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was profoundly unpopular in the country. The old ruling class perceived that the electorate yearned for its dispossession, as soon as ballot papers were offered to them at a general election. In Nicolson’s words: “The upper classes feel that all this sacrifice996 and suffering will only mean that the proletariat will deprive them of all their comforts and influence, and then proceed to render this country and Empire a third-class State.” Yet the prime minister himself was far from immune from the effects of public alienation. Nicolson was shocked one day to notice scrawled graffiti in a station lavatory: “Winston Churchill is a bastard.”997 When he remarked upon it to an RAF officer standing beside him, the airman shrugged, saying, “Yes. The tide has turned. We find it everywhere.”

“But how foul. How bloody foul!”

“Well, you see, if I may say so, the men hate politicians.”

“Winston a politician! Good God!”

On October 27, the prime minister delivered a brilliant speech about his experiences in Moscow. Then he adjourned to the smoking room, and addressed the barman: “Collins, I should like a whisky and soda998—single.” After sitting down for a moment, he struggled out of his armchair and returned to the bar. “Collins, delete the word ‘single’ and insert the word ‘double.’” “Then,” in the words of an MP, “grinning at us like a schoolboy, he resumed his seat.” Here was another of those impish miniatures which help to explain why love for Churchill ran so strong among most of those who worked with him. For all Alan Brooke’s exasperation with his master at this time, he wrote fondly of a scene that winter, as the two men visited the snowbound French battlefront in the Vosges. The prime minister arrived for lunch with de Gaulle “completely frozen999, and almost rolled up on himself like a hedgehog. He was placed in a chair with a hot water bottle at his feet and one in the back of his chair. At the same time good brandy was poured down his throat to warm him internally. The results were wonderful, he thawed out rapidly and when the time came produced one of those indescribably funny French speeches which brought the house down.”

But the British people had by now hardened their hearts towards their rulers, even the greatest. Many felt less gratitude to those presiding over victory in the most terrible conflict in history than implacable resentment against the politicians whom they held responsible for getting them into it in the first place. Even if Churchill had not himself been among the guilty men of the 1930s, he was now their political standard-bearer. And for all his giant stature as Britain’s war leader, millions of voters sensed that his interest in the humdrum domestic troubles of peace was perfunctory. An anonymous officer of the Second Army, fighting in Holland, wrote in the Spectator about the mood of the British soldier under his command: “[He] is fighting for the future of the world1000 and does not believe in that future … He asks a lot of the future, but he doesn’t expect to get any of it.” The writer perceived his men as chronically mistrustful of all authority, institutions and politicians, but Tories most of all: “It is, perhaps, encouraging that Tommy, 1944, will not be foozled by facile talk of a land fit for heroes. He wants deeds, not words.” Few among such men perceived Winston Churchill as the national leader likely to fulfil such hopes once victory came.

NINETEEN

Athens:

“Wounded in the House of Our Friends”

GERMAN WITHDRAWAL from the Balkans precipitated a crisis for Churchill which severely damaged his standing in America, engaged him in bitter political dispute at home, and provided the last perilous military adventure of his life. Experience at the end of World War II demonstrated that it is much more difficult to order the affairs of liberated nations than of defeated ones. This is because it is undesirable, if not impossible, to arbitrate their affairs with the same ruthlessness. If Washington’s twenty-first-century neoconservatives had possessed a less muddled understanding of the