weren't great reasons when one looks at them logically and rationally, but it wasn't a logical and rational moment, frankly it was one in

which you had to have self-belief and he did have that. And one of the things we haven't touched on so far, but I think it's the right moment to touch on is you've actually talked about him having different roles within government prior to this moment in which he actually does very well. So he's clearly a competent, not just leader who gives speeches and inspires people, but actually competent at administration and management and running departments. Why is that? Why is he so good?

Well, absolutely. He'd run huge departments. The Ministry of Munitions was the biggest government department in the world at the time of the number of people. It had well over one and a half million people working for it. He was a chancellor of the extracurricular and therefore in charge of the entire British economy for five years. You know, these are big areas. The first law of the Admiralty at the time when the British Navy was easily the biggest

Navy in the world as well. So he was good at these big things. And the reason was that he was a real micromanager. He got down into the into the basics of everything. He would visit the depots constantly. He would meet people below the top level. So he actually knew what what people on the shop floor were thinking and saying. He was somebody who was so energetic. You know, every morning bounced out of bed early in order to get the job done. And this was partly obviously because of

his ambition. He wanted to do well in each of his jobs and therefore get promoted. But also because he was a total perfectionist when it came to the duties that he was given. And was he a good people person? Oh, wonderful. Actually, one for he had any number of sort of top tips for how to how to get on with people. He was immensely charming. Very funny man. And so he was able to put

people up there at their calm. He was very, very calm in crises as well, which people hugely appreciated, especially considering how many crises he was involved in in his life. He was a very much as a people person as the exact right way of putting it. Yeah, he would, if he felt that people weren't connecting with each other, he would make sure that they turned up. He'd give parties. He would give them Swedish milk punch, which is a rather disgusting

sounding drink. But nonetheless, it was something that he would give them and he would make sure that people met other people, important for them and so on. He was very, very good when it come to everything to do in networking. That's very interesting. He was a connector. So how does he bring this to bear? Britain is looks like it's about to lose. The British expeditionist force has been forced back to Britain having lost tens of thousands of soldiers captured. No allies to speak

of at the time. America is not involved in the war. Germany seems incredibly powerful with these new tactics. The Soviet Union is maybe not allied, but it's allied. Maybe non-aggressive. Yeah, but anyway, it doesn't matter too much. It's supplying grain and oil and so on. What does social do? I think one very important point to point out is of course that although we

don't have foreign allies, we do have the empire. So we have the millions of people who join the Indian army, which becomes the largest volunteer army in the history of mankind, still is to this day. We have the Australians who are superb fighters as are the New Zealanders. The Canadians, a superb fighters, but also are able to ship huge amounts of grain and so on

across the Atlantic to Britain to keep feeding Britain. All three of those, sorry, four of those, and also troops from the Caribbean countries, fight in North Africa and in various other parts of the world, Burma and so on. And finally also fighting Italy and Europe. So the empire is a huge, huge supporter of Britain in its hour of need in 1940 and 1941, whilst Britain is fighting for

its life. And how willing are these, we've alluded to the fact that by this point, the empire is starting to break down and it's inevitable that it will collapse eventually as it does. How willing are the Indians to go and sign up and fight in a war that? This is the amazing thing. They're incredibly willing. The New Zealanders, Canadians and Australians

all declare war on the same day that the war breaks out, 3rd of September. The Maurez, for example, have their chiefs come together and declare war against Germany, even though they're on the other side of the war, the world's from Germany. The Indians, of course, it's via the viceroy, but nobody forces them to sign up and they do so in their millions

to fight. And this is 18 months or so before the Japanese attack in Pearl Harbor. So, yes, it's a great imperial family, essentially, that comes together to try to fight the horrors of fascism. And how much of that was a loyalty to Britain and how much of that was and look over what Germany were doing and going, this is an evil that needs to be defeated. Both, absolutely, yeah. And of course, it would be both, you know, that makes perfect sense,

doesn't it? It's, if up until Munich, a lot of the rest of the empire wasn't interested in getting involved in a European war. But once it became clear from Munich onwards, and especially as I keep coming back, this idea of the remunetization of Prague, of that moment where he moves into Bohemian and Moravia and then takes a whole of the rest of Czechoslovakia in the March of 1939, that is the clear signal to the whole world that Hitler is not just interested in trying to get

Germans back into the Reich as he had been claiming for years. That all he wanted to do was rip up the Versailles Treaty. No, he was taking slavs into the Reich as well. And so, that was the moment at which the Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and so on all recognized that Hitler was exactly the kind of evil conqueror that Hitler, that Winston Churchill had been warning about.

