Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace, one of the greatest, if not the grandest palaces in Britain. As a result, he had a lot of expectations really on his shoulders from a very, very early age. I think that was really one of the things that made him Churchill. As you mentioned in that very interesting introduction, he did have a knack of being at the right place at the right time. It wasn’t just a knack. It was an actual drive. It was something that was innate within him. One of the reasons that he ensured that he always was in the right place at the right time was because of this great weight of expectation on his shoulders.

Sean Murray  3:31  

One of the things that really struck me about his early years was when he finished his boarding school. I believe it was at Harrow. He decided not to go to Oxford or Cambridge. He instead went to Sandhurst, the Military Academy, which I guess would be equivalent to West Point in the United States. He embarked on sort of a self education. Can you talk a little bit about that decision and then the self education

Andrew Roberts  3:57  

He’s done alright at Harrow. He was actually a much cleverer boy than he made himself out to be. It’s very rare for politicians to make themselves out to be thicker than they genuinely are, but Churchill did do that in his autobiography, “My Early Life”. By the time he left Sandhurst, he certainly wasn’t at the top of his class at Sandhurst. He was pretty far down it. As you say, it’s the West Point of Britain.

He decided he was going to go into the army because he believed that that would be a quicker route to fame and fortune than going into Oxford or Cambridge, which of course allow through lots of his other contemporaries at Harrow had done. So it was a deliberate decision, really. He’d always been interested in the army and in warfare and so on. But it was a quite cold, deliberate decision to prove himself as a soldier as a way of basically leapfrogging a lot of his contemporaries into parliament.

Sean Murray  4:53  

So he had designs on leadership and political leadership early on in his career?

Andrew Roberts  5:00  

Precisely. Because as I say, of his ancestors and also because of his father.

Sean Murray  5:06  

Early in his military career, he was shipped off to India, as I recall in your book, and he wasn’t too happy about that. But one of the things he did there was he started reading. I found that really fascinating. It wasn’t just that he picked up a few books. He seemed to go through the classics of Western civilization and to do it on his own in a very deliberate and determined and disciplined way. It seemed to shape him. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why he did that or how it shaped him later in life?

Andrew Roberts  5:35  

Well, he was very conscious of his contemporaries. As you mentioned earlier, he went to the ancient universities in Britain, and he hadn’t. He felt that he needed to sort of catch up with them intellectually. Not just catch up, but actually leave them behind as it turned out. The way he was going to do this was to use the time in the afternoons when the rest of his brother offices went to have their afternoon nap in the heat of the Indian afternoons. He would sit down and read. He read the entire canon of Great Western literature, not literature as in fiction. But works of philosophy, politics and history. And pretty much everything else you can think of beyond fiction back. 

And he wound up by the time he was a young subaltern. He’d gone off to India, of course, in order to try to fight in the North West Frontier and make his name as a soldier. But he also used that time to educate himself in a manner that was extremely disciplined. He must have read many thousands of pages. When one looks at the list of people whose books he read, it really is an extraordinary act of self education.

Sean Murray  6:53  

I would agree with that. And shortly after his time in India, he got involved or somehow beniggled his way into hot spots around the world places where Britain was fighting and became a war correspondent. He was quite a good writer. He seemed to emerge, a fully formed, mature writer. Where did that come from? Was that something he developed over the years? 

Andrew Roberts  7:16  

He certainly thought that it came from reading, especially reading the works of Gibbon and Cooley and the Great British historians. And you’re right. He became a war correspondent. In fact, he became the best paid war correspondent in the world at one point. It wasn’t just the wars that Britain was fighting. He did fight in wars the Britain was fighting up on the North West Frontier, in Sudan, and in the Boer War in South Africa. 

But he also of course, fought in the Cuban [War]. Police attended the Cuban Civil War in 1895 against the uprising against the Spanish there, just prior to American involvement in Cuba in 1898. And so he actually didn’t just go to where the shots were being fired in anger for his own side. But actually, whoever would take him frankly.

Sean Murray  8:08  

There was a quote that you quoted Churchill in your book during one of his articles  when he was writing about his time in combat, and he said, “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result”. That really struck me.

Andrew Roberts  8:24  

Yes, when he was sought out without results in enormous number of times. He missed death on so many occasions that he wound up believing that he was being specially marked out. There was a kind of destiny. One of the reasons that I subtitled my book, “Walking Destiny” was because of the great phrase, he came out within his war memoirs, relating to the time he became prime minister in May 1940: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny. That all my past life had been better preparation for this hour and for this trial.” He very much believed that. 

