Transcription
[Music] Just weeks after the war in Europe had been won, Winston Churchill was fighting another battle to be elected prime minister. He was confident of victory. Just reward, he thought, for his leadership of the country during the war. But what happened next, many still can't understand.
[Music] [Applause] In one of the greatest election defeats of all time, Churchill was humiliated at the polls, his Conservative Party all but annihilated. Why had the British people turned so viciously on their great war leader? Churchill was a sublime, supreme war leader, but in other respects, he was wrong about an enormous number of things.
"There's no great man with capital letters without a dark side. And Churchill certainly had his."
"My dad was a queen and country man, you know, the queen, God bless her, and all of that. Uh, stood up for God Save the Queen and all the rest of it. Hated Churchill. Hated Church with a passion."
Today, Churchill is often revered as our greatest Briton. But to many in the electorate of 1945, he was a figure of hate and controversy. This film reveals how he divided opinion back then and can still do so to this day. What he did for Britain and the cause of civilization. This was a a staggering, awesome historic achievement.
"If there had not been the Second World War, he would have been a second-rate politician."
"And it reveals a Churchill that is not so familiar to our modern eyes."
"One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. We never forgot the role that this man played. Never mind the way that history's been recrafted to try and make this man into a popular hero of the people. He never was."
[Music] In 1945, Britain tried to pick up the pieces after the most devastating war in its history.
"The ordinary people of Britain had been through six very hard years, either fighting, helping the war effort, helping in war production, being bombed, having restrictions, and they wanted a change. They wanted an end to war and a different peace."
With the huge celebrations to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany, grateful crowds cheered their hero Churchill on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. But along with the relief that war was finally over, there was a new political radicalism in the air. People had been through so much. I mean, blood, sweat, and tears right enough. Utter destruction. And now there was a a feeling that things had to change and change for good.
"Two weeks later, sensing the public mood, the Labour Party forced Churchill and the Conservatives into a snap general election, the first in 10 years. Under the leadership of Clement Atlee, it promised far-reaching social reforms, including a welfare state and a national health service. While the Conservatives hoped Churchill, the war leader, would prove the winning ticket, it was a serious miscalculation."
"The Conservative Party um were on the wrong note for the way people were thinking. Churchill's portrait may well have been all right for wartime, but being used as an election poster in 1945, people said, 'Oh, hello. He's in a warlike mood again.' Whereas all the posters of Clement Atlee that I remember portrayed him as an affable sort of chap with a pipe and you can trust Mr. Atlee's sort of thing. And I think that that image fitted more with the way people were thinking."
"The election slogan of the Conservatives tells us it all. I think who wanted him to finish the job. What did that mean? Whereas the Labour Party under Clement Atlee, their slogan was, 'Let's face the future.' And that's what people wanted to do. They wanted to face the future."
[Music] "Tired and exhausted from the war, Churchill had hoped he could delay this election, at least until victory in the Pacific had been won."
"Don't you see? I'm a very busy man. I need to get on with my work."
His doctor and close confidant, Lord Moran, kept a personal diary.
"How have you been feeling?"
His thoughts turned wearily to the election. To have had arbitrary powers for 5 years, to speak for Britain without anybody's leave or question, and then to wait cap in hand on the doorstep irks him.
"Well, goodbye. I'll see you tomorrow."
"Goodbye, my friend."
At the start of the war, Churchill didn't have to woo the electorate. He'd been offered the job of prime minister. And when he had stood for elections in the past, he hadn't had much success. He came from an aristocratic background. Could he now appeal to the majority working-class electorate? A concern that his wife, Clementine, raised with Lord Moran.
"I don't suppose you realize, Charles, he knows nothing of the lives of ordinary people. He's never been on a bus. He's only been on the underground once, and that was during the general strike. I deposited him at South Kensington, and he went round and round and round, not knowing where to get out. He had to be rescued eventually."
Churchill from beginning to end took a view of the industrial working class of that of a Victorian aristocrat. He thought their rightful place was in the servants' wing. He didn't really think of them as people quite on the same planet as himself. There was a chap who who brought him his his tea in bed. Uh, there was a chap who would clean his shoes. He was fine with the working class when it doffed its cap, was deferential, and voted Liberal or Tory. What he objected to was the idea of the working class having ideas of its own and demands of its own.
