Memories of his travails on the UK's behalf during the Second World War—"undoubtedly the central experience of his life", according to Johnson—were fundamental to the sense of profound betrayal Smith felt when the UK government proved one of his main adversaries as Prime Minister. The wartime plastic surgery that corrected the wounds to his face left its right side paralysed, giving him a crooked smile and a somewhat blank expression, while his bodily injuries gave him a stoop and a slight limp; he also could not sit for long periods without pain. The post-colonial UK Smith encountered as Prime Minister seemed to him "foreign and somewhat effete", to quote Kenneth Young, while Smith was "a foreigner in all but language to most British politicians—a man of convictions so outdated, of tastes so naive, as to make mutual understanding almost impossible." Smith held most of the British politicians he dealt with in extremely low esteem, considering them to have pushed him and his country into an impossible position where, he asserted in 1970, the decision to take unilateral action was "forced upon us".