Their whine-est hour: Another week, another tabloid claim that Churchill's been 'cancelled'...
And surprise, surprise Boris Johnson — the Wish.com Winston — has chipped in too. Interesting what Number 10 will comment on, isn't it?
I’m struggling to recall the name. Big bloke, bald, loved throwing up a v-sign, hated Nazis but also quite a fan of hating anyone with a complexion darker than milk… liked a drink, I’m sure there was something about beaches and fighting… think he might have advertised insurance at some point?
Oh wait, I remember: It’s Winston Churchill. A man who, 56 years after his death, is endlessly on TV screens, in the papers, and the subject of new biographies and histories. Of all the people who might be ‘cancelled’, he must be near the very bottom of the list, particularly as the British commentator class cannot look at any contemporary issue without instantly comparing it to World War II.
And yet, the decision by The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, a charity most people have probably never heard of, to rebrand as The Churchill Fellowship was deemed worthy of a front-page splash by The Sun yesterday. The strap read “PC Brigade’s New Outrage” — who are this PC Brigade and do they have natty uniforms or badges you can collect? — while the headline thundered…
… which doesn’t even work as a pun. The copy, bylined to Ben Leo and badged as an exclusive as if noticing a charity has changed its name and refreshed its website is Woodward & Bernstein level action, howled:
A charity set up to honour Sir Winston Churchill sparked a ‘woke’ storm by changing its name and erasing him from its website.
The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust has rebranded itself The Churchill Fellowship and removed every picture of the heroic wartime Prime Minister.
Its volunteers accuse the trust of “re-writing history”. One source said: “It beggars belief that the man who saved this nation in our darkest hour finds himself cancelled in this way.
This is a classic bit of predictive ‘news’ coverage. While the copy purports to be discussing a ‘storm’ that’s already raging, it’s designed to promote thunder and lightning from aggrieved readers who wouldn’t have thought of the charity in a million years but are now aggravated experts on its ‘disgusting’ decisions.
Similarly, I’d be willing to bet a decent sum of money that the quote that ends the front-page text was either ginned up in The Sun newsroom or pulled out of the source with a question that went something like, “Would you say Churchill has been cancelled?”
The Mirror swiftly jumped on the story with its own version (Churchill's charity drops Winston from name and now includes anti-racism statement) and The Times followed suit (Winston Churchill Memorial Trust removes pictures over ‘unacceptable’ views on race).
Then the most hard of thinking man in British media weighed in; MailOnline published a Dan Wootton column headlined How can the very people supposed to protect the legacy and memory of Winston Churchill have betrayed him so badly? We must never surrender to the woke mob. Wootton whose ideas about history are largely derived from waterproof books he could also chew, begins his column with a classic bit of flat-roof pub rhetoric (“We’d be speaking German if it weren’t for Winston…”), imagining:
Walk into the office past a row of swastika flags, with a quick Sieg Heil salute to the portrait of the late Führer Adolf Hitler before jumping in the lift.
Without the bravery and leadership of the greatest Briton to ever live, that's a routine that millions of us in the UK – a bleak Nazi-occupied German colony – might well be following today.
Nobody mention the Russians to Dan, it’ll only confuse him and make the job harder for whoever it is at GB News has to make sure he goes down for his nap.
Wootton continues, building himself up to a nice big foot-stamping, supermarket floor punching tantrum:
… as part of the regressive wokery currently sweeping the world, the campaign to demean Churchill has now reached the very organisation meant to protect his unquestionable legacy.
Did Churchill have some racist, sexist, homophobic and other unsavoury views that were widespread among men born in 1874? Without doubt – and I'm not trying to deny that.
But he was the ultimate anti-fascist who played a significant role in preventing the extermination of Jews and every other minority Hitler was intending to literally wipe from the face of the earth.
Citations very much needed there. As I wrote in a previous newsletter about the ludicrous yet sinister History Reclaimed project, Churchill was not just as racist as anyone born in his era but especially racist for his time.
Leo Amery, a fellow Tory who said Churchill’s views on India were not much different to Hitler’s, the US Vice-President Henry Wallace who was number two in a government still enthusiastically pushing segregation, and even Churchill’s close friend Violet Bonham-Carter all wrote about their shock at just how keen on white supremacy and racist rhetoric dear old Winston was.
And as I also noted in that previous edition, there was a time when even sections of the Right were willing to admit that Churchill, without disputing his central role in the wartime defence of the UK and the ultimate defeat of Hitler, was racist. A 2010 review of Churchill biographies in The Spectator had the unambiguous opening line: “Winston Churchill was racist.”
But now stating historical fact is defined by Wootton as a “loony left bid to piss on the reputation of Churchill”. He turns his anger, which he has for money once a week for MailOnline and nightly for GB News, specifically onto the charity’s chief executive Julia Weston.
Wootton, who delivered dewy-eyed GCSE Theatre Studies monologues after the death of Caroline Flack — a woman whose hounding he was intimately part of — entreating us to be kind and blaming social media for her suffering, is never more gleeful than when he has someone to bully from behind his byline. He writes that Weston, a woman he doesn’t know and has not spoken to, is “playing into the hands of the loony left” and that…
What makes it obvious that Weston is a woketopian is that, as she announced these changes, she also revealed the charity would start to focus on 'addressing inequality and protecting the environment'. Er, why? There are multiple other charitable organisations that already do that.