"Churchill represented in that election a return to the status quo, a return to the aristocracy, the rich being rich, the poor being poor. The workers would go back to the forelock-tipping days. No, people weren't going to have that. People hadn't fought a world war for that. People wanted change, and Churchill didn't represent that. Above all, the working class didn't want to return to the rat-infested slums and unemployment of the '20s and '30s."
[Music] Many held Winston Churchill responsible. His policies as Chancellor had led to a disastrous economic collapse and a long recession.
[Music] "We should never forget that there was a substantial section of the country, of the industrial working class, who remained deeply bitter, deeply alienated by their experiences in the depression, and they hated Tories almost as much as they were told they ought to hate Hitler."
[Music] Now, Labour hoped to mobilize this widespread disenchantment under the leadership of the mild-mannered Clement Attlee.
"I like that one."
"Thank you so much."
Churchill had allegedly ridiculed him, saying he was a modest man with a lot to be modest about.
"But while Attlee appeared the suburban bank manager,"
"He was made of tougher stuff."
"And his party's socialist agenda caught the public mood"
"For the future, for prosperity. The evils that capitalism brings differs in intensity in different countries, but the remedy is seen to be the same by thoughtful men and women."
Attlee proved a highly successful deputy in Churchill's coalition government.
"The abolition of classes is fundamental to the socialist conception of society."
But now was the time Churchill calculated to remind the public of his socialist threat. With less than 5 weeks to polling day, Churchill prepared to give his first live political broadcast of the campaign.
[Music] His wife, Clementine, had urged him to reconsider what he was about to say.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the Prime Minister."
"My friends, I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Socialism is in its essence a man-attack not only upon British enterprise but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths."
Almost half the population were listening. No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo. No doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. The reaction to the broadcast was immediate. The nation was shocked to hear Churchill compare Labour to the Gestapo. The government's Mass Observation survey summarized the response.
"It would be very difficult to exaggerate the disappointment and genuine distress aroused by the speech."
"I could uh hardly get to sleep last night uh thinking of the PM's broadcast, which I think will do infinite harm to his own reputation."
Few understood how Churchill could so viciously attack colleagues with whom he'd shared government just a few weeks earlier.
"Everybody who heard that word um, even his own supporters, was stunned and shocked. But he was a tired old man. He'd been defying gravity for years. Everybody was saying, 'Here's this old man of of 70 plus.' And who can be surprised?"
[Music] Soon dubbed the "crazy broadcast," even Churchill's daughter Sarah was critical of her father.
"You see, the people I know that vote Labour don't vote Labour for ideals or beliefs, but simply because life has been hard for them. And they think that only by voting Labour will their daily struggle become easier. So, in that respect, the speech was a bombshell. Because they are all decent people who just want an easier and gayer life, but certainly wouldn't tolerate any form of totalitarianism."
"It was a very bad mistake for Churchill to use the word Gestapo. The Labour Party picked it up and talked about, you know, 'Are we going on with this terrible rhetoric? This is Britain. This is the victorious nation. We won the war. Let's move on.'"
The following night, Clement Attlee picked his words carefully in reply.
"When I listened to the Prime Minister's speech last night, in which he gave such a travesty of the policy of the Labour Party, I realized at once what was his object. He wanted the electors to understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr. Churchill, the party leader of the Conservatives. He feared lest those who had accepted his leadership in war might be tempted out of gratitude to follow him further. I thank him for having disillusioned them so thoroughly."
"Attlee, the poor Clem of the warriors, did his speech tonight and did it well. It is clear that the PM is on the wrong tack. For the first time, the thought went through my head that he may lose the election."
Now out on the campaign trail, Attlee was quick to draw the distinction between himself, man of the people, and Churchill, the patrician.
"My wife drove me in her own car, our rather unostentious method of travel, contrasted with the elaborate procession which accompanied Churchill on his journey."
Attlee knew to win the election, he must draw the debate onto Churchill's weak point: the reconstruction of postwar Britain. Throughout the war, Churchill thought of only one thing: how to defeat Hitler, how to destroy the Nazis. Nothing else. Whenever cabinet colleagues came to him and said, "Let's talk about postwar reconstruction. What happened?" He wasn't interested. Didn't want to go there.
