From bulldog spirit to lapdog ways

Writing of Muhammed in Heroes and Hero Worship, Thomas Carlyle declared, "I mean to say all the good of him I possibly can. It's a way to get at his secret". Andrew Roberts has decided upon the opposite approach. He means to say all the bad of the "Eminent Churchillians" that he possibly can, in order to vindicate a pre-determined ideological position.

This position, never actually stated but implied throughout the book, is that Margaret Thatcher has succeeded in curing the British disease. Why was this cure not discovered earlier? To this question, Thatcherite historians offer two conflicting answers. The first, given by Maurice Cowling and John Charmley, is that Britain's great mistake was to go to war in 1939. Had we not done so, we could have remained a world power, preserved the Indian empire, and secured an honoured place for ourselves in Hitler's Europe.

The alternative answer offered by Roberts is that the "Eminent Churchillians", the characteristic figures of the age of Churchill between 1940 and 1955, men such as George VI, Lord Mountbatten and Sir Walter Monckton, were short-sighted appeasers. They both failed to recognise Britain's real enemies - Indian nationalists, trade unionists and Commonwealth immigrants - and were, in any case, too cowardly to confront them. "Instead of the innovation, industry and raw energy that had characterised the country a century earlier, Britain had come increasingly to rely upon the charm of her diplomats and politicians to draw attention away from and shore up her declining strength."

Even Churchill is not exempt from Roberts's strictures. For the arch-resister of 1940 became, according to Roberts, the prince of appeasers in the 1950s when his government failed to keep out Commonwealth immigrants and backed away from a fight with the trade unions. How is this to be explained? Roberts suggests that Churchill was too "tired" to deal with immigration, although he seems, unfortunately, to have been alert enough to insist that Monckton's conciliation of the trade unions be carried through.

What about Churchill's associates? Many of his leading colleagues in the 1951-55 administrated - men such as Eden and Macmillan, Cherwell and Salter - far from being congenital appeasers, had established their reputations through their opposition to appeasement. Eden and Macmillan indeed were, in 1956, to fall foul of the very liberal establishment which Roberts excoriates, precisely because they were willing to resort to force during the Suez crisis. Is it not somewhat fanciful to suppose that in 1951 they were suddenly terrified of the trade unions? A more plausible explanation, but one which does not seem to have occurred to Roberts, is that Churchill and Monckton genuinely believed that a consensual approach would be more likely than the confrontation of the 1920s or the 1980s to deliver shared national aims of full employment and low inflation, as indeed it did throughout the 1950s.

Roberts's creaky explanations are sustained by generous doses of the tendentious. One example is to be found in his account of the resignation of Hore-Belisha, the war secretary, in January 1940: the result, Roberts believes, of a conspiracy by George VI against his better judgement, as a result of royal pressure. He cites a letter in which the prime minister declared that Hore-Belisha "did more for the army than anyone since Haldane". But he does not quote the next sentence of the letter: "Unfortunately, he has the defects of his qualities - partly from his impatience and eagerness, partly from a self-centredness, which makes him careless of other people's feelings". Roberts seems unaware that Chamberlain's letters to his sisters indicate not high regard for Hore-Belisha but the opposite. He also seems unaware that Churchill, the hero of this part of his story, was consulted about the removal of Hore-Belisha and approved of it.

It is difficult, therefore, to explain the dismissal of Hore-Belisha either as an example of appeasement or of royal influence. By 1940, George VI had been on the throne for just three years. He was still inexperienced, and it is hardly likely that so masterful a premier as Chamberlain would have dismissed, at the king's behest, a minister who still enjoyed his confidence. In fact, Hore-Belisha's dismissal took the king by surprise, leading him to write to his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, that, although he welcomed the change, he had not expected it. This, too, is not quoted by Roberts whose account is little more than a sophisticated travesty. For a more accurate and objective picture, the reader must consult Sir Basil Liddell Hart's account in the second volume of his memoirs, a book not cited in Eminent Churchillians.

Roberts believes that George VI, an excellent sovereign from the ceremonial or, in Bagehot's terminology, the "dignified" point of view, was guilty of serious misjudgements when he ventured into the political or "efficient" field. For not only was the king, together with the vast majority of the British people, a supporter of appeasement and an opponent of Churchill before 1940, he maintained these attitudes "even after the current had changed direction". Yet Roberts's account goes no further than December 1940 and he says nothing to indicate that the king did not give Churchill his full support after that date. Nor does he succeed in refuting the generally accepted view that the relationship which eventually grew up between the king and Britain's wartime leader was, as Churchill himself put it, "without precedent since the days of Queen Anne and Marlborough during his years of power".

George VI was a sovereign who grew in stature as the years passed. By the end of his reign he had won the respect, indeed the admiration, both of Churchill and of Attlee. Michael Foot has declared that the only occasion on which he saw Attlee moved was on the announcement of the death of the king. Churchill and Attlee were tough and hard-headed politicians whose respect was not easily won. It would not have been given to a sovereign who was as obtuse as Roberts suggests. Faced with this conflict of evidence, most readers will, one suspects, be inclined to prefer the judgement of Churchill and Attlee to that of Roberts.

Eminent Churchillians is Andrew Roberts's second book. His first, a biography of Lord Halifax, was widely and justifiably praised as a profound and scholarly work. Why has he now published a book which falls so lamentably short of the high standards which he has set himself? Can it be that the legacy of Margaret Thatcher will prove as much of a blight on contemporary history as her premiership was to Britain's civic culture? Debunking is, of course, always fun, and Eminent Churchillians will yield many hours of enjoyable reading to the unregenerate Thatcherites, whether eminent or not, for whom it seems to be intended. But it has little value as a work of history.

Vernon Bogdanor is reader in government, Oxford University.