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Best of the Spectator

Churchill: Andrew Roberts in conversation with Robert Tombs

Best of the Spectator

The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4785 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2018

⏱️ 70 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A Spectator event with Andrew Roberts, author of a new Churchill biography, interviewed by Prof Robert Tombs. Tue 9 October, 7pm, at the Emmanuel Centre, Westminster.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Well, Andrew, you had an introduction, but you are, of course, one of our leading historians,

0:18.0

one of our leading historical biographers. You talked to everyone who'd ever come across Churchill, it seemed, and who's still alive,

0:24.6

and you went to all the places he went to.

0:26.6

And you used new documents.

0:28.6

So what have these told you that you didn't already know?

0:32.6

Well, one of the reasons that I went to all these places is that my wife loves holidays.

0:41.1

And so it gave us a wonderful excuse to go all sorts of places around the world because Churchill

0:46.3

was a great traveller and went around the world a lot. But with regard to the documentary sources,

0:51.9

I was tremendously, I'd love to pretend that it was archival

0:55.7

genius, but actually it was very largely just pure luck, that the Queen allowed me to be

1:03.4

the first Churchill biographer to work on her father's diaries.

1:09.0

And the wonderful thing was that King George the 6th and Winston Churchill,

1:13.4

although they didn't get on very much right at the beginning because, of course, Churchill

1:17.8

had supported his elder brother, King Edward VIII, and in the abdication crisis. And also, the

1:27.3

king didn't really trust Churchill

1:29.3

because of any number of reasons to do with Churchill's career.

1:34.3

And it was also very much a supporter of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement.

1:41.3

And so they could have failed to get on, but even by the end of the fall of France,

1:48.0

before the Battle of Britain, they became friends, a word used by the king. And the great thing was

1:58.0

that after September 1940, they sat down and had lunch together every

2:04.2

single Tuesday of the rest of the war, and Churchill completely trusted the king.

2:11.9

He knew that he was one of the only people in public life who wasn't after his job. And he trusted the king and liked him and trusted him with the ultra secrets, with the nuclear

...

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