Removed from banknotes, his statue sprayed with graffiti, blamed for Gaza, the Bengal famine, the deaths of millions, Churchill no longer sits comfortably aloft his ‘pinnacle of deathless glory’, as he wrote of Alfred the Great. In the parlance of the late Martin Amis, it’s as if our national hero’s trusted barber at Truefitt & Hill has given him a brutal rug-redo. A further clipping to his reputation is Simon Matthews’s study of his ‘poor record’ at the Admiralty between September 1939 and May 1940 – i.e. just before he becomes ‘Peak Churchill’.

Viscount Stuart famously overheard Churchill reply to a questioner pressing for awkward details ‘Only history can relate the full story’, adding after the right pause: ‘And I shall write the history.’ Selling 560,000 hardback copies, The Gathering Storm (1948) became the official version – a closed book about the origins and start of the second world war. Thanks to Churchill, who gave himself the best lines, many legends have passed out of history into unbudgeable myth, with the author escaping, Houdini-like, from scrutiny. Matthews holds Churchill’s distorted picture up to the light to reveal another outline – one manifest to contemporaries such as General Percy Groves: ‘There are few paradoxes more striking than to be found between Mr Churchill’s deeds as a minister and his words as a historian.’

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My great-uncle Geoffrey Shakespeare was Churchill’s ‘indefatigable second in command’ at the Admiralty at the outbreak of war. Although he mistitles it, Matthews relies much on Shakespeare’s memoir, Let Candles Be Brought In. Reasonably illuminating, this book appears quite modern now in giving Neville Chamberlain a makeover, as it were, and rescuing his reputation from the ignominy in which Churchill moved to bury it. Still brushed over today is the fact that on returning from Munich, Chamberlain had been regarded as an international hero and spoken of as ‘the world’s lifebuoy’. President Roosevelt congratulated him........

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