Excerpt­ed from “Take This Pud­ding Away—It Has No Theme,” writ­ten for the Hills­dale Col­lege Churchill Project. For the orig­i­nal arti­cle with end­notes, 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.

Puddings (not all desserts) that lacked a theme

A colum­nist and for­mer pres­i­den­tial advi­sor asks us to con­firm Churchill’s rejec­tion of a taste­less pud­ding (gener­ic word for dessert in Britain). “It has no theme.”

While not actu­al­ly pub­lished under his byline, Churchill some­times used the expres­sion when din­ing. Along with pud­dings, he applied it to soups. I asked the late Lord Soames: What gave a pud­ding a theme? “I think,” he replied , “Sir Win­ston referred to a dis­tinc­tive flavour or ingredient.”

What I didn’t expect, research­ing the phrase in the Hills­dale Col­lege data­base of WSC’s pub­lished words, was that Churchill used the theme line polit­i­cal­ly. And more than once. I found five occur­rences, each illus­trat­ing what he thought about the flaws of leg­is­la­tion or leaders.

1935: the India Bill

A con­cen­trat­ed dose of Churchillian vocab­u­lary poured forth on the Gov­ern­ment of India Act. Some analo­gies were a bit strained, but his word-pic­tures were vivid. The Act grant­ed more auton­o­my to the provinces. It also pro­vid­ed for a fed­er­a­tion with the “prince­ly states,” and increased the fran­chise sevenfold.

The his­to­ri­an Zareer Masani said it might have let to a unit­ed inde­pen­dent India, but Hin­du-Mus­lim rival­ries made that polit­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble. Aware of this prob­lem, Churchill argued against the legislation:

[W]hat is this India Home Rule Bill? I will tell you. It is a gigan­tic quilt of jum­bled cro­chet work. There is no theme; there is no pat­tern; there is no agree­ment; there is no con­vic­tion; there is no sim­plic­i­ty; there is no courage. It is a mon­strous mon­u­ment of shams built by the pygmies….

The faith­ful, trust­wor­thy Indi­an police, the main­stay of peace and order, are to be dis­turbed and harassed by divid­ed alle­giances aris­ing from unsure, irra­tional com­pro­mise. The supreme gov­ern­ment of India is to be racked by Dyarchy—rival author­i­ties clutch­ing at the levers of power.

Churchill’s efforts were ulti­mate­ly in vain, but his mag­na­nim­i­ty was evi­dent after the Act passed. Through a mutu­al friend, he advised Gand­hi “to use the pow­ers that are offered and make the thing a success.”

1939: Napoleon versus Hitler

Churchill always dep­re­cat­ed com­par­isons between the great French emper­or and “a squalid cau­cus boss and butch­er.” In 1939 he wrote:

There is no ques­tion of com­par­ing the present ruler of Ger­many with Napoleon…. Hitler can tra­verse in his aero­plane, in a few hours, dis­tances which Napoleon’s coach, with all its spe­cial relays, could scarce­ly cov­er in twice as many days. One of Hitler’s mech­a­nized divi­sions could cer­tain­ly dis­perse all the armies Napoleon ever led. Hitler can add a nought or two to most of the fig­ures with which Napoleon dealt.

1940: Third Reich

Churchill was one of the first to iden­ti­fy Hitler for what he was. And, unlike Napoleon, in WSC’s 1940 lan­guage, Hitler’s Reich had no theme:

It is the rule of the Her­ren­volk—the master-race—who are to put an end to democ­ra­cy, to par­lia­ments, to the fun­da­men­tal free­doms and decen­cies of ordi­nary men and women, to the his­toric rights of nations; and give them in exchange the iron rule of Prus­sia, the uni­ver­sal goose-step, and a strict, effi­cient dis­ci­pline enforced upon the work­ing-class­es by the polit­i­cal police, with the Ger­man con­cen­tra­tion camps and fir­ing par­ties, now so busy in a dozen lands, always handy in the back­ground. There is the New Order.

Napoleon in his glo­ry and his genius spread his Empire far and wide. There was a time when only the snows of Rus­sia and the white cliffs of Dover with their guardian fleets stood between him and the domin­ion of the world. Napoleon’s armies had a theme: they car­ried with them the surges of the French Revolution.

But Hitler—Hitler has no theme, naught but mania, appetite and exploita­tion. He has, how­ev­er, weapons and machin­ery for grind­ing down and for hold­ing down con­quered coun­tries which are the prod­uct, the sad­ly per­vert­ed prod­uct, of mod­ern science.