"He was useless as a social reformer, domestic prime minister. Uh, he completely ignored all uh of the domestic reforms which actually were developing even under his own government at that particular stage."
During the war, William Beveridge, economist and social reformer, had published a popular report. It proposed that everybody, regardless of class, should be cared for by the state from cradle to grave. It was known as the Beveridge Report. But Churchill warned against acting on its recommendations.
"The necessary thing was to win the war. We did not want a statement on any of the hotly disputed things in domestic affairs. Then it was going to be difficult after the war not to avoid a breach on things like property and socialism."
He didn't really share the aspirations of people who had had very little during the war, who actually wanted a a new and different life, places to live, bathrooms in the home. And Churchill, whether it was because he was well off, whether it was because he was cocooned by his cery, uh, whether whether it was just because he didn't really have the imagination, was not a man of domestic peace.
If Churchill couldn't satisfy the electorate's demands for the future, maybe he could appeal to his own prophetic past. Before the war, Churchill was one of the few Conservatives to denounce the Nazi threat, fiercely condemning the then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who thought Hitler was making reasonable demands.
"I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should fall into the hands of the present rulers of Germany."
He was absolutely right that appeasement was bound to fail. That you could not hope to do anything with Hitler except sooner or later fight him. Germany is arming. She is rapidly arming, and no one will stop her. He could see that the whole notion of appeasement uh was based on completely false assumptions, uh, that Hitler could be trusted, that promises that he would not uh take over any other countries or anything like that was simply never to be believed.
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last."
But Churchill's anti-appeasement speeches had been made during his wilderness years when he was out of office and shouting from the sidelines. He'd made only a single broadcast on the subject. Churchill and the BBC never got on. So how important had been Churchill's role in defying Hitler before the war?
"The answer is, not very. It is only in retrospect, when Churchill writes the history, that he is at the center of it. I think Churchill's role in the 1930s is much exaggerated. It was Chamberlain, not Churchill, who introduced the big defense budgets in the mid-1930s. And it was Chamberlain who realized by 1939 the need to accelerate rearmament and the possibility of war. I think that that Churchill's role has always been presented as the opposite of Chamberlain. Actually, Chamberlain is not as different from Churchill as one might expect."
Thank you, Prime Minister.
Churchill hoped his legendary powers of oratory would unite the electorate behind him, as they appeared to have united the nation at the height of the war. But a second broadcast on the dangers of socialism fizzled out.
"He is very low, poor darling. He thinks he has lost his touch and grieves about it. He doesn't realize that after each broadcast, he's lost ground. Miss Watson, one of the staff at Number 10, met me in the passage. She thinks that neither of the two broadcasts is the true PM. There was no vim in them. You know, Lord Moran, she said his heart isn't in this election."
The '45 election broadcasts were lackluster in comparison to his electric performances of the war.
"Out goes that famous square bowler in salute."
Today, many consider those speeches as the greatest ever delivered by a British politician, giving the country the confidence to go on fighting when all seemed lost.
"What's that infernal noise?"
"I think it's the clock, Prime Minister."
"Well, stop it. Sounds like bloody jackboots. And I will not have them marching in Downing Street."
Churchill succeeded in rousing the British people to an appreciation of their own destiny, which only he with that extraordinary rhetoric and oratory could have done.
"I fear, I fear greatly, the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar."
"What he did was something um history has never seen before, and maybe we'll never see again."
"We shall not fail or falter. We shall not weaken or tire. Ever louder."
From 1940 to '42, Churchill made five key speeches which are now considered his finest. But how were they received back then?
"I remember the family used to go hush. Everybody kept silent while he was speaking on the radio, as if we put him off his stroke or something."
"Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."
"And he, he, he mentioned the young RAF pilots who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger. I remember that hit a note with my grandmother and uh youngest aunt. I remember them being in tears at the end of that broadcast. But I don't, I can't recall people in general being terribly impressed by his broadcast. 'Oh, is Churchill on again?'"
"Of every home in our island, in our working-class people. Perhaps it, perhaps it sounded old-fashioned and historic and almost Shakespearean, if you like that kind of vocabulary."
