I'm currently reading Boris Johnson's book The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. This hovered on my list for a little while, and then the author was made Foreign Secretary. I'm a great believer that how a person writes, and what they write about, tells you much about them. John Major's memoirs, for instance, as well as his later writing about cricket and music hall--two subjects he successfully enthused me about, at least a little--reveal him to be a much warmer and wittier character than the media painted him. Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, writes just as perfunctorily as her apparently humourless and mechanistic image suggested; Tony Blair's memoirs were as ghastly as I'd feared, but Chris Patten's significantly better.
I recall Johnson's biography of Churchill being reviewed, fairly neutrally, on Radio 4 some time ago, and one of the panellists remarked: "thank goodness we have Boris Johnson to cast some light on this little-known figure from British history."
Well, it turns out that Boris Johnson's biography casts light not just on Churchill, but on Johnson.
Exhibit A.
"Rab Butler might have been Prime Minister. In 1940, he was a junior minister, and a strong supporter of appeasement. Here is what he had to say about the ascent of Churchill:
"'The good clean tradition of English politics has been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history,' he was heard to say. 'Surrendering to Winston and his rabble was a disaster and an unnecessary one', mortgaging the future of our country to a 'half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.'"
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