Month: October 2014

Boris: What Winston Would Do, Part 13,783

Boris: What Winston Would Do, Part 13,783

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May­or John­son

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.…

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He drank 42,000 bottles of champagne?

He drank 42,000 bottles of champagne?

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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….…

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