October 2014 | Page 2 of 2 | Richard M. Langworth

Boris: What Winston Would Do, Part 13,783

25 October 2014 Comments 0 Comments

London Mayor Boris Johnson has disobeyed the Lady Soames Commandment: “Thou shall not say what my father would do today.” May the fleas of a thousand camels infest his pyjamas.

During a Daily Telegraph readers Q&A to launch Johnson’s new book, The Churchill Factor, Telegraph Head of Books Gaby Wood asked the Mayor what “we could take from Churchill today” and whether Islamofascism was an equivalent threat to the Nazis.

Although Mr. Johnson said he did not know whether Churchill would get involved in Iraq, he added: “I think he would have been in favour of air power. I think air strikes but not boots on the ground is my hunch on where he would have been because he wasn’t obsessed with foreign entanglements.”

Well, he was obsessed enough in the 1930s to argue for foreign entanglements (France, Russia, USA) when his country was in danger.…

He drank 42,000 bottles of champagne?

4 October 2014 Comments 0 Comments

It’s nice to be quoted, even if it’s only your pen name, in my case “Michael Richards.” In “Churchill’s Legendary Thirst,” The Herald (Scotland) of 4 October 2014, drinks columnist Tom Bruce-Gardyne kindly quotes me while revealing the astonishing calculation that Churchill drank 42,000 bottles of champagne!….

The claim is one of a stream culled from a new book by the team behind the television programme QI. The total amount of fizz – enough to float a battleship – is a simple calculation which takes an arbitrary date of 1908, when Sir Winston Churchill was 34, and assumes he drank an average of two bottles a day for the rest of his life….…