For some, even the way Churchill delivered the speeches provoked more skepticism than inspiration.
"I don't buy the idea that he was a great orator that that kept the the country together. I think most people saw him as a kind of a Boris Johnson kind of a character, a kind of a a buffoon. And incidentally, something I've never ever got away with these these um bunker speeches that he made during the. He's obviously pissed out of his head, and everybody listening to the radio knew he was pissed up."
Often the speeches were delivered first in the House of Commons, then broadcast later to the nation. This was the case with one of Churchill's most famous, his "Finest Hour" speech.
"Please wait, Prime Minister, for the bongs of Big Ben, and then you'll be introduced by the announcer."
"Why Big Ben? I am speaking. The world is waiting for me, not Big Ben."
This is the recording from that night.
[Music] "The disastrous military events which have happened in France during the last fortnight have not come to me with any sense of surprise. Indeed, I told the House of Commons, as you may remember, uh, almost exactly a fortnight ago, that the worst possibilities were open. And I made it perfectly clear that whatever happened in France would make no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on."
"We had the impression that Mr. Churchill died a little too well last evening. And I'm sure if the Germans had been listening to the wireless at 9:00 last night, they would have had a similar view."
"Men will still say this was their finest hour."
"At the time, it got a bit of a mixed reception. People liked the content, but they weren't very keen on the delivery. Some people thought that he sounded drunk, others that he was ill, others that he was simply tired."
"Churchill's oratory during the Second World War uh was certainly hit and miss. There were long speeches where people fell asleep. But I think that that one of the things that has cemented Churchill's reputation is that he is immensely quotable, like Martin Luther King, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If you want to think of sound bites from the 20th century, sound bites from history, you think of Churchill. You certainly don't think of Hitler."
But there may be another explanation for why one of Churchill's top pieces of oratory did not make such an impact with audiences back then as it does with us today.
"We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds."
Amazingly, the nation never heard Churchill actually speak these words during the war.
"Hill."
"There are many people who believe that they remember hearing Churchill deliver that broadcast on 4th June 1940. Unless they were in the House of Commons at the time, that cannot be true."
"We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing."
The only recording was in fact made 9 years later, after the war, at Churchill's Chartwell home.
"We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the land."
"One in a series recorded for posterity."
"Fight in the hills. We shall never surrender."
"A lot of his oratory was actually in the House of Commons. Um, and you know, so it would have been, as it were, secondhand. They might have read in the newspapers because of course Parliament wasn't uh broadcast in those days. So maybe we overplay his oratory a bit."
[Music] With time running out, Churchill embarked on a whirlwind tour to try and whip up support. Huge crowds turned out. And with just 3 days left to polling day, the papers seemed confident.
But not everywhere was the reception so warm.
[Applause] One venue Churchill would never forget was at Walthamstow Stadium in the East End of London.
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
"One of the spectators that day was 9-year-old Lionel King. My father came home from work one evening and he said, 'We're going up to Walthamstow Stadium. Uh, Mr. Churchill speaking.' So, I like to hear him speak in public. Anyway, enormous crowd there. I think 30,000 people. The poor chap could hardly make himself heard. And the language as well was quite vile, really. The things that were being shouted out. Towards the end, my unease and disappointment turned to outright fear."
Churchill's car was surrounded by a very angry crowd of militants who were literally beating the car with their banners.
[Music] "But what did strike me, Churchill wound down the window. He started making V signs."
[Music] "There was some kind of fight in the old guy even then. Yes. My father said, 'You're not supposed to see those.' He said, 'I remember that.'"
"Walthamstow shows something we've forgotten, which is there's a whole section of the electorate, particularly the working class, particularly the trade union electorate, that never had any time for Churchill. He thinks something like Walthamstow is simply a one-off. It's not. It's a genuine expression of a working-class revulsion for what Churchill stood for in terms of working-class politics."
[Music] The hostility between Churchill and the industrial working class had started decades earlier when Churchill had fought bitterly with dockers, miners, and the TUs.
"In the Tyneside pit villages, you don't get stories of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You get Churchill and the 1926 strike, 'cause we learn from the cradle, you know, how much I mean, the man was almost in folk legend."
[Music] Following a lockout of 800,000 coal miners in May 1926, the TUs called a general strike.
