It Is Finished

Martin Gilbert and Larry P. Arnn, eds., The Churchill Documents, volume 23, Never Flinch, Never Weary, November 1951 to February 1965, Hillsdale College Press, 2019, 2488 pages, $60. ISBN 978–0916308483

The 1951–1955 Conservative government was the only one Winston Churchill formed as a result of winning a General Election. That distinction ought to have earned his administration a hallowed place in his career pantheon. Instead, it is often viewed as an anti-climax. If Churchill’s peacetime government gets any attention in historical surveys or biographies, it is usually as a postscript to the main event, his epic 1940–1945 wartime premiership. Churchill himself is portrayed as aged, ailing, and only spasmodically effective as prime minister before a stroke in 1953 worsened matters. There were occasional flashes of his old brilliance, but the day-to-day grind of peacetime leadership bored him. Having avenged his 1945 electoral defeat, Churchill stands accused in some quarters of doing little with power other than to cling to it. Friends and political intimates initially assumed that he would make way for his anointed successor, the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, within a year. But on he went to April 1955, the fading leader of a government both “undistinguished” and “bad for the country.”¹

There is, alas, some truth to all this. Pushing seventy-eight-years-of-age at the time of the 1951 election, Churchill was unquestionably past his prime. The malaise, however, both personal and political, has been exaggerated. Historians specialising in the 1951–1955 period have shown that there was much more Now, with the appearance of the twenty-third and final volume of , the evidence is there for all to see, more than 2,000 pages of it in a massive amplification of Martin Gilbert’s (1988), the concluding instalment of the official Churchill biography. The volume’s sub-title, “Never Flinch, Never Weary,” taken from a 1955 Churchill speech, describes perfectly the mind-set required of successive documents-volumes editors Randolph Churchill, Martin Gilbert, and Larry P. Arnn as they went about their Herculean task.