So, they then started to fight the Germans. At what point did we see the Germans start to get pushed back, as if it looked like it was a more fair fight and actually the defeat didn't look inevitable? Well, the first moment, of course, was the victory in the Battle of Britain. On the 15th of September 1940, it became clear that the RAF had won the Battle of… against the Luftwaffe and that the invasion therefore wasn't going to take place. We didn't know it wasn't going to

take place really until the June of 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia. But it became pretty clear because you can't invade across 22 miles of saltwater unless you have air superiority. We established that obviously in Operation Overlord in June 1944 going in the other direction. And they didn't have operational air superiority because they lost the Battle of Britain. That was the first point, but then it's not until the November of 1942. So, a full two and a half

years after the Battle of Britain that the Germans start to get seriously defeated on land. And that happens in North Africa at the Battle of El Alamein at the end of 1942. And how much of that was because the Americans then got involved? A lot because we were very fortunate that the Americans gave us, essentially, the Sherman tanks

with which we fought the Battle of El Alamein. And also, of course, in the same month of November 1942, the Americans also landed a quarter of a million men in North West Africa in Morocco and elsewhere on the Northwest coasts there. I don't know that, but America is not involved in the wars at a combatant at this point, is it? In November 1942, it is. So, yes, it goes... Of course, because by this point it's been attacked. Yes. Well, this is an amazing thing about America.

Is that although it wasn't attacked by Germany, and Hitler didn't declare war against America until the 11th of December 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration took the most incredibly statesmen-like decision to put Germany first. It's called the Germany First Policy. And what they decided to do was to, even though they hadn't been attacked by Germany, they'd only been attacked by Japan in the Pacific. They nonetheless had 70% of their resources

concentrated on defeating Germany. And this is because of great statesmanship by the Roosevelt administration by General Marshall, by General Eisenhower and others. You came up with what's called the Germany First Policy. And the fact is that under clouds of it and the great military thinkers, if you're attacked by two enemies, you take out the strongest one first. And Hitler was much stronger than Japan. Whenever I think about Pearl Harbor, I always see it as a ridiculous thing

to do by the Japanese. You've got the Americans. They're not involved at this stage. They're a superpower. Why are you going to attack them? Because of the oil embargo, the fear was that Japan was essentially, the Japanese Empire was essentially just going to run out of oil. And the way to smash that was to take on the Americans and steal the oil of the Netherlands East Indies, Dutch East Indies. And the only way to do that was

to attack America. It was, of course, and ultimately incredibly stupid and suicidal thing to have done because you can't invade America. America is an unavoidable country. And that's also why it was so stupid. And indeed, literally suicidal for Adolf Hitler to declare war on America on the 11th of December 1941. But both of these countries did that and what happened to them. And Andrew, coming back to Churchill, I imagine when he's taking over in 1940, the war looks like

it's unwinnable at this point or close to. He's giving all these speeches. He's trying to marshal the defense of Britain. Number one at the top of his list or certainly close to, would have been how do I get their Americans to help us? That's right. And the Americans did help enormously. They sent over in the May and June of 1914, the summer of 1940, huge numbers of rifles,

millions of rounds of ammunition, an enormous amount of military help. And then they passed the Len-List Act, which allowed us to buy enormous amounts of munitions from them as well. So the Americans did help. What they obviously didn't want to do at that time was to actually get involved in the hot war and the fighting because they hadn't been attacked. And yet, when Adolf Hitler did declare war on them, then they took this incredible decision, this Germany first decision.

And they landed all those men, called them a million men in the Western theatre, as opposed to just concentrating on the Japanese. Of course, they did fight back very much against the Japanese. You have Guadalcanal. You have the battle of Midway by 1942. But the lion's share of the American resources goes to fighting Hitler in the West. So was Churchill happy with the situation where he was getting supplies? You've got Len-List, or was he banging down the door,

trying to get the Americans to actually get kinetically involved? Churchill very much wanted the Americans to be kinetically involved, of course. But he recognized that he couldn't affect internal American domestic political opinion beyond making speeches to the Americans, constantly getting his ambassador to try to encourage the Americans to give more help.

And making sure that Americans saw the war in the correct ideological terms, which was obviously with civilization and democracy on one side against fascism and frankly evil on the other. When you tell this story about Churchill, he was 65 years old. The toll it must have taken on him. Both physical and emotional must have been. So it must have been almost unbearable. Well, that's right. He was 65 years old when he became Prime Minister in 1942,

as in his early 70s by the time the end of the war. And he was extraordinarily brave during the Second World War. He'd go up onto the roofs of Whitehall, indeed a building that's just behind us there, the air ministry. He'd go up onto the roof during the blitz. He undertook 110,000 miles of flights outside the United Kingdom, not just flights, also ship, journeys by ship. Outside the United Kingdom, sometimes within the radius of the Luftwaffe, he had four separate

bouts of pneumonia, one of which very nearly killed him in Carthage in 1943. So he really was showing tremendous physical courage. But that is Winston Churchill. You see, this is the great thing he showed as much physical courage as he had shown moral courage throughout his career. And let's touch on the things that people say about him, that he was an alcoholic and he was

permanently drunk, etc. I can't believe that. Well, no, you couldn't really have run the Second World War, frankly, and gone to all of these and led these meetings of the cabinets and the war cabinets if you were permanently drunk. He did drink a hell of a lot. That's one thing to remember. He had a rhinocerying capacity for alcohol. He would drink

most lunch times and certainly most dinner times. He didn't get completely plastered, but he did have whiskers and sodas that would start at about six o'clock in the evening and then go through on. But his private secretary, Anthony Bonta, Peter Brown, told me that these were what he called mouthwash. So very, very little whiskey, large amounts of soda. There was a friend of his called C.P. Scorsi who said that Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic because no

alcoholic could have drunk that much. That's very interesting. I mean, I guess the obvious counterpoint to your argument that he couldn't have chared all those meetings, etc. was that Hitler apparently was on all sorts of drugs the entire war? And also it was T-Total, of course. So Hitler was on the other end of the spectrum as it were. Hitler was very interesting the different ways that they acted Hitler. At the beginning of meetings would set out what he wanted the meeting to discuss.

