Who was Winston Churchill? In 2017 he was portrayed both as an irascible, tub-thumping, cigar-chewing maverick by Gary Oldman in the film Darkest Hour and as a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown wracked by guilt over his role in the First World War by Brian Cox in the movie Churchill. Both films are perhaps revealing of what contemporary audiences want to see; a loner who defies the establishment and a leader who develops through a redemptive arc, suffering a crisis of conscience only to have his resolve stiffened through contact with ordinary people before re-finding his voice. It makes for great drama, but it is not history.

Was Churchill a military figure who happened to have gone in for politics or was he a civilian politician with a military background? His role in the early stages of the war as first lord of the admiralty did seem to indicate that he was combining military, naval and political leadership in his own person: taking personal command at the siege of Antwerp, adopting a ‘hands-on’ style at the admiralty and blurring the distinctions between land and sea command. The problem with the Dardanelles campaign was the confusion over whether it was to be a purely naval operation or a joint military–naval one, and the blame for this confusion must lie at least in part with Churchill’s 1914 decision to bring Fisher out of retirement. Churchill’s sacking was a sharp reminder of the ultimate authority of the prime minister, while his service on the Western Front reminded him that his heart really lay in Westminster. Ultimately, he experienced the war from an astonishing range of perspectives while operating as a lone figure. The war provided an important apprenticeship for 1940–5, but it also confirmed that he was essentially a civilian politician who happened to have a strong military side.

The figure who emerges from these pages is a product of his class and age, but one who was intensely driven, hardworking and unafraid to court fame or controversy, who led from the front and relied on his own eloquence to sustain his career, fund his lifestyle and shape his legacy. He embraced technological change but there were always clear limits to his radicalism, even in the early Edwardian period, and like many he seems to have become more conservative as he got older, reacting to perceived threats to the world of his youth from socialism, communism and independence movements throughout the British Empire. The aftermath of the First World War had a profound impact, challenging many of Churchill’s certainties about British power and stability. His opposition to Indian autonomy and German expansionism shared some common roots, and both brought him much criticism at the time.

The chapter looks at Churchill’s economic ideas as a Liberal and then Conservative and their impact on his actions. Churchill was a free trader and accepted the self-correcting specie-flow mechanism of the Gold Standard. His political economy before 1914 rested on interventions to remove monopoly power and market imperfections that would allow ‘competitive selection’ by free enterprise and encourage individual responsibility. After the war, strains appeared in this coherent set of assumptions. Churchill’s tenure as chancellor was marked by creative accounting for pragmatic political reasons. He remained a devotee of sound finance and balanced budgets, and despite some reservations on the issue of the return of the Gold Standard, he could not go against the advice of Treasury officials and the Bank of England, or his own ‘deeply internalized convictions’ that coincided with their assumptions. After 1929 he took little systematic interest in economics. Churchill’s coherent political economy of free trade and the Gold Standard collapsed and he had nothing in its place.

The chapter looks at Clementine Churchill’s often neglected position as her husband’s closest advisor and greatest influence. It begins by recounting the attributes she brought to the role, including championing the role of women in wartime and offering personal ‘protection’ to Winston at times of great stress, such as the eve of the D-Day landings. Her role as a British ‘First Lady’ is explored; attending key wartime conferences, editing and rehearsing Churchill’s speeches, and managing high-level international diplomacy with de Gaulle, Roosevelt and Stalin. However, her most important role was in managing Winston, monitoring her husband’s behaviour and restraining him when the need arose. It was a role that absorbed almost all of her energy and time, leaving her little of either for herself or her family.

What is the ‘political’? What rights, prerogatives and duties turn a person into a political subject? And to what extent is a gendered order, or are other systems of hierarchies contained in the legal definition of the political subject? The right to vote immediately comes to mind as an obvious candidate for illustrating this particular dimension of political rights, for it is well-established that, historically and across a wide range of countries, the very definitions of citizenship as a legal category has been based on the exclusion of a number of categories of people. Women were of course one of these categories, but also others who failed to fit the dominant model of the rational and independent (male) individual that classical political philosophy as well as modern legal systems had consolidated and promoted by the end of the eighteenth century. While this chapter addresses the right to vote as a crucial dimension of the legal construction of ‘the political subject’, it also adopts a wider perspective. This is achieved by adding a historical dynamic to the inquiry about the scope and contours of what has come to be defined as ‘political’ activity since the end of the eighteenth century (Section 1), and by viewing subsequent developments from the conquest of suffrage to more contemporary participatory rules seeking to challenge the foundational gender order enshrined in the definition of the political subject (Section 2) through a comparative lens.