"We are at war," Churchill declared. And he fought the strike like one, demanding the TUs unconditionally surrender.
"My dad and me granddad were both on strike. People literally starved. I mean, Churchill's role in 1926 was one of extreme provocation, um, dispatching armed troops, tanks, armored cars. His intention was to smash the labour movement, break the organized labour, and in particularly break the power of the miners, the miners' union."
"There was never the slightest possibility that Winston Churchill and Britain's miners were going to understand each other. Churchill had always thought that the mining communities of Britain were hotbeds of revolution and sedition. And he wasn't entirely wrong, that by his standards, uh, these were very left-wing uh communities indeed."
This was not the first confrontation between Churchill and the miners. They'd clashed way back before the First World War when Churchill was Home Secretary. In 1910, following brutal skirmishes between miners and the police in the coalfields of the Rhondda Valley, Churchill ordered in armed troops, though he refused to allow them to be used as strike breakers. Clashes with police led to the death of a miner in Tonypandy town square. The conflict between Churchill and the working class did not heal, with each side holding the other in mutual contempt.
"I remember one thing in particular that he's credited with was saying that he would drive the miners back down their holes like rats. You know, whether that's real or purely legendary, I don't know. We believed it was true. So those were the kind, those are the kind of uh, the kinds of stories we were brought up with."
"He found it incomprehensible in the Second World War that miners in quite large numbers went on strike frequently in support of demands that uh frequently seemed completely unreasonable. But several inquiries found that these men had been so alienated by their experiences in the first 40 years of the century that they just couldn't identify with Churchill's war. And equally, Churchill couldn't bring himself to have the smallest sympathy with their demands when, to him, how could you possibly start demanding another two shillings a shift um when we're trying to defeat Hitler?"
"I think the popular perception of Churchill among working men was he didn't give a toss about them, that, you know, he just wanted to impose that the government knew best, and that anything that was organized opposition, he never recognized their proper demands and their proper needs, and anything that um was organized opposition was traitorous."
[Music] Just 2 days after Churchill had been cheered at Walthamstow, it was polling day. But the result would not be known for another 3 weeks. It would take that long to poll the armed forces still fighting overseas.
[Music] With the delay, Churchill flew to Bordeaux with his wife Clementine, his doctor, Lord Moran, and his daughter Mary.
"He is much worn and battered by the election. He feels the attack so deeply, so intensely. We all await the results with impatience and anxiety. I hope he'll be returned. Although it will be a bitter journey's end. So much can go wrong."
[Music] The mystery of the ballot boxes and their contents had an ugly habit of knocking at the door and peering in at the windows. Their mystery would soon be revealed. But would the servicemen and women shortly to return to civilian life want their wartime chief or a different style of leadership for the peace? Most shared our modern view that it was Churchill's single-mindedness and determination that had helped win the war.
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
[Music] "I'm one of those who believes that if Churchill had not been there in the summer of 1940, that any other credible leader of Britain would have made a deal with Hitler on the best terms he could, because rationally, Britain had absolutely no hope of victory. And Churchill alone saw with this extraordinary clarity that the Nazis represent an evil so absolute that we must bite on, even if there was no reasonable hope of success."
"Thousand times you can't have them. Why do you keep asking?"
"Well, I ask because it's required. We need them."
"Yes, we need."
But the widely held view of Churchill as resolute leader of the nation,
"We're going to get them from."
"Is contradicted by his Chief of Staff."
"Do we hell? Yes, we do. Spare capacity where? Show me. Show me."
One of Churchill's closest military advisers, Chief of the Imperial Staff, Lord Alanbrooke, kept a daily diary.
[Music] "All right, gentlemen."
"At 10 p.m., we had a frightful meeting with Winston, which came to an end at 2:00 a.m. It was quite the worst that we've had with him. He was very tired after his speech at the House concerning the flying bombs. He tried to recuperate with drink. As a result, he was in a mlin, bad-tempered, drunken mood."
"Well, that's just the thing that Stalin wants."
"Ready to take offense at anything and suspicious of everybody."
"That's not good enough."
"We're working flat out. There's nothing more that we can do."
"Poppycock."
"Fortunately, he finished by falling out with Attlee and having a real good row with him."