Then he would listen quite a lot. He was quite good listener. In fact, we know from the Führer conferences which were all taken down by the stenographers every word, the Wolfschump in Eastern Prussia. But then at the end he would sum up and not change his mind at all. He would have listened to his generals, but then he would not have taken their point of view. With Churchill, it was very different. He didn't start off saying what he wanted. He would listen to what they

have to say. And if the arguments were better than his arguments, he would change his mind. And that obviously is the much more democratic, much more grown up frankly, and much more useful, and not all successful way of going about a meeting. Well, quite you mentioned that one of the lessons he learned from his earlier mistakes was that his opinion wasn't always the right one, and that he ought to listen to the professionals, particularly when it comes to matters of war.

How did that manifest itself during World War II? Oh, well, he would have some of the Chiefs of Staff sit across the table from him. Again, not very far from here, just over there in the cabinet war rooms, and they would General Alan Brook, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, would lean across and break pencils in half, saying, no, I disagree with you, Prime Minister. But they would have these arguments. Sometimes they would be roused. Sometimes they would bang the

table. Sometimes Winston Churchill would burst into tears if he didn't get his way. But if the Chiefs of Staff all stuck to their original beliefs, as they did, over say the Samatra plan of March 1943 and various Norwegian plans as well, and they refused to change their minds, then Churchill never overruled them. And this turned out to be the best thing, because they did not make any

huge errors. They were, of course, there were mistakes and defeats and problems and so on. But the Chiefs of Staff overall didn't make the kind of errors that they would have made if they had been putty in Churchill's hands. And as we move towards the end of the war, when we saw the fire bombing of Dresden, how much was Churchill involved in those decisions? Well, he was one of the people. Of course, that was an RAF bomber command decision, which was essentially okayed by the Chiefs

of Staff. The Dresden one in particular on the 13th and 14th of February 1945 was an easy decision for the Chiefs of Staff to take, because the Russians had asked bomber command to smash the railway nodes that were bringing German forces back from the west to shore up the defence of Nazi positions in the east. And so to attack the railway siding, which is what they did in

Dresden, was not a difficult decision to take. The reason that the losses were so high, and by the way, there nothing like as high as pro-Nazi historians have made out, in much more like 20,000, rather than 200,000 people killed on those raids, the reason they were so high was because the galleiters of Dresden had not prepared proper defences in Dresden. But

nonetheless, I guess what Francis' question is getting at. And this is relevant to a more modern context when we see conflicts that are ongoing currently, where there's a constant discussion about civilian casualties and war and so on. In the last year and a half of the war, the Allies and Britain in particular dropped a hell of a lot of munitions on Nazi Germany. To what extent was there a moral debate within the British government and armed forces about

that? I was it just seen as, look, we've got to win the war. This is what you do when you're in. There was a moral debate. The Church of England had several bishops who were opposed to it, and Gu said so in debates and House of Lords. This got very little traction amongst the public. The public, frankly, who had taken the blitz, of course, back in 1941 and in the V2 attacks in 1944 were taking it all over again. They were very much in favour of giving it back to the Germans.

As it was, we lost over 50,000 killed civilians and the Germans lost half a million. So we gave it back 10 times. It tragically is war. That's what happens in war when you start a war and you and you try to kill as many innocent civilians as possible. Obviously, there is a war going on at the moment in Gaza where much the same kind of thing is happening, very many more civilians being killed than originally were killed by the aggressors. But it's absolutely essential to remember

who were the aggressors. Well, quite. And it's one of the reasons I brought in the modern situation. However, I'm just curious. And to think about the decision, was there a... You alluded to the fact that the general public, frankly, wanted to give it back to the Germans. Was there an element of the aerial bombardment of Germany that was about punishment? Not really, no. It was that

was there, of course it was. But actually, when you look at the graphs of the increase in munitions productions, on the August of 1943, all of the graphs come, they basically plateau off because the Allied bombing campaign, it wasn't just the RAF, of course, it was also the US AAF, are able to take out the factories necessary in so many cases that mean that yes, the Germans continue to increase military production, but nothing like the same extent as in 1941, 1942,

and the early part of 1943. So it really is an attempt to hit the well-bearing factories, the oil refineries, the tank production factories, and they're very successful in that. Was it seen really as a way of just expediting the end of this conflict? Precisely. You try and shorten the war by any means possible. The RAF and the US AAF believe that they could actually win the war just by smashing German cities. And if you also, what was

called to rather horrible phrase, but nonetheless, sort of bloodless phrase, de-hows. But if you also, at the same time as hitting the factories, de-hows the civilian population. You make it much more difficult for them also to work in the factories to produce the necessary munitions for the Germans to carry on fighting. So it was just a very simple and effective way of bringing the country to

its nose. Yes. And it did it extremely successfully. And if we had not done it, you could well have found that the Germans could have carried on fighting for many months, indeed possibly even years longer. And if that had happened, many more millions of people would have died. And at what point did they

find out about the concentration camps? Relatively late on. There were overflights, of course, where they were reconnaissance planes were able to take as we discovered after the war, a very good photograph of the actual ramp at Auschwitz. There's a photograph. If you visited Auschwitz today, you see this