He thought that the reason that he had escaped death on so many occasions, I mean, literally dozens of them. And in peacetime that is as well as in wartime, came as a result of him having what he called “invisible wings” beating over him to keep him alive, when he was still at Harrow as a 16-year old school boy. He told his friend that there should be great upheavals and great struggles in our lives, and that I shall be called upon to save London and England. He said that half a century before the Second World War.

Sean Murray  9:29  

I find that just utterly amazing and I wonder if that was just incredibly prescient in some way or some intuition or he was tapping into some greater sense of knowledge in some way. Where did that come from?

Andrew Roberts  9:44  

An enormous sense of self belief. It came also, I think, from his father’s rejection of him and his father’s falling, dislike of him, frankly. Lord Randolph Churchill said things that no son should ever hear from their father. His mother took very little notice of him as well. She was a great beauty to society, and American, of course, born in Brooklyn, but she was having affairs with the Prince of Wales and the Austrian ambassador and so on, and never really took any notice of her son, at least until he became a signatory on her trust fund, up until about the age of 20.

His father died at 45 years old. All he really had was hostility and contempt from his father. And instead of allowing this to grind him down, as it might do with any normal person probably with you or me. It actually did the exact opposite and gave him this sense that he was going to really beat his father in terms of greatness, which of course, he went on to do.

Sean Murray  10:46  

You mentioned that he had this sense he was walking with destiny and everything in his previous life had prepared him for that moment when he became prime minister during World War II. What do you think the years of being a soldier and a war correspondent shaped Winston Churchill?

Andrew Roberts  11:04  

Oh hugely. He very much was a soldier. He was in other things of course, as well, I’m sure we’ll get on to all the various other things he’s done. He did in his life. But his knowledge, his understanding of what it was to be like on the front line, having those exhilarating bullets go past him was absolutely essential both in the Second World War and of course, when he became the left hand and colonel in charge of a series of trenches as commander of the sixth battalion of the Royal Scots guards in the overall Scots Fusiliers in the First World War. That really was a moment where every day he was in the front line, he was of course being subject to sniper fire and so on. 

And again, on one occasion, he left a dugout. Five minutes after he left it, a German whiz bang high explosive came and hit the dugouts and decapitated everybody inside. He believes that he had been plucked from that moment of danger and given safety in order for him to do great things.

Sean Murray  12:10  

It is amazing as I read the biography of Winston Churchill that you wrote. The times that he almost died and it caused me to think periodically as I read the book, what would have World War II been like? Or how would history had been written if any one of these numerous times that he dodged death would have turned out differently? It’s amazing.

Andrew Roberts  12:33  

It might well have been completely disastrous, of course, because the person who would almost certainly become Prime Minister instead of Winston Churchill, Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, wanted to make peace with Hitler in May 1940, the time of the catastrophic defeat of the British Army and the evacuation from Dunkirk in May 1940. And had we made peace with Hitler, all sorts of terrible things would have happened. But not least, of course, the United States couldn’t have used the British *inaudible* as sort of unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to liberate Western Europe in 1944. 

However, all sorts of other monstrous things would have happened, including the possibility, of course, that Hitler would have won the war in Europe, because he’d have been able to have concentrated 100% of the *inaudible* and Luftwaffe against the Russians after he attacked Russia in Operation Barbarossa on the 22nd of June 1941. So I think history would undoubtedly have been certainly very different, and much, much worse.

Sean Murray  13:36  

I completely agree. We can all be grateful that he survived through those narrow escapes, but you did mention that he was an officer during World War I, near the trenches or in the trenches. And what I found was really fascinating about that is prior to that, between the time he was the war correspondent and doing all these incredibly brave escapades, fighting in these wars, and writing just wonderful dispatches that were wildly popular with the public, he became the chancellor of the Admiralty, is that that right? 

Andrew Roberts  14:10  

The first lord of the Admiralty, which is exactly that same as secretary for the navy. And of course, he held that job at the beginning of both the First World War and the Second World War. But he was forced to resign in the First World War in May 1915 because of one of his many blunders, I think it’s very important. And certainly when I was writing this book, it came to me very strongly, quite how many mistakes Winston Churchill made in his life. This really is a sort of a redemptive story. He made error after error, blunder after blunder, and the worst of the moment was the Dardanelles Catastrophe of 1950. 

