Most biographies can be located on a spectrum somewhere between hagiography and hatchet job. As in other things there exists a third way in biography, however, that of the scholarly hobby horse.
Kevin Theakston’s new book on Winston Churchill and the constitution is a small work competing for space with offerings from some intellectual and political bruisers.
As an acclaimed great man Churchill has been dissected, lauded and lamented by every species and style of biographer.
In the process, as Professor Theakston is decently keen not to disclose, the great man’s track record has been rather elided in a welter of detail and praise. The uncomfortable truth is that, even as Churchill burst onto the national stage at the turn of the twentieth century, the kind of unideological politics he represented were in their death throes.
Churchill ratted on his principles to become a Liberal, then re-ratted later in life. If he had been of the left the accusation of careerism would have hung about him like a shroud. Amongst others of his bent his shifts of direction, his opportunism and his astonishingly sophisticated leaps of logic would have seemed normal; politics was not, perhaps, reported in the kind of forensic detail we experience today.
It certainly is the case that Churchill’s twists and turns seem to be treated with an undue degree of kindness by Professor Theakston.
The concept of an overall assessment of Churchill through the prism of his performance in one area is where the hobby horse biographer like Proffesor Theakston all too often struggles. Mapping Churchill’s travels through the British constitution is like trying to map his train journeys; in a long life he seemed to go almost everywhere, with neither plan nor predilection easy to distinguish amongst the sheer volume of data. The trick is to use the data available to illuminate an aspect of Churchill’s character, and in this aspect Theakston fails.
The kindness Theakston shows about Churchill’s ratting and re-ratting on his party looks less like an acceptance of the different mores of another time, and more like an affection for Churchill that blunts Theakston’s analytical faculties. The British constitution was a side show in Churchill’s life, always distilled and distorted through the unformed but ever present prejudices that made Churchill both decisive and fallible. That he loved aspects of the constitution is not evidence that he believed in or thought about it as a whole.
Professor Theakston’s measured tone leaves me, as a reader, unsure of how strongly the author actually feels about Churchill’s unprincipled or inconsistent behaviour. If Churchill indulged himself in violent rhetoric about Ulster in 1914 in order to bolster his position in his party, as the author suggests, what does that say about his character, that he was willing to risk inflaming the situation in Ulster for personal advantage?
Ulster of course is a unique case in British politics where sharper minds than Churchill’s have faltered or failed.
The acid test for Professor Theakston is how he reacts as Churchill shifts from supporting House of Lords reform to opposing it, or from opposing plural voting to supporting it. Alas, the truth is that this is again the academic that did not make a sound in the night, neither barking nor remarking on the incongruous realities of the situation.
There is a small flaw with the concept of the book as well. Professor Theakston has grouped his account thematically, rejecting the single strand chronology of biographical convention for a series of overlapping chronologies. As a way of building to a single masterly summation of Churchill it would have been an artful concept; as it is the conclusion is so reliant on others’ views of Churchill, so measured, and so unrelelentingly kind that I was left feeling as if I had been led by the hand through a set of lecture notes by an astute and genial tutor.
None of these are major flaws, if I found the footnotes sometimes unhelpful and the absence of a bibliography a little jarring in a book that is going to primarily be of interest to students and academics they are minor obstacles to enjoyment too. A greater detraction from the enjoyment of the book is Professor Theakston’s tone; always measured, his words chosen with care to reflect no obvious prejudice other than a kindly affection for a man, Manny Shinwell, called one of the great institutions of British life. Odd too, that while quoting Shinwell he did not note Shinwell’s own comments in his appraisal of Churchill: “We have in out time paid one another compliments and hurled our invective.
When the Churchillian periods were honeyed I have on occasion suspected the political motive behind them.” (Manny Shinwell Lead With the Left, Cassell Ltd 1981, p.118)
Even Shinwell, a self confessed admirer of Churchill, suspected him of speaking for effect rather than out of genuine feeling. Nothing in professor Theakston’s careful and studied work persuaded me that he had adequately addressed those accusations about Churchill’s opportunism, even when the evidence stared him in the face. That opinion of mine, however, should not stop anyone needing to know about Churchill’s many and varied opinions about the constitution from consulting this book.