![]() ![]() ![]() Having operated as a journalist in that context made him less forgiving and less understanding, later, of journalists who he thought were doing things contrary to his government’s interests, basically by being openly critical of him or his ministers. There were strict limits to what you should and should not say. He was trying to be a little bit controversial, a little bit provocative, but he was doing so with an understanding that he was governed by the rules of censorship-particularly when he was a serving soldier, and also as a journalist. In some ways, as a young man, he was pushing the envelope a bit. They were restored, and it turned out to be a little bit of a storm in a teacup, but Churchill said in the House of Commons, “Well, I would never have been allowed, when a correspondent during the Boer War, to use the expression, ‘The situation is desperate.’” At the time of the Anzio landings, when things were going badly wrong, there was a minor crisis when British journalists had their press credentials withdrawn because they were alleged to be spreading despair. That background also influenced him when he was prime minister. He was a very good journalist, very interesting, and certainly one of the most highly paid. And then he exploded onto the scene when, as a young man in the 1890s, he joined the army and wrote journalistic accounts of small wars, starting in Cuba, then the North-West Frontier in India, then the Sudan, then the Boer War. As the son of a well-known politician, Lord Randolph Churchill, he got occasional mentions through his childhood and his teenage years. So that was his first mention in the press. His birth was reported in The Times, actually on the front page, which in those days carried these little personal ads. What’s your focus in the book?Ĭhurchill: A Life in the News takes the story from his birth. Churchill was making the news even before he became a politician, as a soldier, but also, quite literally, as a journalist. Your most recent book is Churchill: A Life in the News. Foreign Policy & International Relations.Sutherland considered the destruction of his painting an act of vandalism, but when one considers that portraits, particularly official ones for public display, have always been a combination of visual record and propaganda, it is perhaps unsurprising that a likeness the subject did not consider flattering should have been suppressed. Word came that this was not the first Churchill portrait his wife saw fit to condemn: those by Paul Maze and Walter Sickert also disappeared under her watch. Lady Churchill had hidden it in the cellar at Chartwell at her request, the Churchills’ private secretary, Grace Hamblin, had it removed and secretly burned on a bonfire. It was destroyed shortly thereafter, with news of its obliteration emerging only in 1978. The work was destined for permanent display in the Houses of Parliament after Churchill’s death, but it was initially given to him as a gift. One of his political opponents described it as ‘a beautiful work’, while an ally dismissed it as ‘disgusting’. The presentation was to be televised, which meant Churchill was obliged to compliment the painting, though he did so with faint (one might say feint) praise, saying that it displayed ‘force and candour’ and was ‘a remarkable example of modern art’. He was persuaded only with great difficulty to accept the portrait at the ceremony in order to avoid causing offence. Ten days before the official presentation, he wrote to Sutherland, rejecting the painting and declaring that the ceremony would not include it. On seeing a photograph of it, he called it ‘malignant … filthy’. While Lady Churchill was said to have remarked that it looked ‘really quite alarmingly like him’, and Churchill’s son, Randolph, thought it made his father look ‘disenchanted’, the sitter himself hated it at once. The result, when it was revealed on Novemto Clementine Churchill, was not a smashing success. Ancient worms and the problem with climate politicsĬhurchill reluctantly accepts Graham Sutherland’s portrait in Westminster Hall in November 1954 ![]()
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