In fact, Roberts tends to offer the conventional view of Churchill, namely that he was guilty of ‘catastrophic errors’ throughout his career, but that these were more than offset by his correct assessment of the Nazi danger, his sublime resolution in 1940 and his incomparable wartime leadership. Roberts himself, in Eminent Churchillians, cited George VI’s official biographer, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who could find no evidence that the king ‘exercised any influence or ever thought about anything’. On, as German panzers were scything through France, the king recorded lamely, ‘The situation was serious, and is afraid that some of the French troops had not fought as well as they might have done.’ The truth is that George VI, an old appeaser who resented Churchill’s support for Edward VIII during the abdication crisis and his pre-eminence during the war, was, as Lloyd George said, ‘a nitwit’.
Yet the entries he quotes are almost inconceivably banal. He claims, for example, that George VI’s unexpurgated diary, one of the ‘last pieces in the archival jigsaw’, has helped him to present Churchill in his true colours. To be sure, the fresh details that Roberts has unearthed scarcely change the big picture. Churchill: Walking with Destiny is the best book he has written since his prize-winning biography of Lord Salisbury.
This is Andrew Roberts’s method and he uses it to excellent effect. The more difficult way to resurrect Churchill between hard covers is to discover new sources by delving into repositories near and far, and to pen an original portrait of an all-too-familiar figure. This was the procedure adopted by Roy Jenkins, who never visited the Churchill Archives Centre, where his subject’s papers are stored in 2,500 boxes, and composed a flatulent summary of Gilbert that was absurdly over-praised by the critics. The easy way to write a full-scale life of Winston Churchill is to quarry material from the official biography, eight huge tomes completed by Martin Gilbert and accompanied by documentary volumes that continue to thud from the presses.
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