Allied photograph. But at the time, they didn't know what it was tragically. Then there were some people in 1942 who actually came back, very brave Poles, that came back to explain what was going on. Certainly by 1944, by the time of the mass movement of Hungarians to Auschwitz, the Western Allies had a pretty good idea that something truly monstrous was taking place. Winston Churchill said to Antony Eden, invoke me if necessary, but we need to bomb the railways

going from Hungary to Auschwitz. But the trouble is that bombing a rail is very difficult. As we discovered at Dresden apart from anything else, it's a really tricky thing to do because it's in a straight line. And so what happened essentially was that the Americans didn't want to undertake the daylight bombings, highly lost producing, and the RAF used to bomb at night. So tragically, that was not done. And so we're going to the bombings of Dresden. Was that the one thing that

really ended the Nazi regime? Were there other factors involved at the time? Oh no, the thing that ended the Nazi regime was the was D-Day in the West where you have a million men by D-plus-30 landing on in Western Europe and Operation Bracarattian in the east, where in the August of 19, a July and August of 1944, the Red Army kills captures or wounds over half a million German soldiers, 510,000 German soldiers. And then it smashes essentially Army Group Centre in Belarus.

And marches on to Berlin. The war was not won by the Combined Bomber Offensive, although that did help enormously. It was won by fighting on the ground in Europe, extirpating the Nazi regime in Germany. Well, I'm glad you said that because my Soviet ancestors were not accept. The telling of the story, for instance, attempts and the fact there are historians who have argued that really Germany lost the war in the attempt to capture Moscow, which failed and stalled in

China. It's a very interesting historical discussion. I go into this in my book The Storm of War. Is it the failure to capture Moscow in the October and November of 1941? You could argue that it's a Stalin-grad, of course, between August 1942 and the fall in the February of 1943. Some would argue that Hitler's counter-attack at Kursk in the Kursk salient in the July of 1943 and the failure of that is the key moment. By the time of Operation Pogration, the German Army

is very much wrong, the retreat. But yeah, your Russian ancestors can take great pride because of the five, for every five Germans killed in combat by which I don't mean bomb from the air, not that half a million that we mentioned earlier, but the half a million, sorry, for every five Germans killed on a battlefield, four died on the Eastern Front. And it costs the Russian some

27 million people. Exactly. And the reason I bring it up is I imagine that for Churchill, the pragmatic necessity of doing a deal with the devil, Joseph Stalin, would have been simultaneously a very difficult and a very simple decision at once. Is that fair to say? Yes, that is actually he, the moment that he heard of Hitler's invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa on the 22nd of June 1941, he immediately went to the House of Commons and declared the

alliance with the Soviet Union. I mean, it's an amazing thing for him to do at this man who had been a powerful, the most powerful anti-communist advocate since 1917, since the Russian Revolution, comes out and says, I would, in fact, he makes a joke of it saying that saying that he would make a positive reference to the devil in the House of Commons if the devil were to invade Russia. He goes to the House of Commons and says that if Hitler invaded hell, then he would make a

positive reference to Satan in the House of Commons. So he had this very much this sense that he puts his country's best interests first and Swallows essentially for the remainder of the war, his hatred of communism, and is right to do so because of course the most important thing is

to defeat Nazis. And the reason I bring that up is that I think most even people like us who are not well educated in history will be familiar with towards the end of World War II, Germany is being enveloped from both sides and eventually succumbs Hitler kills himself and the bomb bla bla bla. What's interesting to me is there must have been a calculation at some point where Churchill and

the Americans would have gone, we're going to win this war. And then we've got another problem, which is we've won this war with Joseph Stalin with whom we've had to do a deal with the devil and now the devil is in the heart of Europe. Well, that comes by the delta conference, of course, of January and February 1945. So they agree essentially to believe Stalin's lies about

the integrity and independence of Poland. That's one of the things they need to do essentially if they're to keep the alliance together until the moment when when the Germans are ultimately defeated in the May of 1945. It's a very difficult moment. You can argue and historians do that they were being deliberately naive or they were just following Real Politik, which is what I believe. If you've got an alliance with somebody who is worse than the person you've got the alliance

with, then you have to see that alliance through. Because I guess the reason I'm bringing the sub is I'm just curious what is his story and what other options you think there may have been available. Because if you look at it objectively, World War Two was started in defense of Poland and Eastern Europe from being occupied by Hitler. All of that territory and way more ends up falling to a dictator who's almost as bad. That's right. Yeah, that is the ultimate sort of

irony of World War Two. There are others. He starts believing that the British Empire needs to be protected and we wind up so poor and poverty-stricken and weak that the Empire has to be given away. He is an anti-socialist and yet the whole of Eastern Europe is dominated by communism. There are lots of ironies of the Second World War, but the central one, which is that

Adolf Hitler had to be stopped. Nazism had to be extirpated and destroyed. That's the one that I think Britain and the Western powers have a untarnishable glory in being the people who started from the first day of the war and went on to the last day of the war. And that's something that Canadians and Australians, New Zealanders and so on, Indians are able, I think, to take great pride along with the British people. Were there any other options at Yalta? Could they have done anything to say?

