The Churchill factor

Author: Boris Johnson

I knew Churchill was good. But on reading this book, I learnt how truly awesome he was. Let’s start with his written word. He delivered 8700 speeches and wrote more than a million letters and memos. Unlike politicians of today, he was his own speechwriter. He had a factory of assistants who were with him around the clock and wrote down every word that came from his mouth. This prompts Boris Johnson to muse that Chartwell house, Churchill's abode, was the worlds best word processor!

Apparently he read a lot too. Johnson estimates that he read 5000 books in his lifetime and could recite passages and poetry from memory. When he visited Roosevelt, he entertained him with the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear.  Apparently Churchill also loved summits and was an incessant traveller. In 4 years (1939 - 1943) he logged 111,000 miles with 792 of them at sea and 339 in the air.  Johnson employs a conversational style in the book that will go well with a peg of whiskey. You will encounter phrases like “[Churchill] was truly a Marlborough and not just a Marlborough lite”, as page after page, Johnson can’t stop gushing about Churchill’s prowess.

Johnson’s one-sided portrayal of Churchill gets tiring after a while and I almost abandoned the book after the first hundred pages. However, the book gets interesting again when Johnson starts talking about Churchill's mis-steps in Chapter 15. Note that Johnson still can’t give up the hope that even in these follies there is an air of “brilliance” and desperately tries to hint at how things could have turned out differently if some element of history or the people in charge were altered. 

Despite all the criticism, you can’t help appreciate Churchill’s major contributions at what must have been a pivotal time for Europe and the world. Johnson sums it up well when he says “no normal family man produces more words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined, wins the Nobel prize for literature, kills umpteen people in armed conflict on four continents, serves in every great office of state including Prime Minister (twice), is indispensable to victory in two world wars and then posthumously sells his paintings for a million dollars”.