"We withdrew undercover of this smoke screen, having accomplished nothing beyond losing our tempers and valuable sleep."
"One of the things about George [Churchill] is that that he he seldom seems to doubt the rightness of his cause. Once he's wedded himself to an idea, he really does think that that that he's right and the people around him are are wrong, and that when he's made to change his mind, he does so of course with extremely ill temper. By you. And I think in that sense he was extremely fortunate in having General Alan Brooke as the abominable no-man who just keeps having to say no. It took a lot of guts to say no to Churchill, and the country owes a great debt of gratitude to Alan Brooke for doing so."
"Why is that?"
"Well, we can only do what we can do, sir."
"If we do it better,"
"I don't think I can stand much more of it."
"We waffled about with all the usual criticisms, all the usual optimists' plans, no long-term vision, and we settled nothing. In all his plans, he lives from hand to mouth. He can never grasp a whole plan. His method is entirely opportunist. Gathering one flower here, another there. Oh my god, how tired I am of working for him."
"One of Churchill's great flaws was uh, he did have a magpie mind when it came to military affairs. He was always looking at one uh field, one uh theater of war, and another uh, without actually prioritizing."
"He was very obsessive. When he got an idea in his mind, he would doggedly stick to it and pursue it, even if most of those, or indeed all of those around him, insisted that the idea was absolutely crazy. And the wonderful thing is that three-quarters of the world's population imagines that Winston Churchill is one of the strategists of history. A second Marlborough. And the other quarter have no conception of what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war."
Churchill's absolute single-mindedness in pursuit of victory was one of his huge strengths in the Second World War. He understood that one had to fight and fight and fight. The Chiefs of Staff will always find excuses not to fight, and some of them were quite good excuses. But Churchill understood that there is only one way to win wars, and you've got to get out there and you've got to engage the enemy.
[Music] Resuming his role as international statesman, Churchill flew to Berlin to continue the Potsdam Conference. There he met President Truman for the first time. Stalin he knew well. Their objective: to discuss the war in Japan and the future of Europe. For Churchill, though, the most pressing concern now was the future of the British Empire, under threat in the face of a new world order.
"When Churchill was leading Britain in the Second World War, he believed very much, I think, in restoring British rule in India, Burma, um, and other possessions. Um, this, of course, was a major mistake. Um, he failed to understand, in fact, that the Second World War was really bringing and accelerating the end of empire and the whole concept of colonialism."
Churchill considered one of the greatest threats to his colonial project was the call for Indian independence. But his preoccupation with matters of empire was out of sync with an electorate desperate for reform at home, and who'd not shared his hatred of the civil disobedience leader Mahatma Gandhi.
"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a kind well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace while he is still organizing and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience to parley on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King."
"Younger, more progressive Conservatives had been horrified by the language that he used about Gandhi and his really nasty attitude towards uh greater governance for India, and they want nothing to do with him because he is seen as, if you like, the equivalent of Nigel Farage. And we forget, because of the myth, that that's really how Churchill was regarded by many in his own party in the 1930s, someone so far to the right that the next stop was Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts."
"He did not include black and brown people in his vision of freedom and human rights. He was almost um primeval in his approach to um uh Indian and African peoples. He thought the empire would and could go on forever. And in that respect, uh, he was a man of his time. He was a man of the 19th century, not the 20th century."
"I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, um, higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
So important was the preservation of empire to Churchill. Some argued that this had been the reason why he'd wanted to defeat Hitler.
"I think during the Second World War, there was a big difference in the way Churchill viewed the purposes of the war and the way in which the wider British public perceived it."
"Churchill is not fighting a war against fascism. In fact, a lot of Churchill's ideas in the 1930s had been rather rather sympathetic to fascism. He admired Mussolini. He admired Franco. Um, and at least until 1938, he'd he'd said obliging things about Hitler as well."
"One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."
Far from the the popular myth that Churchill was regarded as a great war hero and a great defender of democracy and freedom, his role during the rise of fascism across Europe, in Spain, in Italy, and and in Germany, was loathsome. It was one of supporting the rise of fascist tyrannies because he seen communism and socialism as the enemy of his class, and he seen fascism as its ally.
