Left-wing smears against Churchill reveal the agenda of their pedlars

To say that he had flaws, or opinions most would not hold now, is to say nothing more than that he is a figure in history

Churchill’s Secret Apartheid. One’s heart sinks at another Channel 4 documentary knocking our great war leader.
The film is actually more interesting than the title might suggest. It looks mostly at the broader reactions of the British people to the arrival of a segregated American army from 1942.
To her acknowledged surprise, its presenter Nadifa Mohamed ends up finding that the British were pretty unsympathetic to segregation and disinclined to play along with it.
A good story, one might think. So why the clickbait title? Clearly it’s to pull in what Channel 4 think is their typical viewer, to gel with its editorial line, and above all to leave people with the impression that Churchill actively supported South Africa-style racial politics.
This in turn is part of the modern phenomenon of delegitimising great figures of British history in order to promote a progressive political agenda today.
Churchill is target number one in this respect. If the progressives can tarnish his iconic status, that of a great man of whom many alive today have direct knowledge, then who is safe?
That’s the point of these cheap attacks. In reality, the worst to be said of Churchill on this particular issue is that he wasn’t inclined to have a row with the Americans about it.
But he was far from sympathetic to segregation. His biographer Andrew Roberts has pointed out that the October 13 1942 War Cabinet, which Churchill chaired, concluded that “they must not expect our authorities, civil or military, to assist them in enforcing a policy of segregation” and that there must be no restriction on British bases.
Churchill was a man of his time with many of the opinions that went with that. The same could be said of the vast majority of people throughout history. The issue is whether he was anything more.
And of course he was – not just a great war leader, but a great politician, with an extraordinary breadth of military and political experience, and a great writer and wordsmith who captured the essence of what we British think, or perhaps thought, of ourselves as a people.
To say that he had flaws, or opinions most would not hold now, is to say nothing more than that he is a figure in history. What matters is what made him exceptional, not what made him typical.
Some modern historians line up more with the progressives. David Olusoga, much in evidence this Black History Month (a doubtful concept in the first place in my view), this weekend described history as an “arsenal of dangerous ideas” and argued historians should “make it more difficult for people to raid that arsenal to use it for their political projects” – that is, they should police the past to support the politics of the present.
That approach to history is deeply unsatisfactory, yet all too much of today’s historical writing is somewhat influenced by it. We can’t learn from history if we see it as a morality tale supporting a progressive world-view and focused on telling ourselves how much better we are today.
Such agenda-driven history, motivated by modern preoccupations and judgments, is not real history; and its spread will in the end devalue all historical work because none of us will be able to entirely trust what we read and watch. That’s the real danger.