Excerpt­ed from “Churchill’s Crit­ics: Jibes, Ripostes and Insults,” writ­ten for the Hills­dale Col­lege Churchill Project. For the orig­i­nal arti­cle with end­notes and oth­er images, click here. To sub­scribe to week­ly arti­cles from Hills­dale-Churchill, click here, scroll to bot­tom, and enter your email in the box “Stay in touch with us.” We nev­er spam you and your iden­ti­ty remains a rid­dle wrapped in a mys­tery inside an enigma.

Q: “How many jibes were aimed at Churchill?”

Charles Legge, the Dai­ly Mail Q&A edi­tor, was asked by a read­er: “Entire books cel­e­brate Win­ston Churchill’s insults, but what jibes were direct­ed at him?” Mr. Legge offered a clas­sic, deliv­ered by Lord Hal­dane, a port­ly col­league giv­en to wit­ty rejoin­ders (below). Dai­ly Mail read­ers added two more. Sure­ly Churchill picked up many more jibes than this. Is there a list? —N.D., Camp Hill, Penna.

A: Incoming! 

No, but you prompt us to cre­ate one. Churchill, of course, received as good as he gave. For the most part, he took jibes sent his way good-natured­ly, some­times repeat­ing them himself.

In com­pil­ing this list, we were struck by the good humor of many crit­ics. Rel­a­tive­ly few expressed real malice—Samuel Hoare and Aneurin Bevan being excep­tions. (Rab Butler’s nasty aside when Churchill became prime min­is­ter quick­ly sub­sided when he saw oppor­tu­ni­ties and was giv­en a Cab­i­net min­istry.) Some were deliv­ered with, or for, laughs. A few evi­denced affec­tion. It was anoth­er world, when deco­rum was expect­ed— and prevailed.

Read­ers are wel­come to add to this list in the com­ments box. Please pro­vide the source (Hansard or book, author and page) and the most exact date avail­able. Thanks for many of the fol­low­ing jibes to Richard Cohen, Andrew Roberts, Dave Tur­rell, William John Shep­herd, Charles Legge  and Dai­ly Mail cor­re­spon­dents Peter Gilbert and Dave Taylor.

Archie MacLaren

1888: “He’s quite use­less and a snot­ty lit­tle b****r.”

Leopold Maxse

June 1904: “Churchill’s atti­tude can­not sur­prise since he is him­self half-alien and whol­ly undesirable.”

F.E. Smith Lord Birkenhead

1918: “When Win­ston is right, he is unique. When he’s wrong—Oh My God.”

1920: “I final­ly come to the Dundee Adver­tis­er. I mean the paper, not the politician.”

Arthur Balfour

1923: “I am immersed in Winston’s mag­nif­i­cent auto­bi­og­ra­phy [The World Cri­sis], dis­guised as a his­to­ry of the universe.”

Samuel Hoare

1923: “Win­ston has writ­ten an enor­mous book all about him­self and calls it The World Cri­sis.”

1 June 1934:  “I do not know which is the more offen­sive or more mis­chie­vous, Win­ston or his son. Rumour, how­ev­er, goes that they fight like cats with each oth­er and chiefly agree in the prodi­gious amount of cham­pagne that each of them drinks each night.”

Richard Haldane

1920s: [WSC, prod­ding Haldane’s ample bel­ly: “What’s in there?”] Hal­dane: “If it is a boy, I shall call him John. If it is a girl, I shall call her Mary. But if it is only wind, I shall call it Winston.”

Philip Snowden

Ca. 1928: “I under­stand that Win­ston has tak­en up a new pastime—fiddling, and very appro­pri­ate, too.”

Herbert Samuel

May 1935: “[T]he House always crowds in to hear him. It lis­tens and admires. It laughs when he would have it laugh, and it trem­bles when he would have it tremble—which is very fre­quent­ly in these days; but it remains uncon­vinced, and in the end, it votes against him.”

Leopold Amery

June 1935: “Here endeth the last chap­ter of the Book of Jeremiah.”

Adolf Hitler

6 Novem­ber 1935: “If Mr. Churchill had less to do with trai­tors and more with Ger­mans, he would see how mad his talk is, for I can assure this man, who seems to live on the moon, that there are no forces in Ger­many opposed to the regime.”

Stanley Baldwin

22 May 1936: “When Win­ston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cra­dle bear­ing gifts—imagination, elo­quence, indus­try, ability—and then came a fairy who said, ‘No one per­son has a right to so many gifts,’ picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judg­ment and wis­dom. And that is why, while we delight to lis­ten to him in this House, we do not take his advice.”

Neville Chamberlain

4 April 1939: “It doesn’t make things eas­i­er to be bad­gered for a meet­ing of Par­lia­ment by the two Oppo­si­tions and Win­ston who is the worst of the lot, tele­phon­ing almost every hour of the day. I sup­pose he has pre­pared a ter­rif­ic ora­tion which he wants to let off.”

Rab Butler

10 May 1940: “This is a black day in England’s his­to­ry. We have been giv­en into the hands of a drunk­en adven­tur­er with all the worst char­ac­ter­is­tics of Charles James Fox…. A half-breed Amer­i­can whose main sup­port is that of inef­fi­cient but talk­a­tive peo­ple of a sim­i­lar type, Amer­i­can dis­si­dents like Lady Astor and Ron­nie Tree.

James Maxton

10 May 1940: “I am get­ting more and more fatalist—it was writ­ten in the book of fate, say, per­haps on the bat­tle­field of Blenheim or some­place, that he would one day be prime min­is­ter…. But frankly, I can­not see the won­der­ful motive pow­er that has been pro­duced by the trans­fer­ence of the rel­a­tive posi­tions of the two Rt. Hon. Gen­tle­men oppo­site [Churchill and Chamberlain].”

Franklin Roosevelt

1940s: “Win­ston has a hun­dred ideas a day and four of them are good.”

Aneurin Bevan

2 July 1942: “The Prime Min­is­ter wins Debate after Debate and los­es bat­tle after bat­tle. The coun­try is begin­ning to say that he fights Debates like a war and the war like a Debate.”

9 Sep­tem­ber 1942: “[His speech indulged] in these turgid, wordy, dull, pro­sa­ic and almost invari­ably emp­ty new chap­ters in his book…. The Prime Min­is­ter was dressed in some uni­form of some sort or oth­er. I wish he would recog­nise that he is the civil­ian head of a civil­ian Gov­ern­ment, and not go parad­ing around in ridicu­lous uniforms.”

13 July 1945: “[For Churchill], democ­ra­cy is a state in which the peo­ple acqui­esce in the rule of prop­er­ty. Democ­ra­cy is an admirable insti­tu­tion so long as the poor con­tin­ue to car­ry the rich on their backs. When the poor decide to change places, democ­ra­cy falls into dis­re­pute. That is why, when­ev­er you scratch a Tory, you find a Fascist.”

Ezra Pound

1945: “Win­ston believes in the max­i­mum of injus­tice enforced with the max­i­mum of brutality.”

Joseph Stalin

14 March 1946: “Mr. Churchill is now in the posi­tion of a war-monger…strikingly rem­i­nis­cent of Hitler… also with a racial the­o­ry…. [He says:] ’Rec­og­nize our suprema­cy over you, vol­un­tar­i­ly, and all will be well—otherwise war is inevitable.’ [We will not] change the rule of the Hitlers for the rule of the Churchills.”

Clementine Churchill

No date: “Win­ston is a sport­ing man; he always likes to give the train a chance to get away.”

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