Winston Churchill

REVIEW BY TAYLOR DOWNING

The military historian Peter Caddick-Adams has written this witty and enjoyable political biography of Winston Churchill. Unlike the multivolume authorised biography written mostly by Sir Martin Gilbert – which contained more than three million words – Caddick-Adams’ book is blissfully short at barely 200 pages in length. But although brief, his biography is rounded, with plenty of criticism of his subject, as well as praise where due, and constantly enlivened by Churchill’s own wonderful one-liners, which make the story sparkle.

There is nothing startlingly new in the biography – how can there be in a life that has generated a mini-industry of scholarship? But there is little of real importance in Churchill’s long and action-packed life that is left out here. And the central thesis of Caddick-Adams’ book is surely spot on: the First World War provided a sort-of dress rehearsal for Churchill’s leadership of the Second. He had closely watched first Asquith and then Lloyd George as they had struggled to lead the nation in war. He had observed their successes and failures in attempting to build a vast land army, enduring air raids, constructing an armaments industry, drawing millions of women into the economy, and maintaining fractious war cabinets.

Moreover, Caddick-Adams rightly argues that Churchill’s so-called ‘Wilderness Years’ from 1929 to 1939 were not a wasted decade, but instead gave him the credibility to become the great wartime leader of 1940. He had remained outside the governments of ‘guilty men’, forever associated with the doomed policy of appeasement. But all three Prime Ministers of that decade encouraged officials to feed him discreetly with detailed information about Germany’s re-armament, enabling the then-backbencher Churchill to speak out when necessary. It all helped prepare him for the ultimate test when it came.