Well, yeah, there was this thing called Operation Al-Unthinkable. This wasn't at Yalta. There was nothing you could do at Yalta because by that stage, the Soviets had millions of boots on the ground in Poland and at least in Europe. But by the time of Potsdam, of course, the United States had the nuclear bomb. But there was simply no way they could have threatened to use it against their Soviet allies who had lost 27 million fighting against the, um, million human beings,

fighting against the Russians. Against the Germans. Uncle Joe Stalin was very popular in the West, of course. There was simply no way that the nuclear bomb could have been threatened against the, uh, against the Russians. And of course, you still had to win the war in the East against Japan. And the Russians promised to go to war three months to the day after the end of the war in Europe and they carried out that promise. So no, the, um, the opportunities were non-existent, frankly.

And moving over to the war in the East, some of the most brutal and horrific fighting was in countries like Burma where we suffered horrific losses. How much was Churchill involved in the discussions about dropping the nuclear bombs on Japan? Oh, very closely involved. It was an Anglo-American decision. Absolutely. He was, he was as much in favor of it as, uh, um, as Truman. He had signed the

original agreements with FDR about the joint decision-making. A lot of British scientists, we of course involved in the, uh, uh, what was going on in, in New Mexico, uh, in creating the, the bomb. And, um, it wasn't until after the war in the March of 1946 that the Americans moved to essentially make the nuclear bomb an American thing and cut the British out of the decision-making process. So he thought it was a necessary evil to get rid, to bring Japan

and essentially humiliate them and decimate them. Um, well, to defeat them, essentially. Yeah. You know, he wasn't that worried about humiliation and decimation so much as their surrender. And it did take place, of course, within days of the, uh, of the Nagasaki bomb being dropped. And before we move on and we talk about other things, what was Churchill's impression of Hitler? Was it, was it someone that he actually, despite obviously the awful atrocities

among committed? Was it someone that he had a grudging amount of respectful? No, no. He thought of Hitler as being completely useless as a strategist. He thought of the very beginning of the war when Hitler was doing extremely well, uh, that maybe, you know, he, he did have a, uh, sort of sixth sense. He worried that he did, but it became, it soon became very clear when he made him steak off to mistakes, especially in North Africa, the timing of the

invasion of, of Russia. And then one mistake after another in Russia, um, that actually he was, he was a pretty useless strategist. And he made lots of jokes about court-pro-shuckle gruba, and, uh, and what a bad strategist he was. And in fact, when in July 19, the 20th of July 1944, the Germans tried to kill Hitler and, and blow him up. And, uh, Churchill went on the radio and said, well, we can be pleased that they failed, because of all the strategic mistakes that court-pro-shuckle

gruba is making. So, uh, so no, he didn't have a high, uh, respect for him. He thought of him as a common, uh, gutter sniper. He called him at one point, caucus boss. Uh, he has some absolutely magnificent phrase-eology for, uh, for Hitler, which he unleashed, even better phrase-eology for Mussolini, actually, as well. And was his criticisms, were his criticisms of Hitler accurate? Um, yes, overall they certainly were, because, um, Hitler, as I mentioned, didn't listen to

many of his top generals. He had people, um, like, um, Gerd von Runchdeid and Erwin uh, Rommel, Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian. These generals, who, um, were far better strategists than he, people who had gone to staff college who had been officers in the Great War, and, uh, who were, you know, very significant and impressive commanders in the field. And they would go and, uh, and talk to Hitler, as I say, we have every word spoken in the furicomferences. And, uh, and Hitler would just, um,

stick to his original ideas about what he wanted. He also became a terrible micro-manager, much, much worse than Churchill. Churchill came back, uh, as the war progressed and was able to see things in the, in the round, whereas Hitler would concentrate on where individual regiments were trying to capture individual, uh, villages deep in Russia, um, which was, of course, a ridiculous way to, um, to fight a war. So when one looks at the different ways that the two, um, men,

dealt with decision-making, they're very, very different. And do you think part of it as well why Churchill was a far more competent leader is the fact that he was much more emotionally stable than Hitler? No, it wasn't just that. And by the way, he was a very emotional man. He burst into tears some 50 times during the Second World War. You would get very emotional. He wasn't in that sense a stiff upper-lipped Victorian. He was, uh, a much more sort of regency aristocratic

girl figure who, who wore his heart on his sleeve. No, what it was was that he was high, far more intelligence, um, than Hitler. And he had spent a lifetime thinking about grand strategy ever since he had been taught it when he was at, uh, Sanders. He heard, of course, in the first world, war been thinking about and been involved in grand strategy, not always successfully as we discovered from the, uh, Dars and Elves, but nonetheless, uh, that he was also involved in very

successful parts of it. And he was a, a person who wrote a lot of history. One of the reasons I'm proud to be in historian was that Winston Churchill was in historian and he was able to look at, uh, the problems of the day through the lens of history. And, uh, and he also was somebody who would listen to his strategists and take their advice and not overrule them. So he had all of these enormous advantages that Hitler, um, chose to throw away. And what did you make of Stalin?