It was the attempt to get the Royal Navy through the strait of the Dardanelles between Asia and Europe. And so thereby knock Turkey, the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War is a brilliant concept, but it failed miserably. It led to the killing or wounding of 147,000 Allied troops. And so he was forced to resign as first lord of the Admiralty, and instead went off to the trenches, which he didn’t have to do. He was over 40. He was married. They weren’t calling up married 40 year olds at that stage in the war, or indeed, at any stage in the war. But nonetheless, he did. He thought it was his duty. He went off and commanded his regiment in the front line of the Western Front.

Sean Murray  15:33  

What I found very admirable about that was that it took some humility to go from being in charge of the navy to being an officer in the trenches. He seemed to do that with grace. And as you said, he looked at it as his duty and he dispatched it.

Andrew Roberts  15:52  

That’s right. Yes, he had a very powerful sense of public duty, of course. But also, he knew that having come up with this idea that it led to 147,000 killed and wounded was sort of almost incumbent on him to put his own life in danger. Which of course, up until that point in the First World War, sitting there in Whitehall, the Admiralty, it hadn’t been. 

Although, having Churchill being Churchill, he also flew aeroplanes and drove extraordinarily fast. He managed to win on things we mentioned earlier about his face brushes with death. But with just a *inaudible* to sum up a few of them, he nearly died of pneumonia. 

When he was young, he was caught in a house fire. He nearly drowned in Switzerland. He was involved in two plane crashes, even three car crashes. He was run over in New York, of course on 5th Avenue and 76th street. He was very nearly killed then. I mean, it really was the most extraordinary series and there are many other examples as well actually. 

So yes, to do get very much this sense that by 1915, when he had made this terrible blunder in the Dardanelles that he felt that it his duty to put his life on the line, even though as I say, he was not in any way, sort of contractually obliged to do so.

Sean Murray  17:14  

Another hobby that he picked up around his time, which really surprised me, because you just don’t see this that often in today’s leaders that I’m aware of is painting. He took up this art of painting. It was a hobby, but it seemed to be almost consuming and something that wasn’t just for a year or two. It lasted throughout his life. What was going on there? Why did he pick up painting and what does that tell us about him?

Andrew Roberts  17:40  

I think there’s a myth about this. The myth is that he did it because he was so depressed by the Dardanelles catastrophe. He did get depressed undoubtedly, but he was not a depressive. He did not suffer from what was basically called Black Dog, a manic depression. He actually was never mad depressive. But, in the times that he got depressed, the moments when pretty much anyone would have gotten depressed, including, of course during this Dardanelles catastrophe. So he didn’t paint out of depression, I don’t believe. He did paint because it did take his mind off politics. It was a way in which he could entirely concentrate on something else. So he found it immensely relaxing. 

He put a lot into it. He painted 650 canvases in the course of his life. Which by the way, at the moment, go for about $1 million each. So, not bad. He had helped out his grandchildren and great grandchildren, that particular hobby. And he tried every kind. He did still life. He did some portraiture. He did some self portraiture, actually. On a couple of occasions, he painted his friends. He painted landscapes. He really had a very good eye for painting. But it wasn’t as a painter that he would have been remembered. He did it in order to relax his mind, especially in moments of crises like the 1930s, which I’m sure we’ll be getting onto later.

Sean Murray  19:04  

What I recognize in painting for Churchill, as I was reading your biography was, it was something that he could go to at times, almost in a meditative way, or to get into some kind of flow state so he wouldn’t have to think about all the other stresses in his life.

Andrew Roberts  19:20  

And that’s not just true of painting, of course. It’s also true in a way I’m sure will come on to his writing. But also he was a bricklayer. He built a cottage and walls on his beautiful estate chart in Kent. He was interested in butterflies. He was interested in all sorts of things that one wouldn’t automatically equate with a soldier.

Sean Murray  19:42  

Let’s talk about his writing because that’s another part of his life that is almost amazing in its scale. When he wrote a book, it was often 800 to 1000 pages long in volumes. Where did he find the time? How did he develop the skill?

Andrew Roberts  19:59  

His first books were about his time in India. “The Story of the Malakand Field Force” was about his time, his first book in India. Then he wrote a book called “The River War”, which was about his time in the Sudanese campaign. And then he wrote other books on the Boer War, and so on. And then, of course, about the First World War. But he also wrote a biography of his father. He wrote 37 books in all and about 800 articles. And the thing that drove him was money because his father had been a huge spendthrift and indeed, his mother as well. 

