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By Root 1012 0

such as he had been allowed to ignore for six years, not least the need to pay bills. His personal finances during the war years remain somewhat opaque. He received a monthly salary of £449 from the Treasury, for his services as prime minister. In addition, his books generated substantial income. There was some postwar political controversy about the fact that, throughout the war, he gained handsome royalties from sales of collections of his prime ministerial speeches. For instance Into Battle, the first volume, generated £11,172, of which sum the prime minister instructed his bank to divert half to the account of his son, Randolph. He received a huge amount, £50,000, in October 1943 for the film rights of his biography of Marlborough and a further £50,000 in April 1945 from Alexander Korda for film rights to his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He was able to adopt a lofty attitude about book contracts and delivery dates with his publisher, Macmillan, because one of its most influential directors was a member of his government. An old friend, Sir Henry Strakosch, who died in 1943, bequeathed the prime minister £20,000 in his will. Yet punitive wartime taxation, more than 80 percent, absorbed a large part of these sums. Even on a care-and-maintenance basis, Chartwell, his home in Kent, incurred costs. Randolph, the monstrous pelican in the family, represented a major drain on his purse. As prime minister, he contributed about £351123 a month for his personal share of the costs of Chequers. What is undisputed is that he emerged almost penniless from his experience as the saviour of his nation.

Smuts said, more than two years earlier, “Winston’s mind has a stop in it1124 at the end of the war.” Churchill grumbled: “I do not believe in this brave new world1125 … Tell me any good in any new thing.” Even had he won the election, the great conflict with which he would be inseparably identified for the rest of human history had barely three weeks to run. The nugatory military decisions still at the discretion of a British national leader could exercise little influence upon the manner in which its final operations were conducted. Thereafter, while Churchill might have enjoyed retaining the trappings of power, as all prime ministers do, he was quite unsuited to address the challenges of peace. Isaiah Berlin wrote: “Churchill sees history—and life1126—as a great Renaissance pageant: when he thinks of France or Italy, Germany or the Low Countries, Russia, India, Africa, the Arab lands, he sees vivid historical images—something between Victorian illustrations in a child’s book of history and the great procession painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi Palace … No man has ever loved life more vehemently and infused so much of it into everyone and everything that he has touched.”

Yet by July 1945 the British people hungered for simpler and more immediate things. They had played their parts in the most terrible global drama in history. Now they were eager to quit the stage, to address themselves to their own private and social purposes, which Churchill only dimly understood, and was unsuited to assist them to fulfil. Alexandre Dumas wrote: “Il y a des services si grands qu’on ne peut les payer que par l’ingratitude.” The electorate had performed a service to Churchill, as well as to itself, by parting company with its great war leader when there was no more war for him to lead. He was profoundly glad for his nation that its struggle was approaching a conclusion, but deeply grieved for himself. At noon on July 27, he held his final cabinet—“a pretty grim affair,” in Eden’s words:

After it was over I was on my way1127 to the front door when W. called me back and we had half an hour alone. He was pretty wretched, poor old boy. Said he didn’t feel any more reconciled this morning, on the contrary it hurt more, like a wound which becomes more painful after the first shock. He couldn’t help feeling his treatment had been scurvy. “Thirty years of my life have been passed in this room. I shall never sit in it again. You will, but