Churchill attacked by ‘unholy alliance’ of Left and Right | Politics | News
Wartime leader Winston Churchill has long been the focus of attacks from the Left, but his biographer warns that a new breed of “Right-wing revisionist forces” are poised to destroy his reputation. The Policy Exchange think tank claims that the new wave of attacks is “designed to rewrite history and realign appeasement to justify new Western isolationism, including the withdrawal of support for Ukraine.” It has published a new report by Lord Andrew Roberts: “A Defender of the West: A response to attacks on Churchill’s life and legacy”.
Lord Roberts, known for his acclaimed biographies of Churchill and Napoleon, said: “It is incumbent upon all of us to stop this poison from spreading into British politics and to defend the memory of our greatest statesman.”
There are fears that false accounts of Churchill’s wartime leadership will take root both in the MAGA movement that supports President Trump and on this side of the Atlantic. Policy Exchange warns of “an agreement between the far left and the far right that will distort Winston Churchill’s legacy, which should not be exported into UK politics.”
Lord Roberts addresses claims that Churchill ‘loved war’; that the British Government should not have given guarantees to Poland in 1939; that Churchill was wrong to reject a ‘deal’ with Hitler in 1940; that it escalated the conflict; and that his “quest for glory clouded his judgment.”
“The attempt to portray Churchill as a war-obsessed moralist fundamentally misrepresents both Churchill’s perspective and the historical record. Churchill was in many respects a consummate realist,” he writes in his report, co-authored with Zachary Marsh.
“Throughout the 1930s he advocated rearmament as deterrence rather than preparation for war in response to a German resurgence. Churchill consistently argued that the decision to support the war in 1939 and continue the conflict in 1940 was based on the continuation of the British policy of avoiding domination of the continent and channel ports by a single European power.
“He realized that Hitler could not be trusted to keep his word, as evidenced by the fact that continuing the war was the only way to prevent Britain’s eventual transformation into a ‘client state’.”
He expresses concern that “some of the new anti-Church sentiment on the right also coincides with a resurgence of antisemitic tropes on America’s far right.”
Defending both Churchill’s and Britain’s reputation, he says: “Suggestions that Britain, as opposed to Germany, initiated civilian bombing ignore the fact that it was used by the Nazis from the start of the war in Wieluń and Rotterdam, and Hitler’s promise to wipe out British cities.”
He warned of fringe Rightists forming an “unholy alliance with the political Left”, saying that on the Left “it has become commonplace to criticize Churchill for ‘racism’ or ‘imperialism’, while new revisionists on the Right see Churchill as a warmongering idealist seeking personal glory at the expense of Britain and wider western civilisation, even the ‘arch-villain of the Second World War'”.
Lord Roberts adds: “This new wave of criticism is driven by more than a desire to criticize Churchill’s legacy historically as part of an ongoing historical debate. Its proponents share a broadly isolationist view of foreign policy that is deeply skeptical of international intervention to the point of questioning Britain’s choice to counter Nazi Germany.”