They were constantly broke, and so he didn’t inherit a large amount of money. And so, in order to keep up his tremendous spending, his best friend, F.E. Smith said that Winston was always satisfied with the best of everything. And best of everything costs a lot of money. George was broke pretty much all his life. He only actually was no longer indebted when he got into his early 70s and signed the contract for his history of the Second World War. Otherwise, he was almost always in debt. 

And so the way he fought off this debt and did earn an absolute fortune with some of his books, such as histories of the First World War and Second World War was to write books. And in 1953, of course, he became a Nobel Laureate for literature. He himself was always annoyed that it hadn’t been peace. He wanted to be the Nobel Peace Prize, but in fact, his Nobel Prize for Literature. He must be one of the only people in history, who was disappointed at being told that he’d won the Nobel Prize. But the writing came as I mentioned earlier, very much the old gustan style, the high ironic English style that you get from Macaulay and Gibbon. 

He grew out of that by his mid-40s, and had adopted a more conversational approach, which he also was doing, funny enough with his speeches as well. And by the time he was hitting his stride in the 1930s, when he wrote his great full volume biography of his ancestors, “Marlborough”. Many consider, including me, actually, to be one of his finest books. He really was a first class writer. I think his autobiography, “My Early Life” written in 1930 is one of the great autobiographies.

Sean Murray  22:15  

He seems to have found or discovered, cultivated a lot of joy and happiness out of writing. At one point, you quote Churchill saying, “to be able to make your work your pleasure is the one class distinction in the world worth striving for”. When he wrote that, he was talking about his pleasure derived from writing.

Andrew Roberts  22:35  

That’s right. That’s not to say that he didn’t find it in hard work. There’s another quotation somewhere, which I unfortunately don’t have at the top of my head about how a book starts as your pleasure and then turns into your master and then you wind up being its slave and just before it crushes you, you kill it and throw it to the public, is a marvelous extra. I’m just trying to write my 19th book at the moment. I feel very much that Churchill got it back on right.

Sean Murray  23:04  

Trying my hand at some writing myself. I think I can relate to that. Maybe not to the degree of Churchill because I’m nowhere near as prolific writers as him. Not many people are. 

Andrew Roberts  23:14  

No one is. He wrote more than Dickens and Shakespeare combined. 

Sean Murray  23:19  

That’s just incredible. What else can you tell us about these years between the two wars?

Andrew Roberts  23:25  

Well, they were crucial for his career because he started off as a conservative. And then in 1904, when he felt the conservative said, the trades his beliefs in free trade. He crossed the floor of the house. And so, it wasn’t until 1924 that he crossed back again and became a conservative again. So, that was very important for him. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer, which of course has been his father’s old job between 1924 and 1929. And when the conservatives lost that election, he went into opposition. 

He took the opportunity to go around America, which he did already many times, but he really got to know [it this time]. He traveled, I think 29 states in all. And he wrote books, of course, to bump up his income. And so, by the time he entered the 1930s, the decade that he observed is going to be crucial to him and to civilization. He was ready, rested, and was expecting at some stage in that decade to have office, which never came. Not once in the whole of the 1930s, at least until September 1939.

Sean Murray  24:37  

He felt like he was sort of wandering in the wilderness, he was somewhat outcast. I believe part of that was his continual drumbeat of warning the public about the rise of the Third Reich and the rise of Hitler. And this was something that you made pretty clear the public really didn’t want to hear and didn’t want to believe. I think this speaks to a really important aspect of his leadership, which was his willingness to face reality, his willingness to tell the public things that were very unpopular.

Andrew Roberts  25:11  

That’s right. Yes, he didn’t alter his message, because people didn’t want to hear it. And of course, they didn’t want to hear it. The British had lost 900,000, killed in the First World War. The last thing they wanted to hear was that we were going to have to fight another war against the same enemy. It was only a quarter of a century later. And so we’re 20 years later. So it was something that he was ridiculed for. He was lambasted in the press. He was shouted down in the House of Commons. He nearly lost his seat in Parliament. But the key thing was he had this tremendous moral courage that equals his physical courage. 

He continued to say the same thing, to make the same warnings against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Regardless of whether anybody wanted to hear him. What it meant, of course was that by the time Hitler and the Nazis had shown by their own actions what a danger they were to peace, people turn to him and realized and remember that he had been the only person, any major British political figure to have made these consistent warnings all the way through that decade, a decade in which he was kept out of.

Sean Murray  26:24  

Another aspect of Churchill’s life that really made a big impression on me right around this period when he became prime minister. And this is something you do a great job of kind of painting this picture in the book, which is basically the dire state that Britain was in, in the late ’30s and in the spring of 1940. 

