Would your party pass the 'Gove Test’?
Lockdown has been generally good for authors in terms of book sales, but the closure of archives and libraries for research has been a problem
Andrew Roberts
Andrew Roberts sits in the House of Lords as Lord Roberts of Belgravia
Thursday
Would your party pass the 'Gove Test’?
I’m on a book tour which involves 65 speeches in 60 days in Britain, Washington, Philadelphia, Virginia, Mexico, California and New York. I suspect the second part will be tougher than the first, as Americans understandably hold a less charitable view of King George III. I’m a lot kinder about their Founding Fathers than the
Thursday
Churchill as villain – but is this a character assassination too far?
The veteran journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft claims in his prologue to Churchill’s Shadow that: ‘This is not a hostile account, or not by intention, nor consciously “revisionist”, or contrarian,’ before launching into a long book that is virtually uninterrupted in its hostility to Winston Churchill, his memory and especially anyone who has had the temerity to
Wednesday
History may hold the secrets of statecraft – but not the secrets of business leadership
‘How can one person lead one hundred?’ That was one of the questions in my Cambridge entrance exams back in 1981, and although I can’t now recall whether I tried to answer it in the three hours we were given, it has fascinated me ever since. So when I was given the splendid opportunity of
Thursday
Diary – 7 March 2019
John McDonnell might think Churchill a villain, but he’s beloved in America. I’ve just returned from a ten-week, 18-state, 27-city, 87-speech book tour there, and can report that the enthusiasm for all things Churchillian in the USA is stronger now than at any time since his death. Merely bringing out a new biography of him
Thursday
Diary – 11 October 2018
I’m giving 93 speeches over the next four months to promote my new book, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, but I don’t actually like public speaking. I enjoy it once it’s over, but not while it’s happening. I envy those writers of the 1970s who just got on with writing the next book as soon as
Wednesday
Scott Kelly was foolish to apologise for quoting Winston Churchill
This week, an astronaut called Scott Kelly was quoting Churchill and his great line, ‘in victory, magnanimity’. He got massively trolled by the anti-Churchill cyber warriors who denounced him for all sorts of things. One of the things for which he was attacked, of course, was the Bengal famine, which they say he caused. In
Thursday
Napoleon dynamite | 14 June 2018
The Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides in Paris has a new exhibition that I believe to be the best and most extensive on the Emperor in three decades. Anyone interested in Napoleon Bonaparte, early 19th-century military history and strategy, the Grande Armée’s campaigns from 1796 to 1815, monumental battle paintings, First Empire beaux-arts, uniforms,
Sunday
Churchill did not have an affair – so don’t fall for Channel 4’s spin
‘Revealed,’ blares the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Churchill’s secret affair and the painting that could have damaged his reputation.’ ‘Winston Churchill’s secret love Doris Castlerosse a blackmail risk,’ agrees The Sunday Times. At least the Daily Mail inserted a note of doubt in its headline – ‘Churchill may have cheated with society’s wildest woman’ – and included
Thursday
With Europe, but not of it
Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard and is an excellent writer. In trying to persuade us that Churchill favoured Britain joining a federal Europe, however, he comes up against several immovable obstacles. The most serious of these is that in the
Thursday
A tough act to follow
Gary Oldman has joined a long list of actors who have portrayed Winston Churchill — no fewer than 35 of them in movies and 28 on television. He is one of the best three. ‘I knew I didn’t look like him,’ Oldman has said. ‘I thought that with some work I could approximate the voice.
Thursday
National Army Museum
I used to love the National Army Museum in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, which was crammed with the memorabilia of four centuries of the British Army. I even visited it on the morning of my wedding. It taught you about the history of the British Army in a completely non-political way, allowing the objects —
Thursday
Jaipur Notebook
Did Winston Churchill, like Donald Trump, also like to ‘grab them by the pussy?’ Last week at the Jaipur Literary Festival, I was on a panel discussion entitled ‘Churchill: Hero or Villain?’, where the Indian biographer Shrabani Basu told a large crowd that at a suffragettes’ demonstration outside Parliament in November 1910, Churchill, then home
Thursday
Dear Mary: I’m addicted to Gogglebox
From Andrew Roberts Q. My wife and I are addicted to the brilliant TV series Gogglebox, which makes us feel proud to be British. We know two of the people who appear on it socially and might be meeting them in the new year. How can we show our appreciation of their superb, hilarious and
Saturday
Fidel Castro was a cruel dictator. Ignore the revisionists
Why are left-wing dictators always treated with more reverential respect when they die than right-wing ones, even on the Right? The deaths of dictators like Franco, Pinochet, Somoza are rightly noted with their history of human rights abuses front and centre, but the same treatment is not meted out to left-wing dictators who were just
Monday
The National Portrait Gallery has never had a proper Wellington. Now it has the chance
For some inexplicable reason the National Portrait Gallery, of which I am a trustee, doesn’t have a significant portrait of the Duke of Wellington. There’s one rather stiff picture in oil by Robert Home from when he was a young soldier in India and a few watercolours of him in retirement, but weirdly none at
Thursday
Has Jeremy Corbyn rebelled against himself and voted Leave?
How do you think Jeremy Corbyn voted in the privacy of the booth? Might he have kept his 100 per cent record of rebellion by even rebelling against himself, and voting Leave in line with his long-held anti-EU beliefs? It won’t be long before politicians start tweeting selfies with their ballot papers; a ghastly development,
Wednesday
Diary – 22 June 2016
It was a nice touch that MPs sat in each other’s seats in the Commons during the tributes to Jo Cox on Monday. I hope it helped remind Tories where they’ll be sitting permanently after 2020 if they don’t bind the party’s wounds on Friday. If Remain wins, then everyone must coalesce around David Cameron;
Tuesday
‘Sell everything’ – here’s the incendiary RBS warning on deflation, risk and the next crash
The advice of Andrew Roberts, head of European Economics at RBS, has today gone around the world: its time to sell, ahead of a stock market crash. The RBS European rates research team said that things all “looks similar to 2008.” It seems to cap a bearish round of forecasts: Standard & Poor’s, the credit ratings agency, has more companies on
Wednesday
Where will David Cameron end up in the history of Conservative Prime Ministers?
At a large Tory breakfast meeting that David Cameron spoke to recently, the tables were named after all of the Conservative premiers of the past: the good, the bad and Ted Heath. So there were the Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher tables, for example. (I was delighted to be on the Winston Churchill
