Boris Johnson, whose book, The Churchill Factor, is feted widely, speaks his mind with a smile. Like Mr. Obama, he’s a chap I’d like to share a pint with at the local.
But fame and likability don’t a Churchill scholar make. And in that department, Boris Johnson needs some help.
His remarks are quoted from a November 14th speech at the Yale Club in New York City.
Boris Fact-checks1) Lend-Lease, Roosevelt’s World War II “loan” of $50 billion worth of war materiel to the Allies, “screwed” the British.
I queried Professor Warren Kimball of Rutgers University, editor of the Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence and several books on World War II, who wrote:
The U.S.…
N.B. A shorter version of this piece on Nigel Farage appeared in The Weekly Standard online
A few years ago Britain’s Nigel Farage was a political curiosity, head of a fringe party, gadfly member of the European Parliament, an ex-commodities broker who never went to college, dismissed as a nutter by ruling elites in London and Brussels. On 23 June 2016, he was widely credited with a key role in the referendum favoring Brexit— Britain’s exit from the European Community.
“Our Nige,” his supporters call him—personable, chatty, good-looking, beer swilling, cigarette and cigar smoking—wants Britain, not the European Union, to govern British affairs.…
I didn’t expect to find myself agreeing with Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt. But take a look at his Great War article “Bashing History,” and see what you think.
We’re going to be reading a lot of silly nonsense about the Great War in the next year or two, and Hunt’s preemptive strike is a salutary warning.
His piece recalls a poetic answer to Eric Bogle’s famous poem “Willie McBride,” written by Stephen Suffet in 1997:
Ask the people of Belgium or Alsace-Lorraine,
If my life was wasted, if I died in vain.…
Churchillian Drift is just the ticket. I have been looking for a term to describe the numerous potted, inaccurate Churchill quotes. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its trousers on.” That is big right now on Twitter. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Everybody uses that one repeatedly.
“If you’e going through hell, keep going.” No one knows who said that, but it wasn’t Churchill. Then there is: “If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”…
Mr. Daniel Knowles (“Time to scotch the myth of Winston Churchill’s infallibility,” (originally blogged on the Daily Telegraph but since pulled from all the websites where it appeared), wrote that the “national myth” of World War II and Churchill “is being used in an argument about the future of the House of Lords.”
Mr. Knowles quoted Liberal Party leader Nick Clegg, who cited Churchill’s 1910 hope that the Lords “would be fair to all parties.” Sir Winston’s grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames MP, replied that Churchill “dropped those views and had great reverence and respect for the institution of the House of Lords.”…
