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Extract from: The
Tories versus Churchill during the 'Finest Hour''
"'Seldom can a prime minister have
taken office with the Establishment . so dubious of the choice
and so prepared to find its doubts justified,' wrote Jock
Colville of Winston Churchill, adding 'within a fortnight
all was changed'.
This has since become the accepted version
of history, convenient both to Churchill and to the Establishment.
It has been presented as the story of the Conservative Party
swiftly recognizing him as a national saviour and, as the
Battle of Britain and the Blitz raged, quickly falling in
behind him in a spirit of defiant solidarity. The truth could
not have been more different.
Old men forget, but old politicians forget
selectively. Many are the self-serving memoirs of Conservative
MPs who prefer not to remember both the depth of mistrust
they felt for Churchill and the length of time that they continued
to feel it. Such was the post-war deification of Churchill
for his sublime leadership in 1940-41 that it would have been
a brave Tory who told the truth about the undeclared guerrilla
warfare which was fought between the new prime minister and
the conservative hierarchy over those fateful months.
Extract from: 'Patriotism: The Last Refuge
of Sir Arthur Bryant'
On 19th February 1979 London's literary,
political and historical world came together in the Vintners
Hall for a dinner to pay tribute to Sir Arthur Bryant CH,
CBE, LLD, FRHist.S, FRSL on his eightieth birthday. The author
of over forty books, a columnist on the Illustrated London
News for more than four decades, and knighted by Churchill,
Bryant sat between Harold Macmillan and the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Other guests included the then prime minister,
James Callaghan, a brace of field marshals, the chairman of
Times Newspapers, half a dozen knights and over two dozen
peers and peeresses. It was, as one of those present put it,
'Bryant's apotheosis as the Grand Old Man of British historical
writing'.
Yet those distinguished guests in the Vintners
Hall could not have known what the expiry of the Fifty Year
Rule and the subsequent opening of Bryant' s private papers
can now tell us; that far from being the patriot he so long
and loudly proclaimed himself, Bryant was in fact a Nazi sympathiser
and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment
as a potential traitor in 1940. He was also, incidentally,
a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar and humbug."
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