Having been born 25 years after World War II, I always saw this as a foregone conclusion. I knew who was going to win when I looked at the history books. But when I put myself in the shoes of the British public or in the shoes of Winston Churchill in the spring of 1940, it really was not clear how things were going to break and it looked bleak. This was the very moment that Churchill, the Prime Ministership changed. It was passed to him. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that situation that he stepped into and what he did.

Andrew Roberts  27:21  

It was a very dire situation on the morning of the 10th of May 1940. Adolf Hitler unleashed blitzkrieg on the West. He’d already of course taken Poland back in September and October of 1939. But in May 1940, he unleashed blitzkrieg. He invaded at dawn that morning, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg shortly afterwards, of course, to invade France. 

Also, the British Army was forced back to the channel. It was totally nearly surrounded on a couple of occasions but managed to a “great miracle of deliverance” as Churchill himself called it to get the British Expeditionary Force back across the channel. Although, he’d lost 40,000 men in the course of the campaign. Nonetheless, we’d also lost all our tanks, all our heavy artillery, pretty much everything that men had apart from their rifles and bayonets. 

And so, we then faced the onslaught of the Luftwaffe which attempted to destroy the RAF. And how that happens, the Germans would have undertaken an invasion of Britain. And we might have joined all those other countries. However many they were, some 10 of them that were to fall in Europe. 

So, considering that at the same time, the Americans were showing no interest in getting involved in the Second World War. In fact, in the October and November election period, President Roosevelt said that he was not going to send your boys into any foreign wars. And that the Russians have been allies of the Germans since the Nazi Soviet pact of August 1939. 

Britain was in dire straits in dire perils. Not just Britain, thank God. The British Empire and Commonwealth had rallied round the mother country superbly, on that same day that war broke out. So also the declarations of war came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and so on. So there was huge support overseas. But with regard to the actual defense of London, as it were, it was very much down to a Canadian Division. And the men who came back from Dunkirk, without as I say, any heavy weaponry. It was pretty much touch and go in the summer of 1948. It could have gone very much against this. 

Sean Murray  29:43  

He stepped into a leadership role, leading a country that was under threat of invasion. There was a very real possibility that if the Royal Air Force was not able to hold off the Luftwaffe, there would be an invasion that summer. And it’s a scary proposition. What Churchill did that maybe we could talk about also speaks to his leadership in his life. And one of his great skills was he started making speeches. I mean, it has always been one of the greatest orders. But tell us a little bit about the speeches he made during this period.

Andrew Roberts  30:20  

It’s interesting, he hadn’t always been. Right at the beginning of his career, he had tried to make a speech without notes in the House of Commons. And it’s got 45 minutes or so into his speech. In those days, they used to make very long speeches. And lost his train of thought and sat down. After that, he never spoke without notes again. 

He worked incredibly hard on his speeches. He’d sometimes spend as many hours as there were minutes in his speech. He would practice again and again. He used his capacity for language that he had honed as a war correspondent, as you mentioned earlier, as a writer to create these words, these speeches which will live, really, for as long as the English tongue survives. 

They can still send tingles down your spine when you hear them or read them. And he had given literally thousands of speeches, his collected works of speeches, which are behind me on my shelf, here in my study. It will cover over 8000 pages. 

So, this is somebody who knew how to give a speech in public, of a speech in the House of Commons, and he found all of those skills. This is a classic example. In fact of what we mentioned earlier about all his past life, in better preparation for this hour and for this trial.

Sean Murray  31:36  

What he seemed to do so amazingly well in those speeches was give hope to the people of Britain to the British Empire, or the Commonwealth, to even America, I believe at that time. He provided a steadfast conviction that victory would come. You give the inside story. He was also a realist. He understood that it was a possibility that London would fall and that he would have to either fight to his death or run off to a bunker somewhere, and try to keep his cabinet going in secrecy. This was a trying time for him.

Andrew Roberts  32:16  

That’s right. Yes. In fact, his bunker in North London rather than the cabinet war rooms, where he lived, was the place where he was going to himself fight and die. He made sure that everybody had revolvers and rifles, and that’s where they were going to have their last stand. But, you’re right. It was a complete make or break moment really. It could have gone wrong. And undoubtedly, we could have lost the Battle of Britain, in which case, we’d have had to have brought the Royal Navy down from Scotland. 

And that, as we learn, as you learned, of course, in Pearl Harbor, when ships are attacked by bomber aircraft, some terrible things can happen. So there was absolutely no assumption that we were going to be able to get through 1940. 

