I am trying to verify three quotations attributed to Mr. Churchill. All three apply to politics or politicians, and all are very relevant today. Can you assist? I saw them on Facebook.

1. “Youth is for freedom and reform, maturity for judicious compromise and old age is for stability and repose.”

2. “What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people? …of sending Members to Parliament to say what they are told to say by Ministerial platitude? What value can we place on our parliamentary institutions if constituencies return only lame, docile and subservient members who try to stamp on every form of independent judgement?”

3. “If you make ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”

I can find no documentation to support these quotations. Can you help me to verify that they accurate, or misattributions? —A.J., London

A: Yes to all three quotations

Facebook and Twitter (or “X” or whatever it’s now called) are fonts of false Churchill quotations. So thanks for questioning these. Happily, all three quotations are sound. From my book, Churchill by Himself:

Life

Usually youth is for freedom and reform, maturity for judicious compromise, and old age for stability and repose.

—Chapter 2, “Maxims.” This is from Churchill’s essay, “Consistency in Politics,” Pall Mall, July 1927. WSC reprinted this piece in Thoughts and Adventures (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932, and many subsequent editions). We can all think of several politicians who richly deserve a period of stability and repose.

Principle vs. Politics

What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people? What is the use of sending Members to the House of Commons who say just the popular things of the moment, and merely endeavour to give satisfaction to the Government Whips by cheering loudly every Ministerial platitude, and by walking through the Lobbies oblivious of the criticisms they hear? People talk about our Parliamentary institutions and Parliamentary democracy; but if these are to survive, it will not be because the Constituencies return tame, docile, subservient Members, and try to stamp out every form of independent judgment.

—Chapter 29, “Leadership,” from the House of Commons, 14 March 1939. That one seems not without considerable relevance at the moment. Perhaps it’s always been relevant.

Free Market

If you destroy a free market you create a black market. If you make ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

Three correct quotations in a row! This one is also in Chapter 2, “Maxims,” from the House of Commons, 3 February 1949. Churchill was arguing against the stifling regulations of industry and commerce by the postwar Labour Government (1945-51). He thought they were excessive. We can only guess what he’d think of government regulations now.

Fair and balanced

In his best-known book, Robert Vidal Rhodes James said he aimed to prove that Winston Churchill was human. He was immediately asked: wasn’t that a superfluous mission? Sir Robert replied that Churchill had been almost completely deified—so it was high time someone brought him down to earth. Churchill: A Study in Failure (1970) was a comprehensive catalogue of the great man’s outrages, miscalculations and errors which left WSC, through the late 1930s, admired for his drive and brilliance and distrusted for his supposed lack of judgement. A Study in Failure was not a pioneering work, since critical books about Churchill had been appearing since the 1920s. But it was the best of them: carefully researched, deftly argued, elegantly written, a model.

The politician-writer

Like Churchill, Sir Robert was that rare combination, a politician-writer. Unlike many today, he didn’t make politics his sole career. He clerked in the House of Commons, returned to All Souls College as a research fellow, taught history at Stanford and the University of Sussex, and worked for the United Nations in New York. In 1976 he stood as a Conservative in a by-election for Cambridge, a marginal seat. He held it despite strong challenges until he retired in 1992. 

Aside from A Study in Failure, Robert left a huge corpus for laborers in the Churchill vineyard. His first book, Lord Randolph Churchill (1959), was the first biography of Sir Winston’s father since WSC’s and Lord Rosebery’s early in the century. In 1964 he published a biography of Lord Rosebery himself.

Biographies followed on Prince Albert (1983) and Anthony Eden (1986). Like most of us, he was sometimes uneven. Bob Boothby (1991) bordered on hagiography. Boothby, Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary in the 1920s, who later fell out over ethical lapses, hardly puts a foot wrong in that book, which etiolates Churchill. Perhaps this was because Robert and Boothby both liked to stir the political pot. But most of the time, like Churchill, Rhodes James was a skilled politician-writer.

His greatest contribution was Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963 (1974). It took up eight thick volumes, with two well-organized and comprehensive indexes. He shocked me once by confiding that he had been paid only £5000 for the whole job—55 pence per page. Out of that he had to pay his student researchers. It’s a safe bet that he derived little from the later abridged editions, such as Churchill Speaks. But he was proud of the effort, and smiled when told it’s among the most sought-after of the multi-volume Churchill works.

