A POLITICAL and literary life of such extraordinary longevity, variety and richness of vocabulary leaves anyone seeking a consistent theme among any of Winston Churchill’s verbal puddings with a bowlful of paradox. The conduct of the premiership and the management of cabinet government are no exceptions. Among the papers his no. 10 private office produced for Harold Macmillan in the summer of 1960 when his appointment of a peer (Alec Home) to the foreign secretaryship led to accusations of excessive prime ministerialism, is a Hansard extract for 1938 in which Churchill defends the appointment by Chamberlain of Lord Halifax to the same post on the grounds that the prime minister sat in the House of Commons. ‘What is the point of crying out for the moon’, Churchill inquired of the Lower House, ‘when you have the sun and you have that bright orb of day from whose effulgent beams the lesser luminaries drive their radiance?’ And his most famous characterisation of the premiership seems to treat it as a post of licensed overmightiness. ‘The loyalties’, he declared in his war memoirs, ‘which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed’ – a case, to adopt a phrase of John Ramsden’s, of ‘autocracy tempered by assassination’.