It was all in the early part of 1941. It wasn’t really until Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, the great pressure came off the British Isles. From that moment, we could concentrate on the next stages of the conflict, which in December 1941, once Pearl Harbor had taken place, And once Hitler had declared war against America on the 11th of December 1941, everything changed. And from that point, we could really think about where to strike that.

Sean Murray  33:33  

It’s at this point in Churchill’s career where I really recognize his skill as an administrative leader. I mean, it’s one thing to deliver a great speech. I think we see that today with certain politicians that can deliver a speech. He went on to manage and administer through his cabinet and through the people that he selected to manage the war in working with his generals to go from this perilous point, as you mentioned, in 1941 to eventual victory. What were some of the leadership skills, techniques or habits he developed during this time? 

Andrew Roberts  34:06  

Oh, there were so many of them. Well, first of all, he tended to choose the best man for the job and then support him, and really support him through thick and thin. He didn’t care where the best man came from, if he was from business or industry or so on, he would take him out and put him in key positions and sometimes keep political positions. But then if the chap turns out not to be up to it, he would sack him absolutely ruthlessly. He could be a truly ruthless sacker of men, as well as leader of them. 

He had several generals in the western desert who he sacked one after the other, until he finally got the one that he thought would win. A bit like Abraham Lincoln actually in the early stages of your Civil War. He was somebody who enjoyed getting people together, although he did expect them to take his orders. When he would have huge rouse and clashes with his Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Chairman of the British equivalent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then *inaudible*. They would have massive ruses. 

He actually enjoyed having the toughest and cleverest people around him because he didn’t want “yes men”. It’s very rare for politicians not to surround themselves with “yes men”. But he went out of his way not to. He wanted people who were constantly going to be pressuring his judgment. And that didn’t mean that when he made the decision, he didn’t expect them to support as he did. Nonetheless, he got a huge sort of thrill from the galeon process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. That’s something that, as I say, is fairly rare among statesmen.

Sean Murray  35:49  

Another thing that surprised me about this period is his daily work habits and how he would take a nap because you don’t picture the leader of the Western Allied Forces during World War II having time to take a nap. But it sounds like the way he worked it, he got more out of his day. I found that fascinating.

Andrew Roberts  36:07  

Yes. Sleeping for 45 minutes to an hour every afternoon of his life of the war meant that he could according to him, in his view work for two days. The first day was from 8:00 AM until his nap. Then after that, when he got up from his nap in the afternoon, he would then work through until midnight, which he couldn’t have done. 

He couldn’t have done the day from 8:00 AM through to midnight every day. So, he very much saw this moment in the afternoon, which of course his generals and ministers weren’t able to do. So they had to carry on until midnight. They were exhausted, furious very often. They couldn’t do the same thing as the Prime Minister. But the prime minister was still fresh as a daisy sometimes up until one o’clock.

Sean Murray  36:50  

He got more out of every day.

Andrew Roberts  36:53  

He believed that was the way he went about it. I mean, he didn’t get out of bed until noon either. So he would sit up in bed from 8 o’clock in the morning until noon. He would be reading dispatches, dictating articles, dictating orders, writing to ambassadors, and so on. He’d do all of that paperwork. Then he would have a bath. Then he’d have lunch, and order a cabinet. He’ll often meet the King every Tuesday of the Second World War. And have an audience with him. 

I was very fortunate in this book that the Majesty the Queen allowed me to use her father’s diaries. And I was the first Churchill biographer to be allowed to see King George VI’s diaries. And luckily, the King wrote down everything that Churchill said after the audiences. And so we now know everything that was going through Churchill’s mind every Tuesday, at lunchtime of the Second World War. It is a huge cornucopia of new sources about Churchill that I was able to use in this book, but I think of all of them that was the sort of freshest and most interesting.

Sean Murray  37:53  

I think that’s a great addition to the book and what I remember was that, I maybe wrong here, but it seems like the King’s perspective on Churchill evolved over time.

Andrew Roberts  38:07  

Absolutely. I mean, they started off, or at least the King didn’t really sort of like or trust Churchill terribly much when he appointed him the Prime Minister. There was a very much a sense that because the King had been a great supporter of the policy of appeasement in the 1930s, and because Churchill had been a supporter of the King’s elder brother, King Edward VIII *inaudible* Windsor during the abdication crisis. These men might have actually clashed. But as it was, partly, of course, because he’s a great threat to the country, but also partly because they immediately became friends. In fact, Churchill is mentioned in the King’s diary as his friend. He called him by his Christian name, which was only one of the King’s four prime ministers who he called by his Christian name. And soon they became firm friends. So you’re absolutely right. There was an evolutionary process on both sides.