Well, interestingly Stalin actually came round to the western way of making war, the deliberative way, the way, the interactive way, um, rather than the, um, the way he started off, um, at the time of Operation Barbarossa, he had something akin to a mental breakdown and went back to his dacha and couldn't be heard from at all until the Politburo went to him. Um, and by the way, just to add something, when they arrived, he thought they'd were there to arrest him. Yeah, absolutely, and

to, and to liquidate him exactly. And, uh, and so he was, um, surprised and presently, he's, very pleasantly surprised when they turned to him and said, you know, you're our leader and, and you've got to, um, you've got to save us. And what he then did was to listen, I mean, he was a dictator, of course, um, but nonetheless, he listened to men like Zhukov and Rokhazovsky and,

Ivan Konyev and the great Russian marshals. And when the great battles that we mentioned earlier, of Stalin, Greed and Moscow and Kursk and so on, and the battle of, um, uh, of, um, Berlin were fought. They were fought by the marshals interacting in a rational and logical way with Stalin. And he didn't go down the Hitler route, which he perfectly easily could have, of course, because he was a paranoid dictator. And, but, uh, so, just on the Stalin thing, uh, Churchill and

Stalin met on several occasions of these conferences. What did you, do we know what Churchill made of Stalin? I'm afraid he liked him. Um, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, I'm, as, as you can tell, I'm in a bar of, uh, of Winston Churchill and I'm sorry to say that he got on very well with, uh, the most evil man apart from Hitler. Um, he, uh, he had a bit of a drinking competition with him,

at the Kremlin. The first time they met in the August of 1942, then he got on very well with him again in the October of 1944. He visited Moscow both times, of course. They also met at Tehran and, uh, Yalta and, and Potsdam. And, uh, there was one moment where, um, Stalin said that he was going to shoot 50,000 German officers out of hand as soon as they were captured. And Churchill got up from the table and marched out and refused to interact. Um, but, uh, but other than that, I'm afraid they,

they got on well. Uh, he believed he could outdrink, um, Stalin in vodka. Very interesting. Well, uh, Andrew, it's, uh, been such an interesting discussion of the biography of Winston Churchill. And we wanted to bring it a little bit into, uh, conversation about his legacy and how people talk about him now. We've obviously seen, uh, an attempt to, uh, change narrative. Let's

put it like this or to perhaps drag his legacy out of the historical context and which it exists. And as you well know, his statue just down the road here in Parliament Square was defaced with the words Churchill was a racist and all of this. And by the way, based on what you were saying earlier, I think by the standards of the modern day, a kind of, uh, Victorian racial superiority by, by

our standards, it would be absolutely considered that way. Absolutely. Oh, no, no, no. Today's, in today's, um, um, today's world, uh, his views are obscene and absurd, of course, also, but, but what he didn't know was the scientific underpinning that we have whereby we know that, uh, um, the racism, biological racism is obscene and absurd. And they, they believed in a Darwinian form of scientific

racism, which, uh, is, um, is despicable to us today, of course. Um, but I think to, uh, to blacken his memory because of something that was considered a scientific fact at the time, uh, that he was living is, is pretty strange. It's a, it's a sort of unhistorical way, a historical way, really,

of, uh, of approaching, um, people in the past. Well, this is quite what I was going to ask you, which is we, uh, I, I don't know what you make as a historian of the fact that people seem to have forgotten that there was a different time in which values were different scientific understanding.

I, you see, I wonder whether they do genuinely think that or whether or not it's just a political, um, thing where they, um, impose ideological, um, stances and they know perfectly well that actually they don't really make much sense logically, but they don't care because they want to grandstand, want to, um, you know, use a, um, spray can to make a, uh, political point essentially. And, um, they know that it is, uh, it is infuriating and hurtful, really, to, uh, to a generation of

people, our grandparents and parents generation who remember the Second World War. It's also, uh, of course, very stupid in a way because the, um, the people who had Hitler won the war had, had, uh, Churchill not been there to ensure that we fought on in, uh, 1940, had the Germans successfully invaded, had they managed to establish the Third Reich in Britain and, uh, and elsewhere. You know, the people that would have come off worst were not the whites.

Mm-hmm. And they ultimately would have, um, had a terrible, terrible time. Of course, white British, um, people, but compared to their, um, ghastly time, the, um, what would have happened to non-white people, uh, in a Nazi world would have been far worse. And I think this is such an important point because people seem to miss this when they denigrate Churchill and they say that he was this evil man. And we go, really? What was the alternative?

The alternative was truly horrific. When one thinks of the, uh, way that the Nazis treated every, uh, non-Aryan, um, people, um, and not just the Nazis, you know, the, uh, the Japanese killed some 17% of the Filipinos, for example. You know, if that had happened in India with the 300 million people in India, that would have led to the deaths of 15 million Indians. But fortunately, uh, the British Empire and the, uh, and the Indian forces of the British Empire held the Japanese

back in, uh, northeast India and they, and they didn't manage to get into India. Uh, you know, it was, it would have been for all of the, um, subject peoples, the native peoples you call them, what you like of the British Empire, much, much worse, uh, if, um, if not, his and the prevailed. And one of the reasons it didn't prevail was Winston Churchill. And what can we learn from this man? This incredible figure in history.

