Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, the day Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, and led Britain for the rest of the war in Europe. He is consistently voted the greatest Briton in national polls, and he is also the subject of increasingly serious argument.
Before 1940
He had a long and largely unsuccessful career first. Born at Blenheim Palace into aristocracy, he was a soldier and war correspondent, then an MP who changed party twice. As First Lord of the Admiralty he was blamed for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915 and resigned. As Chancellor he returned Britain to the gold standard in 1925, deepening unemployment.
Through the 1930s he was out of office and widely regarded as finished — a brilliant, erratic figure whose judgement could not be trusted. His warnings about German rearmament were dismissed as more of the same.
1940
Those warnings made him the only credible choice when Chamberlain fell. In late May 1940, with France collapsing and the army trapped at Dunkirk, the War Cabinet seriously discussed whether to explore terms with Hitler through Italy. Churchill refused, and carried the Cabinet with him.
That decision is his claim on history. Whether Britain could have survived a negotiated peace is arguable; that the refusal changed the course of the war is not.
The speeches
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, largely for his oratory and historical writing. The lines are still quoted:
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
We shall fight on the beaches… we shall never surrender.
This was their finest hour.
Losing in 1945
Two months after victory in Europe, Churchill’s Conservatives were beaten in a landslide by Labour. Voters credited him with winning the war and did not believe he would build the housing, health service and full employment they wanted. He was, by all accounts, devastated.
He returned as prime minister from 1951 to 1955, suffered a stroke in office that was concealed from the public, and retired.
The reassessment
His record beyond the war is genuinely contested and increasingly discussed in Britain. He was a committed imperialist who opposed Indian independence in explicitly racial terms. His government’s handling of the Bengal famine of 1943, in which around three million people died, is the subject of serious historical dispute, with critics pointing to his decisions on grain shipping and his recorded remarks about Indians.
He also supported the use of force against strikers, and his early views on eugenics were of their time in a way that is not much defended now.
The current British position on Churchill is not settled. Most people hold both things at once: that 1940 was indispensable, and that the rest of the record is a great deal darker than the statue suggests.
The funeral
He died in January 1965 and was given a state funeral, the first for a commoner since Gladstone. As his coffin travelled up the Thames, the dockers of the Port of London lowered their cranes in salute — an unplanned gesture from men who had little reason to love him, and the most affecting moment of the day.