Sean Murray  38:59  

And there’s a point where you describe this meeting, where Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, prior to Churchill, becoming Prime Minister realizes he can no longer lead the country. He had to decide who’s going to replace him. Can you talk about that meeting because I found that fascinating?

Andrew Roberts  39:17  

Yes, the meeting was held at 4:30 in the afternoon on the Thursday, the ninth of May 1940, so the day before Hitler invaded in the west. But not that of course, anybody at the meeting knew that was going to happen. It took place in Downing Street. Chamberlain needed to decide whether or not he was going to tell the King that Churchill should be Prime Minister or the Lord Halifax should be Prime Minister. The only other person in the room at the time is David Margesson, the Government Chief Whip. 

Churchill wrote about this moment, and claimed that there had been a very long silence and at the end of it, Lord Halifax said in a sort of embarrassed way, backed down. But there’s absolutely no other evidence for this having been the case. And I don’t believe it. I think that Churchill will do the same thing as he’d always done throughout his life. 

Whenever he’d wanted a job and he desperately, desperately wanted the job of Prime Minister at that stage in the war, but he realized how necessary it was that he should have that job, and so he demanded it. He had been proved right about Hitler all the way through the 1930s. The others had the votes in Parliament, but they simply didn’t have the moral capacity to deny him the job, which so obviously had to be his. Not least because he was interested in war and warfare, and Lord Halifax wasn’t.

Sean Murray  40:38  

And so Chamberlain did recommend Churchill for the job. How did the King respond to that?

Andrew Roberts  40:44  

Well, the King didn’t like it. So the King actually said, what about Lord Halifax? The King was friendly with Lord Halifax. Lord Halifax, his wife, Lady Halifax was one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting. They knew each other well, and he assumed that Winston Churchill could stay just running the war, whereas the actual Prime Minister could be Halifax. 

However, Halifax did point out that because he was a lord, he’d have to sit in the House of Lords. And to have a Prime Minister in the 20th century, during a major world war in the House of Lords rather than where the power was in the House of Commons would just simply have not worked. Whereupon, the King told Chamberlain, well, then we can put his peerage into abeyance and he can sit in the House of Commons instead, which is perfectly true and right. In fact, it’s a law that they brought in only a few years later. 

So actually, the King did not want Churchill to be Prime Minister in May 1940. But very soon, by June 1940, he recognized that he was the right person for the job. And as I say, they became firm and fast friends.

Sean Murray  41:51  

Another habit that maybe it’s time management skill that Winston seemed to develop at this time that I found really, almost hilarious but very effective. He was putting the stamp that said, “action this day!” on certain activities. You get the sense he needed things to be done. And he demanded that things be done, and they weren’t happening fast enough. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Andrew Roberts  42:14  

It’s not so much a stamp. I’ve got one actually on my desk. It’s a little red label with the black writing, “action this day”. And what he did was to attach them with a paperclip to papers that he was sending to ministers that had to go at the top of the pile and be actioned there and then. And when you got one of these, you realize that if you wanted to stay in your job, you jolly well made sure that whatever he was writing about to you that day was dealt with that day. And there are lots of diaries and papers and correspondence and so on, little test to the efficacy of these. The sort of electric shock that went through civil servants and ministers when they received an “action this day” label.

Sean Murray  43:01  

I think it’s something we can all use. We all need to administer our own “action this day” just to get through the day with our access to the internet and our ability to be distracted and whatnot. But maybe you could walk us through towards the end of World War II. What are the steps he took to help achieve victory for the Allies and then his career after the war?

Andrew Roberts  43:21  

Well, the Mediterranean strategy by which the United States attacked in Operation Torch in Northwest Africa at exactly the same time that General Montgomery counter attacked against Rommel in the western desert of Allemagne. Then together, the Allies then forced the Germans and Italians off North Africa. Literally capturing a quarter of a million Axis troops in the May of 1943. Then going over of course into Sicily and Italy. And only a day after the fall of Rome crossing over to the channel to attack in Normandy. 

This was very much Churchill’s grand strategy which he sold to the Americans, even though the US Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall didn’t like the idea. Nonetheless, President Roosevelt supported Churchill over his own Army Chief of Staff. It was the strategy that drew German forces away from Normandy when the great sucker punch of the D-Day took place. So Churchill can be credited with a great degree of sort of masterminding of the strategy of the Western Allies, at least in the Second World War. 