1946: “Vague palimpsest of officialese”

Albert Vic­tor Alexan­der had served as First Lord of the Admi­ral­ty in Churchill’s wartime coali­tion. Alexan­der was a social­ist, but there was affec­tion between them. In 1945, Alexan­der became Min­is­ter of Defense in the new Labour gov­ern­ment. Even so, Churchill insist­ed, he could not have writ­ten a doc­u­ment (the Defence White Paper) with­out a theme:

I must again remind the House that the Rt. Hon. Gen­tle­man used very hard lan­guage about the argu­ments of his polit­i­cal oppo­nents the oth­er night, and about their style. No more bar­ren, dis­mal, flat­u­lent, plat­i­tudi­nous doc­u­ments than his White Paper—if you can call it “his” White Paper—has ever been laid before the House of Commons.

His friends—and I am cer­tain­ly a wartime friend—hope that it is to his cred­it that he had noth­ing to do with writ­ing it. It was one of those rig­maroles and gri­maces pro­duced by the mod­ern bureau­cra­cy into whose hands we have fallen—a kind of vague palimpsest of jar­gon and offi­cialese, with no breadth, no theme and, above all no facts.

1949: Nature of a new threat

Speak­ing at a din­ner giv­en by Hen­ry Luce, Churchill revived his belief that Nazism had no theme save racial suprema­cy. Com­mu­nism, by con­trast, did. And that made it an even more for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge than Hitler:

We are now con­front­ed with some­thing which is quite as wicked but much more for­mi­da­ble than Hitler, because Hitler had only the Her­ren­volk stuff and anti-Semi­tism. Well, some­body [WSC was refer­ring to him­self] said about that—a good starter, but a bad stay­er. That’s all he had. He had no theme.

But these four­teen men in the Krem­lin have their hier­ar­chy and a church of Com­mu­nist adepts whose mis­sion­ar­ies are in every coun­try as a fifth col­umn, and not only a fifth col­umn, in your coun­try, ours, every­where, and so on, with a feel­ing that they may be run­ning a risk but if their gam­ble comes off they will be the mas­ters of the whole land in which they are a minor­i­ty at the present time. They will be the Quis­lings with pow­er to rule and dom­i­nate all the rest of their fel­low coun­try­men. There­fore they have a good prospec­tive advantage.

In a way, the late con­ser­v­a­tive leader William F. Buck­ley, Jr. shared this con­cept: “My thought has always been that Nazism had absolute­ly no escha­tol­ogy,” he told me years ago. “It would with­er on the vine. Only the life of Hitler kept it going, and I can’t imag­ine he’d have last­ed very long. The Com­mu­nists hung in there [after the war] for forty-six years.” (In the con­text of the 1930s, I respect­ful­ly disagreed.)

Words for our time?

It is inter­est­ing how Churchill con­sis­tent­ly relied on a favored phrase in his ora­to­ry. But the remarks above involved issues long past.

Now comes what he said about the lack of “theme” in the 1930 Social­ist gov­ern­ment. It is remark­able how close this seems to cer­tain sit­u­a­tions today:

[T]his island and this Empire are pass­ing through a peri­od of eclipse which may well be con­vert­ed into a peri­od of decline. There is anx­i­ety abroad, and can we won­der at it! Why should the Gov­ern­ment com­plain? Look at all they have said. Look at all they protest they stand for….

They have no theme [and] have delud­ed the mass­es of their sup­port­ers in the coun­try into believ­ing they are about to bring into being some vast, splen­did, new world. They have climbed and ensconced them­selves upon the struc­tures of Cap­i­tal­ism, and they are shout­ing to the mob below that they are going to pull them down….

Can they won­der there is con­fu­sion and anx­i­ety abroad in the nation; and can they won­der that the elec­tors are show­ing an increas­ing reluc­tance to entrust the task of restor­ing con­fi­dence to a bank­rupt Government…?

The British elec­tors spoke last on July 4th. Of course, his­to­ry doesn’t repeat.

Related reading

“William F. Buck­ley , Jr.: A True Churchillian in the End,”  2020.

“Zion­ism, Bol­she­vism, Ene­mies of Civ­i­liza­tion: What Churchill Said,” 2021.

“Com­ing: New Churchill Phrase Index in My Next Quote­book,” 2024.

“All the Quotes Win­ston Churchill Nev­er Said,” Part 1 of four parts, 2018.