Rhodes James as I knew him

I met him in Washington in 1994, where he spoke at a symposium, later quantified in Churchill as Peacemaker (1997). He sniffed that his hotel room lacked the bottle of whisky he’d enjoyed at his last symposium in Texas. He was affronted by America’s no-smoking diktat, then almost universal: “In a few year’s time everything in your country will be illegal, except sex between consenting adults of the correct persuasion. I like smoking. Oh dear.” One evening the ebullient James Humes, after too good a dinner, introduced Lady Rhodes James as “an English rose.” Robert murmured, not quite sotto voce, “Who is that dreadful man?” 

At our symposium he griped that speakers had to stand up, then took on Professor Manfred Weidhorn, who said Churchill objected to Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland. Walking briskly to the podium after Manny’s presentation, Robert announced: “Churchill said nothing about the Rhineland, nothing at all. He was hoping to get into the Cabinet and so he kept his mouth shut.” Then bang, he sat down again. No questions, thanks very much.

Nevertheless we found Robert a grand personality, full of stories about Churchill and Parliament. Paul Addison remembered “what fun he was to be with. Such a warm and generous character—he sparkled with gossip and was full of enthusiasms.”

The Washington Post said Robert “could be a congenial companion to those he counted as his intellectual near-equals.” But he “never lost the superior manner commonly displayed by clerks of the House of Commons.” On balance Sir Robert remained pro-Churchill, and hoped to write a post-1939 volume entitled A Study in Success. 

Tory Wet

I was sure that Robert and I weren’t destined to become chums. He was a “Tory wet” (think RINO Republican, conservative Democrat). He believed in Little Britain within the European Union, and regarded Margaret Thatcher as a rather nasty aberration. I was a right winger who had voted for Goldwater and Reagan and Steve Forbes, and would have voted Thatcher if I could, who believed that the EU was a globalist con-job for the benefit of the Franco-Germans. The best Great Britain could do was to revive Commonwealth Free Trade and join the North American Free Trade Association. (Oh dear, indeed.)

We disagreed about the Churchill Official Biography. Randolph Churchill had sacked Robert from his research team of “young gentlemen,” and Robert never forgave him (or his dislike of Eden). He always maintained that the O.B. was the same “case for the defence” Sir Winston had already made in his own books. Robert always said exactly what he believed—in the most forceful terms available to a gentleman. In an age of prevaricating phonies of Left and Right, such a character is rare. Winston Churchill would have loved him.

Flogged then forgiven

We tangled over the Rhineland issue, because Churchill did and said things about it which ought to be considered. Sweeping generalizations, I argued, have no place either in a biography or a seminar. Robert ended the discussion with a preemptory note. “I am one of Churchill’s strongest admirers, but I cannot accept claims that have no merit or justification. I see no point whatever in continuing this correspondence.”

And that, I thought, was that. Yet a year later he wrote to offer me a very good piece: “Myth-Shattering: An Actor Did NOT Give Churchill’s Speeches.” Instantly we renewed our correspondence, in which I was rewarded with a treasury of keen observations.

Robert’s shrewd thoughts on Churchill and politics, delivered ad hoc with an entre nous intimacy, were a privilege to read. (I share some below, all food for thought.) He even agreed to consider whatever I would write about Churchill and the Rhineland. I came to realize that here was a wise and opinionated Diogenes, to shed a kindly light over my own insignificant Churchill studies.

Alas the Rhineland piece was set aside, because like most of his friends and admirers I expected Robert would be with us a good while yet. Now if I write it, he will never read it, and then hammer me in cordial debate.** He died too young, of cancer on 20 May 1999, his second Churchill volume unpublished. I mourned the loss of a first class intellect and, as Churchill said on occasion, “a good House of Commons man.”

**See “Churchill and the Rhineland: ‘They Had Only to Act to Win.'”

Robert Rhodes James on Churchillians

From correspondence with the author, 1995-98.