[Music] Churchill had also taken Attlee to Potsdam, just in case a Labour victory meant that he would be the one to return to the next round of the conference. Not that that looked likely. The Daily Express was predicting a 100-seat majority for the Conservatives.
"I think we were all feeling soberly confident that Papa would return on the 27th with a workable majority. Our farewells at Potsdam were therefore of a light-hearted and and very au revoir nature. Little did we then guess what lay within the sealed ballot boxes."
But Churchill was haunted by the possibility of defeat. On the eve of the election, he had a premonition which he told to his doctor, Lord Moran.
"I dreamed that life was over. I saw it was very vivid. My dead body under a white sheet on a table in an empty room. I recognized my bare feet projecting from under the sheet. It was very lifelike. Perhaps this is the end."
"Prime Minister. Sir, we have the results of the first 10 seats, and they've gone to Labour. Sir, come in and fix me my towel."
Mary and Clementine drove to Churchill's Woodford constituency to hear the result.
"Mommy and I drove down to the constituency and were admitted to the count here. The first inkling of a setback occurred."
[Music] Out of respect for his war record, no other party had fielded a candidate against Churchill.
"Ladies and gentlemen,"
But just before nominations had closed, an independent candidate, Alexander Hancock, had entered the race. Hancock had eccentric ideas about a philosophical community, with much of his manifesto written in poetry.
"Alexander Hancock, independent, 10,488 votes. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Conservative, 27,688 votes."
Churchill had won. But despite being a complete outsider, Hancock had collected over a quarter of the vote.
"A guy collects 10,000 votes. That I think is an index of how far whole groups of the electorate simply did not believe that just because Churchill had won the war, they should vote for him. Doesn't mean they weren't grateful to him for winning the war, but it really means that they wanted to say, 'Thank you and good night, Mr. Churchill.'"
"This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news. The general election. So far, the results have been"
By 1 p.m., the result was clear, and the BBC confirmed a Labour landslide.
"The sweeping victories throughout the country marked an epoch in the political life of this country. Never before have the electors shown so clearly their desire that there should be a Labour government carrying out Labour's full policy."
Labour had gained 239 seats. The Conservatives had lost 190.
"I certainly expected that the election figures would leave me a reasonable majority. Mentally absorbed as I had been in the prosecution of the war, I did not understand what had taken place in the British Isles. Otherwise, I think I could have arranged things differently."
Churchill was completely devastated by his election defeat, and he was absolutely stunned. Suddenly to find himself rejected by the British people whom he had led to victory against all odds. This was a terrible, terrible blow, and many of those closest to him really wondered whether he would ever come back from this. It was, I think, probably the most shattering single blow of his life.
"I spoke of the ingratitude of the people."
"Oh, no," he answered at once. "I would not call it that. They've had a very hard time."
"For some time, I've had a growing disquiet that he had lost touch with the way people are thinking. But I was not prepared for this dead bark."
"But he never really understood ordinary people. He never really understood the extent to which democracy in Britain had transformed people's expectations for 20, 30 years before the Second World War. And in 1945, he was an old-fashioned figure. Most people were looking to the future. And the future was not a future that Churchill had any sympathy with."
[Music] "You know, cometh the hour, cometh the man. He was invaluable in 1940, 1941. He had many flaws. Those flaws were put to very good use in the war. He was the man of the hour, but not before then and not after then."
"I think I would describe Churchill as a flawed genius. He was not, I think, a man of great vision, not a man who could really understand where Britain might go and where Britain was going. If there had not been the Second World War, he would have been a second-rate politician. You know, he kept making mistakes. He was seen as lacking in judgment, and people, many in respects, didn't like him. They didn't trust him. But the war came, and his character defects, in a funny sort of way, became advantageous."
"Give us the tools, and we will finish the job."
"However you look at him, uh, that moment of greatness in 1940 should never be denied him. And I do believe that the British people in the 21st century will be losing something if we don't recognize, even if we don't feel comfortable with big political heroes now, that he was a vast political hero in whom we should still today take enormous pride."
"I wonder whether any historian of the future will ever be able to paint Winston in his true colors. It is a wonderful character, the most marvelous qualities and superhuman genius mixed with an an astonishing lack of vision at times. He is quite the most difficult man to work with that I've ever struck. But I should not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on earth."
[Music]