Oh, so much. So much. I mean, his wit, uh, his, his charm is intelligence, uh, his, uh, quotations, the, uh, things he said about the things that matter about politics and about freedom, and liberty in the world. Those are, um, those are the most important things. Then there's a lot of things about life, actually, and, uh, about resilience and the, uh, need for, for courage. Uh, he, he said of courage that it was the most important of the, uh, all the human values because it

underpins all the rest. And you see him again and again, showing his moral courage as well as his, uh, physical courage. And he, um, gives a, uh, an example in his own life. He is somebody who is willing to, um, to explain, um, all the time, what he's doing, you know, he wasn't, uh, he never hid his light under a bush. He wrote these 37 books, which are all of them still worth reading, all of them, which is an incredible thing considering he started writing in the 19th century.

Um, and he was somebody who had this extraordinary foresight. Not only was he able to tell before the First World War that the Germans were going to cause a, um, a great threat to the Germany of, of, um, uh, sorry, the balance of power in Europe, but before the Second World War and after the Second World War, he warned against Nazism and Soviet communism, the sort of two twin, uh,

totalitarian threats of the 20th century. So there was so much still to learn from here. And the good thing is that when you write about him in the, in the book that I wrote about him, it's just such fun because, but every four or five pages or so, he comes up with a witticism or an Apesu or some kind of insight that you, uh, you're, your jaw drops. And he was also very intelligent with the way that he dealt with Germany post war as well. They didn't make the same mistakes as

they made in 1918. Exactly. Well, they did split Germany, of course, which they hadn't done in 1918. They split Germany into two, but they made sure that the Western half of Germany was democratic. And, uh, and when Stalin tried to, uh, to suck Berlin into the Soviet more in 1948, um, the, uh, the British and Americans, uh, stopped them from doing that and eventually as a direct result

of that, NATO was created in the April of 1949. And I want to ask you a question that's less about Churchill and more about what you see as a historian because as we've been talking, one of the things that struck me when we were talking about a weakening empire, um, demoralization, it sort of all sounds quite familiar to me, but as I look around and I look at the Western world today, are there a parallels to be drawn between the period, uh, maybe before World War

II and, and today's world? I think there are. Yes, absolutely. And we're speaking of course today, on the day that Alexei Navalny has, uh, essentially been murdered, um, by a, uh, by a despot. Um, Adolf Hitler murdered a lot of people, even before the Second World War broke out. Um, the way in which Ukraine has, um, um, fought back against, uh, Putin's Russia is a interesting example of how free people can fight back, um, especially if they've got their help, of course, of the, uh, of the free

world. Um, and I do see, uh, overlaps between Zelensky and Winston Churchill. He's been called Winston Churchill with an iPhone, uh, because he does have this, uh, command of the language, and this tremendous bravery. He liked Churchill refusing to leave London in, in the blitz, stayed in Kiev in those, uh, key moments, um, immediately after the Russian invasion. So yes, there are, um, um, overlaps, but one doesn't want to ever, um, really, um, ever put too much, um, emphasis of

the 1930s on to present day. I know that there are echoes and, uh, there are shadows, but, um, it's, it's by no means exact. No, I, I, I, actually, I understand why you answered the question the way that you did, um, because a lot of people have made the parallel. I wasn't suggesting that we are on the, on the path to another world war, actually, uh, what I meant is more that there is a kind of, I don't remember the phrase that Churchill used that you quoted earlier, but there's a kind of,

uh, loss of self confidence. Drift and surrender quite. It sort of feels, and it comes back very much to the cultural conversation we were having a few moments ago about the denigration of statues, the denigration of history, the, the complete lack of teaching of history and all well warned about this, that the, the way to demoralize the people is to take away from them their history. Do you feel that, uh, you know, there is a kind of decay that's happening in, in the West?

Oh, yes, I certainly do. I think the way in which, um, especially in the United States, the pulling down of statues, uh, and, uh, even statues of, of people who are obvious heroes, you know, people who fought against slavery in, uh, in the 19th century and mid-19th century. And even actually pulling down the statues of, of the founding fathers, um, moving Thomas Jefferson's statue out of the, uh, out of the New York Chamber, for example, Council Chamber. I mean, this is

an extraordinary form of, um, of national suicide. It's, uh, moral suicide. I mean, these people, yes, of course, they're not, um, they're not great with regard to slavery. But, um, these people were in the latter part of the 18th century. You have to see them in their own terms. And they, what they did was immensely brave, in standing up against the British Empire, which I've been speaking in favour of recently, but they stood against the British Empire and, uh, and created a great

nation based on a document of genius, which has lasted for a quarter of a millennium. And the idea you pull down these people's statues, as I say, I think it's a form of national suicide. And touching on the British Empire, how do you think we have this discussion, um, the way that we frame it and the way that we talk about it? Is it completely a historical? No, not completely,

um, it's, it's taught a lot, obviously, in, uh, in schools. I hope that people will read books like Nigel Bigger's, um, latest book, um, on, on colonialism, um, a moral reckoning, where he tries to put it into its proper historical context and not just have a complete knee-jerk reaction