Anthony Eden 

“I do not think that WSC developed ‘a cold hatred’ for Eden; certainly their correspondence would belie this. But the abandonment of the Suez Canal base in 1956 angered Churchill, as did Eden’s manifest impatience with WSC’s procrastination about retiring.”

George VI

“The relationship between Churchill and the King during the war is important. It has been consistently underestimated, and even on occasion ignored. It began stickily but developed into the closest collaboration between monarch and prime minister in modern British history. The Queen Mother was very affectionately amusing about WSC, as was the King when Churchill’s letters became especially flowery. On one occasion WSC enthusiastically responded to a plea for help in preparing a broadcast by the King. He sent His Majesty a speech he had composed specially. Of course, it contained words and phrases the King could not get his tongue round. While splendidly Churchillian, was so out of character for the King that it was politely rejected. Sadly, his draft seems to have disappeared.”

Harold Nicolson

“His position was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information between May 1940 and June 1941. This was a junior ministerial post in the Churchill Coalition Government. Alfred Duff Cooper was a disaster as Minister, and Harold’s career suffered thereby. But as his son Nigel has frankly admitted, ‘he was not a fit person to run a department in wartime.’ Indeed, much as I loved Harold, he was marvellously unfitted to administer or run anything. When WSC, who needed a Labour minister to balance the Coalition team, had to sack Harold, whom he greatly liked and respected, he made him a governor of the BBC. This was his true métier.”

Alfred Duff Cooper

“I too thought that John Charmley’s biography of Duff Cooper was much better than his Churchill book, though I thought he was unduly censorious about Duff’s drinking and womanizing. If his wife was tolerant of both, then I think we can be. I prefer red-blooded people to time-servers and sycophants. And Duff had real guts, in war and peace. And he wrote so wonderfully, gracefully and simply—particularly on a hot summer afternoon after a long lunch with beautiful women and plenty of champagne, good wine, and brandy. But this is now terribly unfashionable and non-PC!”

Lord Randolph Churchill

“I never believed the canard that he died of syphilis. When I was researching my Lord Randolph Churchill in the 1950s I discussed it with an eminent elderly specialist in the disease. He told me that, having looked at the symptoms, syphilis was the least likely cause of his decline and death. He was certainly treated for it, by a physician who was on public record as declaring that all nervous diseases were syphilitic. This, of course, we now know is nonsense. John Mather’s conclusion that the treatment only accelerated Lord Randolph’s mental collapse and death seems to me to be fully justified.

I am rather surprised that some of the Churchills told you they believed the story, although Randolph, ill-advised as usual, did. But the Churchills do like to tease. Clarissa Avon [WSC’s niece who married Eden] once told me that ‘of course’ her father Jack was illegitimate, knowing full well that this was nonsense, but rather chic. Jack’s son John was physically almost an exact replica of his Uncle Winston, and with an even more formidable capacity for alcohol. He lived to a much greater age than the modern Puritans deem possible, and was also a very good artist.”

The following, just resurfaced, were not in my original post but shed more light on the great character he was….

Churchill symposia

“I am glad your last Symposium went much better, and the style that I had advised was adopted. The great Austin Conference on WSC* was made memorable and enjoyable by the provision of the smoking room in the LBJ Library, and, by a stroke of added genius by Roger Louis, a bottle of bourbon for each participant. No wonder it was a triumph. And WSC would have greatly approved.” *Published as Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War, Lord Blake and William Roger Louis, editors (1993).

WSC’s grandsons?

“We had a fine dinner meeting of The Other Other Club in Madison. I cut down my contribution drastically, as the old boys were longing to get at their oysters and Pol Roger…. I did the same at the Anniversary meeting in Zurich, where I spoke from the same podium as WSC had in 1946. Alas the Swiss Foreign Minister gave an interminable and hardly relevant speech, Mine went well, and there were many requests afterwards for the full text. The Swiss Press got rather confused and described Nicholas Soames and me as WSC’s ‘two grandsons.’ This puzzled the multitude, as the physical resemblance is absolutely nil. Nicholas, of course, thought it hilarious.”

The weed

“If we have another Winston Churchill symposium it really must recognise that a non-smoking Churchill Conference is a contradiction in terms, almost as idiotic as a non-smoking Churchill Cabinet! Auberon Waugh has formed a club in London in which smoking is compulsory. This may be taking the counter-revolution rather too far, but he is making a point against the PC fanatics.”

