Winnie takes all

Richard Holmes's life of Britain's great war leader, In the Footsteps of Churchill, is packed with startling detail, says Neal Ascherson

In the Footsteps of Churchill
by Richard Holmes
BBC Books £20, pp351

Churchill was anything but humble. But he meant it when he said afterwards that it had been 'the nation' in the Second World War which had been lion-hearted, and that he had merely 'had the luck to be called upon to give the roar'. His chief of staff, 'Pug' Ismay, disagreed, noting in 1940 that 'he failed to realise that the upsurge of the national spirit was largely his own creation. The great qualities of the British race had seemed almost dormant until he had aroused them. The people then saw themselves as he portrayed them.'

He imagined a 'British nation' with an eternal spirit which, as Richard Holmes writes, he loved not because of what it had been or could be but unconditionally. As this fantasy spirit was timeless, he was not afraid to change British life radically and several times over. He did so in 1909 as co-author of Lloyd George's 'people's budget', and then again between 1940 and 1945 when (so Holmes puts it) 'he presided over the greatest and most irreversible shift of power from the citizen to the state in British history'. This shift was not just the taking of wartime emergency powers, but Churchill's support during the coalition years for a comprehensive welfare state, eventually put into practice by the postwar Labour government. At the same time, Churchill never tried to create an 'elective dictatorship', even as wartime Prime Minister. Holmes shows how he prized the archaic machinery of British government and insisted on working through it. 'I have stuck hard to my blood, toil, tears and sweat, to which I have added muddle and mismanagement.' He knew Britain was premodern in many ways and perhaps, Holmes suggests, saw these practical failings as 'a reflection of historic distrust of central power'.

No book about Churchill could be dull. Professor Holmes, who has written this book to go with a BBC TV series, is a military historian with a flair for psycho-biography and for startling detail. Nobody has written better about Winston's infantile, insatiable greed for admiration (his 'poor little Winston' image of a neglected childhood is nonsense), about his flirting with bullets at Malakand and Omdurman and in the Boer War, about the dandy Winston as a young minister with his Penhaligon's cologne, silk hat and cigar, or about the war leader whose geniality could turn to the vindictive bullying of good men - Wavell, Sir John Dill - whom he chose to despise.

Holmes is good on war and rearmament, as he should be, though some of his opinions are unexpected: he calls the Gallipoli campaign (more than 20,000 British dead) 'a relatively minor episode' and he thinks that Passchendaele (more than 500,000 casualties on both sides) was a 'grimly successful exercise of attrition by the Allies'. He shows how wrong Churchill was in the 1930s to appeal for a strategic bomber force, as opposed to a fighter build-up, and demonstrates with figures the personal superiority of the German infantryman to his American or British enemy. Here, too, are all the matchless details of Winston's style. The 'action this day' memos ('Don't argue the matter, the difficulties will argue for themselves'); the wild ideas which were sometimes just mad (invading Germany through the Baltic in 1939) and sometimes brilliant (the Mulberry artificial harbours); the cold game breakfasts in bed and champagne lunches; the enduring child's glee (Winston pissing in the Rhine in 1945 - 'Most satisfactory!' as he did up his buttons).

Congratulations to Holmes for not mentioning - let alone visiting - the argument of some right-wing historians in the 1980s that Churchill should have made peace with Hitler in 1940 and thereby saved the empire. He merely observes that the idea that Chamberlain might have been Prime Minister when France fell really doesn't bear thinking about. But Holmes's fearsome condemnation of British political decay and paralysis between the wars suggests to me that the sickness really was terminal and that without Churchill the impact of Hitler would have been enough to bring the whole system to some unimaginable collapse.

Churchill used the war and the American alliance to raise the moribund creature to a final lease of life, after which, in the post-1945 world, it was able to decline at leisure in the comfortable American-run hospice of the Cold War. Only now, in the 21st century and 15 years after the Cold War ended, are the hospice bills coming in for payment.

But this book has problems as well as virtues. Sometimes it seems to be two books at once: a sparkling biography interleaved with short sections from what appears to be The Betrayal of Britain by Traitorous Eggheads, an unknown work by Professor Holmes. Allusions to this work include constant splenetic references to Aneurin Bevan, Stafford Cripps, the Bloomsbury group and the trade union movement. Where and how this betrayal happened is never explained, though it evidently has something to do with the decline of classical liberalism and the rise of planning. Churchill himself went on about 'a peculiar type of brainy people ... who, if they add something to [Britain's] culture, take much from its strength'. However, he did not go as far as Holmes and talk about 'compound betrayal of the British by their political leadership' between 1914 and 1929, a notion which deserves to be unpacked for puzzled readers.

Holmes also offers the swellest mixed metaphor of the year: 'In an attempt to breathe life back into the traditional pillars of the economy, the coffin of classical liberalism was nailed shut.' Like most items of the species, this monster has its own bandy-legged grandeur. British history since 1918 has indeed been all about trying to animate dead bits of architecture and about nailing down coffins which always creak open again. I think Holmes is right to see the 1920s as the key period when Britain petrified and old 'adventurousness' died away.

Churchill was a survivor from that earlier age of adventure who never fossilised, and what he breathed over his comrades - bumptiousness, energy, sometimes alcohol, sometimes deathless words - was always charged with life.