built essentially on, uh, on present day identity politics. Um, if we're much more sensible about it and actually listen to the voices of the past, uh, and try and work out what Lord Curson was trying to do when he went out to be vice-voy of India, you know, the idea of treating these people as, uh, as, um, uh, evil is a, um, it is a very short-sighted and ignorant, I think, way of going about it. And, and I fully agree with you because the reality is is that no one can withstand the scrutiny

of that these people are subjected to. Even gandying, you know, people will say, you know, he was a whole awful person because he did this and he did that. And it's like young children and his bedmins. Exactly. Yeah. And he was a racist. And you go, what about the things that he achieved? What about precisely? Precisely. Precisely. You've got to see people, um, I think by the way, this is one of the reasons that Churchill's probably more popular in America than he has, uh,

here in England because people in America are able to see the wood for the trees. They're not obsessed about, uh, I don't know, Tony Pandy and the striking miners of 1911. Um, they're much more interested in the big picture in, um, the person who helped create the grand strategy that, um, helped win the, um, the, at least the Western Allied grand strategy that helped win Second World War. And so you have a, an ability in America really to look at the most

important aspects. But you're right. Not only would nobody, but nobody be able to be looked on as a, uh, as a hero, if you constantly look solely at their, uh, feet of clay, but also in our own time, uh, our great grandchildren are going to pull down our statues, uh, for reasons that we have not the first clue about things that we think are scientifically proven facts. We're going to have our statues pull down, uh, because I don't know, we allow our children to use, um, mobile phones.

And, uh, at the moment, that sounds weird, but in a hundred years time, that's what will happen. But unless we learn the lesson, which is of course that you have to see people in their own, uh, in their own time. Mm hmm. Andrew, what haven't we asked you about Churchill that we should have done? I think you haven't asked me one question, which I, um, I'm very interested in, which, uh, I'd like to answer, which is how was it that he was the person who was able to spot Adolf Hitler and the

Nazi's? Yes. Yeah. That's a great question. Thank you. That's kind of you. Thank you. What was it about him? Uh, what was the, the sort of alchemy, the special alchemy about him that allowed him to be, not only the first person, but for many years in the 1930s, the only person who could see what Hitler and the Nazis were all about, uh, and therefore all against them. And the answer is, I think, threefold. The first was that he was a phylocy might. He liked Jews. He'd grown up with Jews,

his father had liked Jews. He'd been on holiday with, uh, with Jews. He recognized the contribution that, um, that Jews had made to Judeo-Christian civilization. He was a supporter of the Balford Declaration in 1917. He was somebody who, um, therefore had an early warning system about Hitler and the Nazis that was not vouchsafed to many of the other, um, upper-class English people of his

age and class in generation of many of whom were anti-Semitic. That's the first thing. The second thing, and of course, that's something that we, we should think about now more than any, uh, time before in our lifetimes because anti-Semitism is now on the rise in a way that it hasn't been at any other stage in our, in our lives. So, uh, standing by Jews as the forefront of civilization

essentially, that is one thing about Winston Churchill. The next thing is, um, that he was an historian and he was able to place the, um, threat, the hegemonic threat that, uh, Nazi Germany, um,

post in the context of the long continuum of British history. Um, the, uh, threat of the Spanish Armada of 1588 of Louis XIV at the time of the, uh, Wars of Spanish Succession, which of course his own great ancestor, uh, John Churchill, Duke of Mordra, was instrumental in defeating, and then the threat of Napoleon of, um, the First World War that he fought in the trenches. And so he was able to see these four great threats before in history and slip, um, Hitler into,

uh, the position of the fifth great threat, which of course he was. Indeed he was greater threat than any of those ones before, um, because of the bomber. And, uh, and the last thing was that he had seen true fundamentalism, fanaticism in his life. He had fought on the Northwest Frontier. He'd fought in Sudan. He had seen, in this case, Islamic fundamentalism, um, and he saw the same tropes in the Nazis that he had seen before, um, this hatred of democracy, this, this complete ability

to turn reality on its head. And because he was able to do that, uh, in a way that the other prime ministers of the 1930s, men like Ramsey McDonald and Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin who'd never seen fanatics before in their lives at all. None of them. Um, he was able to spot this special thing about Hitler and the Nazis and to warn and warn and warn. Just because people didn't listen to him, he didn't change his, um, his message. Most politicians, especially

today, would change their message because of what the opinion polls were saying. He took no notice of opinion polls. He didn't listen to what the editorials were saying in the newspapers. He said what he believed and he carried on saying it until he was proved right. You've made a really profound point there when you compare it to the present day politicians who all they do is go from school to university to then doing an internship to then working in politics.

And the reality is these people, both Labour and Conservative and Liberal Democrat, have no experience of the real world. But when you compare that with Winston Churchill who experienced everything the world had to offer and as a result of that was a magnificent leader, by completely agree with every word. Andrew, fantastic. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in the seconds of follow us over to locals. Where we'll do that?

I seem to remember him saying the words to the effect of we are with Europe but not of Europe. Churchill was more international rather than regional and imperialist. So what would he make today of our politics with the European Union? Francis, I want to take a minute to give a special mention to one of the best podcast interviewers out there. Okay, be quick, though mate. Who is it? It's me. No, it's a certain

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