Once the Americans landed in Normandy, he became a much less important figure, frankly. He did some very important and useful things such as saving Greece from communism in the Christmas of 1944. But otherwise, the Americans are very much taken over the overall strategy of the war, as of course was the intention when Dwight Eisenhower became Supreme Allied Commander.

Sean Murray  44:58  

Despite the fact that the Americans became more important at this time, I still found it amazing or almost unbelievable that he was voted out of office even before victory. Why did that happen? How did it happen?

Andrew Roberts  45:13  

It was after the victory in Europe, of course. But you’re right, it was before the victory over Japan. General election took place on the 26th of July 1945. When Churchill didn’t lose, but he lost a landslide defeat against Clement Attlee, his Labour Party. And this was because he was only one name on them over 600 ballots. The Conservatives, of course, overall were very unpopular. They have been responsible for appeasement. 

Many of the Conservative MPs who supported appeasement were still standing in 1945. And the Labour Party were offering what they called, “a new Jerusalem” of the welfare state and nationalization of the Bank of England, the socialization of medicine, and all that kind of thing, which a lot of people wanted after six years of grueling war. 

And so, even though he was cheered to the echo in meeting after meeting, up and down the country, millions of people turned up to cheer him. But nonetheless, they also voted against him. And brought in the Labour Party. He played it on the day that it happened. When the results were coming in. 

His wife Clementine came into the room and said, “Well, Winston, this may be a blessing in disguise. These from where I’m sitting seem quite remarkably well disguised”. It’s the saving of him though, by the way. I mean, he was exhausted by July 1945. 

Had he been reelected, I very much doubt that he could have just through health reasons seen through the whole of the next five years. He really did use these next 5 years to reinvigorate himself, go on holiday, paint pictures and relax. And so he was ready to come back and become Prime Minister again in the October of 1951.

Sean Murray  46:54  

That goes along with a theme that you talk about in the book, which is, every time he had a setback, it seemed to at the time be a major setback or a negative. But in the long run when you look at his career, that setback always led to something positive.

Andrew Roberts  47:11  

He made sure it did. You know, he was very good at using defeats and setbacks. And as I mentioned earlier, he also made mistakes. He got the gold standard wrong. The abdication crisis, women’s suffrage, the Dardanelles, as I mentioned earlier, many other mistakes. But he learned from all of them. This is another thing. Your podcast is called The Good Life. And one of the reasons I think that he did lead a good life was that he learned from all of these mistakes, and he learned from all of the setbacks. This was a man who was constantly on the learning curve. He never thought that he’d be near it all.

Sean Murray  47:47  

In closing, I wanted to read a quote that Churchill wrote about the importance of living an honorable life. And he said, “the only guide to a man is his conscience. The only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions”, and then he goes on to say, “with this shield however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor”. Can you reflect a little bit on that?

Andrew Roberts  48:16  

Yes, he said that on the 12th of November 1940. It’s one of my favorite speeches of Churchill’s because he said it at Neville Chamberlain’s funeral at Westminster Abbey. It was a freezing cold day. And because they had taken all the stained glass windows down because of the blitz, they only had the boarding up. Snow was coming into the Abbey. 

And he said this about Neville Chamberlain, who had of course been his opponent, his enemy during the wilderness years, during the appeasement debates. And yet, he was able to point out and this is part of his big heartedness, really, that Chamberlain taking the decisions that he had in good conscience, in good faith, believing Adolf Hitler, which of course, ultimately turned out to be a tragic error. 

But nonetheless, he had not done it out of evil or sinister or cynical reasons. He had done it in good faith. And it pointed also, of course, to Churchill’s mistakes and all the various errors that he’d made in good faith. There’s another phrase in that speech about history, which is one of the most beautiful pieces of Churchill’s writings. 

He wrote this, “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct it seems to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days”. That’s something I try and do every day in my life.

Sean Murray  49:41  

That’s a beautiful passage. Winston Churchill both lived history, wrote history, and lived an incredible, flourishing, active life. It’s something we can all I think, learn from. 

Andrew, where can people find out more about you, your books and your writing?

Andrew Roberts  49:58  

I got a website which is, www.andrew-roberts.net. My book, “Churchill: Walking with Destiny,” is as they always say, available to all good bookshops.

Sean Murray  50:11  

Right. Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew Roberts  50:13  

Thank you very much indeed, Sean. I’ve really enjoyed this past hour. It’s been a great pleasure.

Outro  50:18  

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