Click here for clear audio of the 50-minute speech.

Presidents never attend speeches to Congress by foreign heads of state or government. Part of this is certainly courtesy, so as not to steal focus from the guest. In a deeper sense, it is an assertion of the separation of powers between Congress and the Executive. A similar tradition in Britain is when the House of Commons slams the door on Black Rod, when he summons Members to the House of Lords to hear the Queen’s Speech. He then bangs the door again, three times. Members of Commons walk out, talking loudly, and troop to the Lords to hear the speech. The ritual emphasizes Commons’ independence.

Not a P.C. Congress

Churchill and his party, he said,

have not travelled all this way simply to concern themselves about improving the health and happiness of the Mikado of Japan. I thought it would be good that all concerned in this theatre should meet together and thrash out in friendly candour, heart to heart, all the points that arise; and there are many.

Anywhere war industry was concentrated was fair game, Churchill told Congress. If there were populations around it, they would be well advised to leave:

If they do not like what is coming to them, let them disperse beforehand on their own. This process will continue ceaselessly with ever-increasing weight and intensity until the German and Italian peoples abandon or destroy the monstrous tyrannies which they have incubated and reared in their midst….

It is the duty of those who are charged with the direction of the war to overcome at the earliest moment the military, geographical, and political difficulties, and begin the process, so necessary and desirable, of laying the cities and other munitions centres of Japan in ashes, for in ashes they must surely lie before peace comes back to the world.

Dear oh dear, how terribly bullying. How arrogant, insensitive and warlike! But those sentiments were not heard. Members of Congress and American audiences reacted with cheers. The New York Times headlined, “Churchill Predicts Huge Allied Drive in 1943.”

It was, of course, another age. This was the last war in history declared by Congress. And Churchill knew, as he wrote in his memoirs, that “the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death…. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals.”

How times have changed

Having located and listened to the online audio, I had an odd sensation. It wasn’t over the classic Churchill peroration. Most of all I was struck by the announcer. He reminded me how much has changed.

The announcer is full of hyperbole, patriotism and praise, totally unquestioning of the speaker. It is so different from how one expects a speech like that would be covered today. One can imagine the media talking heads at the end of it: “Finally we switch to Berlin for Herr Goebbels’ response…..”​

My friend in England quips: “The BBC would give out a hotline number for counseling to those disturbed by what they have heard.” Certainly many groups would be “offended.”

In another wartime speech, in Canada, Churchill declared: “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”

Let us hope that is still true.

Good question! Ah for the likes of Question Time in the U.S. Congress. Then a Mister or Madam President would get to be grilled with all the famous gusto of the House of Commons.

Dodgy: 11 April 2016 

Eighty-four-year-old Dennis Skinner (Lab., Bolsover) was ejected from the House of Commons by the Speaker, John Bercow. Skinner refused to withdraw, in fact repeated, the term “Dodgy Dave,” with respect to David Cameron.

Amidst cries of “chuck him out!” the Speaker asked Skinner to “withdraw the adjective.” “The Beast of Bolsover” (so named for his flaming attacks on Conservatives) replied: “This man has done more to defy this nation than anybody else. He’s looked after his own profit. I still refer to him as ‘Dodgy Dave.'” And out he went. You can watch the whole jolly episode here.

Boneless: 28 January 1931

Fifty-six-year-old Winston Churchill (Cons., Epping) deplored the lack of courage over a bill about to be quietly set aside by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s  Labour Government:

I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as “The Boneless Wonder.” My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes, and I have waited 50 years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

You’ve probably guessed the difference. Churchill’s remark was not “unparliamentary language,” since it referred to MacDonald’s lack of courage, not his honesty. Skinner’s remark essentially labeled Mr. Cameron a crook. Under the rules, Members of Parliament may not accuse one another of dishonesty or use profanity—though, as The New York Times puts it, “the line at which insult crosses over into ‘unparliamentary language’ is often hard to draw.”

Mr. Skinner should have urged Mr. Cameron to ‘fess up to his sins lest he become another Boneless Wonder. That would have been fine.