This chapter explore Churchill’s contribution to the development of the British welfare state from the moment he entered the Cabinet in 1908 to his retirement as prime minister in 1955. It begins by examining the attitudes that shaped Churchill’s approach to social policy – a strong sense of the electoral salience of welfare, a desire to promote personal responsibility and self-help and a paternalistic concern for the ‘left-out millions’ – and then traces how these views shaped his policy and rhetoric from the Edwardian period onwards. It argues that Churchill played an important role in establishing social insurance and the ‘national minimum’ as defining concepts for the British welfare state, though the meaning of these concepts became more conservative over time – a shift which echoed Churchill’s own journey from ‘new Liberal’ firebrand to stalwart Conservative. Though Churchill’s interest in social questions was sporadic by the time he became prime minister, his focus on consumption and employment chimed with the instincts of many other Britons, and helped to shape the distinctive policy settlement which emerged during the 1940s and 1950s.

The chapter looks in detail at Churchill’s post-Second World War campaign for European unity. It begins by explaining the concepts of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ and ‘Christian civilisation’ that informed his thinking, before outlining the evolution of his thought through exposure to the ideas of Coudenhove-Kalergi and Briand. Prior to the Second World War, Churchill stated explicitly that Britain should not be a member of a proposed United States of Europe, but his ideas continued to evolve. In 1940 his government made the offer of Franco-British Union, and by 1942 he was promoting the idea of a Council of Europe as a counterweight to Russian ‘barbarism’. Defeated at the 1945 election, his Zurich speech and ensuing United Europe campaign are seen within the context of his desire to demonstrate his continued relevance on the world stage and against the backdrop of the developing Cold War. Nonetheless, they were based on sincere beliefs that helped inspire a broader transnational movement. The chapter concludes with the ambiguities in Churchill’s views on the role of Britain in Europe and argues that they may be a ‘problematic guide’ to more recent European politics.

This chapter affirms the feminist impetus of this collection by reflecting on power relations in society and their impact on law and law’s regulation. An acute site for this inquiry is in the state itself, and the state’s determination of its own membership. It is the thesis of this chapter that the national subject, the legal citizen,1 is a space in which gender, sexuality and race keenly interact with the everyday lives of individuals. An appreciation of this point is often overlooked. While the language of citizenship is often gender neutral, it often ‘perpetuat[es] the invisibility of women’ as citizens.2 Margaret Thornton examines the civil status of women as citizens in the early years of the twentieth century to ‘illustrate the peripheral civil status of women as citizens’ and, therefore, questions the full membership consequences of citizenship.3

The chapter examines the different phases of the wartime ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA. Roosevelt’s initial contact with Churchill was born of the realisation that American security was tied to that of the UK but with the over-riding caveat that the USA would not become ‘a tail on the British kite’. Initially, Churchill worked hard to convince Roosevelt that Britain was serious about continuing the war, while FDR pursued a strategy of hemispheric defence. Co-operation then increased with Roosevelt developing a policy of all aid short of war. Pearl Harbor ushered in the high-water mark of the alliance, albeit with disagreements about strategy. FDR saw an opportunity to draw the English-speaking peoples together to create a new, multilateral world order that rejected imperialism, while Churchill saw the war as a means to restore the British Empire and perpetuate British power. Roosevelt’s pursuit of a bilateral relationship with Stalin led to a final phase of increasing tension. Ultimately, the special relationship that emerged from the war would become far more important in the UK than in the USA, yet it owed much to the two people’s shared belief in preserving democracy.

The chapter places Churchill’s lifespan firmly within ‘the golden age of print’. It looks at his apprenticeship as a writer, served while in the army, explaining how his early books helped him earn the war chest that allowed him to launch his political career, before showing how his shrewd and selective use of sources for his biography of Lord Randolph Churchill allowed him to reconcile his role as a defender of his father’s political legacy with his own move to the Liberal Party. Churchill’s working methods also changed as he entered government. He used a team to help produce his multi-volume history of the First World War in order to defend his role in the Dardanelles operation. Thereafter, Churchill had to juggle managing his tax liability as an author with his need for more income, but by the 1930s he was committed to several major publishing projects. After the war, he sought to capitalise on his premiership through his multi-volume histories of the Second World War and the History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The chapter analyses how Churchill managed his various literary projects, sheds light on his own role in the creative process and looks at how this changed over time.

This chapter looks at how and why Churchill has become such a divisive figure. It opens with a description of recent debates in the public discourse and on social media. It then briefly discuses Churchill’s reputation during his lifetime before recounting the role that he played in shaping his own legacy through his words, written and spoken, and through the creation of his archive and official biography. The authors then examine the long and complex historiography of Churchill, highlighting some of the most significant challenges to the dominant Churchillian narrative. Particular attention is paid to the more recent politicising of Churchill as a result of debates over Brexit, empire and race.