September 11, 2013

Finest Hour 104, Autumn 1999

Page 08

The Observer (London) of October 31st carried a front page article arguing that Heathrow Airport should be renamed for Churchill. Auberon Waugh replied in the Daily Telegraph that “the collapsing leftwing former intelligentsia” are hoping “to discredit Churchill, our last great Englishman, by equating him with the ugliest, dirtiest and most inefficient corner of modern Britain. The least we can do is to organize a campaign against this shoddy proposal. Between campaigning and counter-campaigning, we will all have found something to do”….On November 2nd the Paris Churchill Statue (FH 101, p. 5) had its hands daubed with red paint and the words “Mers el Kebir, 1300 killed” scrawled on it, referring to the British fleet bombardment of French vessels in the Algerian port during WW2. The French government had already surrendered when the incident took place in July 1940 and there were fears their fleet could fall into German hands. The statue was vandalised with Franco-British relations at a new low because of the row over the French ban on British beef. Responding to this matter on the Churchill Center e-mail discussion group, Dr. Robert Caputi wrote: “The silver lining, of course, is that some French are reading their own history. I’d skip the chapters on 1940 if I were a Parisian”….Elsewhere in the City of Light, Churchill is still riding high. Robert Hardy, the “All Creatures Great and Small” actor who cornered the market on Winston Churchill roles (and won an ICSICC Honorary Membership for accuracy) plays WSC opposite de Gaulle in a fin de siecle special inspired by the French Government, which runs through February. As he has since the 1990 Churchill Conference in San Francisco, Hardy suggested Sir Anthony Hopkins play Churchill. Hopkins wasn’t interested and, as far as we are concerned, history is the winner. Why trade a sure thing for a dark horse? Official biographer of Winston Churchill, longtime ICS/CC Honorary Member Sir Martin Gilbert has joined the Claremont Institute as a Distinguished Fellow, giving lectures at Claremont gatherings annually. Claremont President Larry Arnn first learned of the work of Gilbert “while several of us were graduate students under Sir Martin’s longtime friend, Professor Harry Jaffa. It was my privilege to help with his work on the official biography in Oxford for three years. From this long acquaintance we know Sir Martin to set the highest standards of accuracy, proportion, and justice in his monumental work.” More details on Claremont‘s website, or its home page. Kenneth Lake of Loughton, Essex tells the Daily Telegraph (October 11th) that currently fashionable non-confrontational politics are un-English: Harold Macmillan said of Anthony Eden: “He is forever poised between a cliche and an indiscretion.” Clement Attlee described Churchill as “fifty percent genius, fifty percent bloody fool”; Churchill called Attlee “a sheep in sheep’s clothing” and “a modest man who has much to be modest about.” Churchill also demolished the Baldwin Government as being “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent,” while Baldwin put Lloyd George in his place: “He spent his whole life plastering together the true and the false, and therefore manufacturing the plausible.” Good British invective goes back at least to Benjamin Disraeli, when he said that Robert Peel was “the arch-mediocrity who presides, rather than rules, over a cabinet of mediocrities…peremptory in the little questions, the great ones he left open.” Says Mr. Lake: “You don’t get epigrams like that nowadays.” You don’t? What about Tony Blair on the Tories: “the Party of Pinochet, foxhunting and hereditary peers: the indefensible, the inedible, the unelectable.” And (after the rejected Test Ban Treaty), Bill Clinton on the Republicans: “recklessly partisan isolationists betting our children’s future.” And the Republicans, fighting back: “naive leftist ideologues compromising national security in search of a legacy other than scandal.” Not bad!