Wootton, true to his nature as one of the British media’s preeminent bad-faith bears1, is twisting Weston’s words from a now-deleted blog post published in September 2020. In ‘Looking to the future’ — still accessible via the Wayback Machine — Weston wrote that:
In the coming months, we will be looking at other ways in which we can amplify the vital work of Fellows here in the UK — work that aims to solve problems, find solutions, share ideas and create a more equitable society.
We will be considering two key themes in our thinking: addressing inequality and protecting the environment. These already run through much of our work and many Fellows address them in their projects…
So the charity wasn’t announcing some big shakeup in what it does: It awards fellowships and grants to people undertaking projects across a wide range of areas and… it’s still going to do that.
But for Wootton’s whining to work he has to frame the Churchill Fellowship as a nest of ‘woketopians’ who despise Winston Churchill rather than a charity that, as it notes in a post published in response to the unhinged media coverage, simply adjusted its name because “we have found that, in a simple practical sense, the name was confusing to people and did not explain what we do.”
When Wootton gets around to mentioning the Bengal famine in his rant — Churchill stockpiled food in Britain ahead of feeding the starving in India and told Amery that aid would accomplish little because Indians “bred like rabbits” — he only does so in the context of a bit of BBC bashing.
Last week, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit published its finding on a complaint about a News At Ten report from July last year in which Dr Rudrangshu Mukherjee of Ashoka University and Dr Yasmin Khan of Kellogg College, Oxford respectively said Churchill was “the precipitator of mass killing” and “prioritised white lives over Asian lives” during the Bengal Famine.
A complainant argued that the report “did not take proper account of the fact that Britain was engaged in a world war at the time” and that an alternative view should have been presented in the package. The ECU upheld that part of the complaint. Of course, Wootton is delighted and crows:
The BBC is, of course, part of the revisionist mob. They were forced to partially uphold a complaint about a News At Ten report that said Churchill's attitude towards the Bengal Famine, which killed three million in India during 1943, was racist without offering an alternative view.
In fact, many historians counter that Churchill did his absolute best to alleviate the famine at a time when food supplies across the world were scarce and he was engaged in trying to defeat Japan in the Pacific.
Notice Wootton doesn’t actually quote any of these historians, because the Mail is in the business of assertions rather than citations. Who needs arguments that can be challenged when you can simply say “don’t listen to the loony lefties dragging this great country down”?
Wootton finally turns his boiled potato brain to a conclusion and it’s a doozy:
Think about this from a personal perspective.
When you're gone, do you want to be judged by the biggest mistake you made – perhaps something you repented for during your life?
Or do you think human beings are fallible and their legacy should take into account their overall achievements and foibles? If we are to apply the latter judgement to Churchill, then he remains the most brilliant and important Briton without any question.
Yes, he was a man with flaws, a man who was very much a product of the era in which he grew up – but a man who saved the world from the tyranny of Nazism that allowed us to enjoy the freedoms we have today.
And that is all that really matters.
That’s not how history works. You can’t just stamp your feet and demand that the facts you like are the only ones that matter. Wootton and the rest of the right-wing drones rushing out to defend Churchill against the sheer horror of a short web page that states things he did and said, and a mild name change at a charity, don’t want an account of Churchill that takes “account of their overall achievement and foibles2”, they want the cigar-chomping, brandy-swilling, Nazi-punchin cartoon that makes them feel cosy.
Of course Boris Johnson — a man with a long history of racist statements to his name — should want Churchill the Cartoon to abide. His own ropey biography of the ‘great man’ The Churchill Factor (2014) was the product of an intense collaboration with Dr Warren Dockter, despite the ‘research assistant’ only getting a mention in the acknowledgements rather than a credit in the book. A recent edition of The Fence newsletter explained:
Boris would wake early in the morning and pad to his study to record himself extemporising on scenes from Churchill’s life – his way of getting the creative juices flowing. Draft chapters would arrive in Dockter’s inbox at 5am, awaiting fact-checking and review.
In The Churchill Factor, Johnson writes that…
Tories are jealous of their relation with Churchill. It is a question of badging, of political ownership. They think of him as the people of Parma think of the Formaggio Parmigiano.
… which, along with his own desire to cosplay as Winston whenever the chance arrives, may in part explain why he decided to issue a comment on the charity. It’s also an easy tabloid culture war win for a Prime Minister who just this week penned an article for The Daily Mail to suck up to it over social care.
The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman threw red meat to the red tops at a Downing Street briefing yesterday. He told the assembled hacks:
It’s completely absurd, misguided and wrong to airbrush his giant achievements and service to this country and the trust should think again.
The prime minister has always been clear that whilst it’s legitimate to examine Britain’s history and we should aim to educate people about all aspects or complex past, both good and bad, and not erase them, we need to focus on addressing the present, and not attempt to rewrite the past and get sucked into the never-ending debate about which well-known historical figures are sufficiently pure or politically correct to remain in public view.
That Churchill’s grandson, the former Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames, who is hardly ‘woke’ even by whatever insane definition The Daily Telegraph is using today, entirely supports the charity won’t matter to the right-wing opinion spaffers. Nor will the fact that Soames’ brother Jeremy is the charity’s chairman.
The “war on woke” requires constant enemies and constant unhinged anger. If that means ignoring Churchill’s actual grandchildren when they say that he hasn’t been remotely cancelled — beyond being dead which is a pretty final form of cancellation — then so be it.
So we have Sir Nicholas Soames telling The Times that claims the charity is trying to distance itself from Churchill are “absolute bollocks” and that:
… this whole thing is so sad and so pathetic. Let me tell you that his family 100 per cent, unequivocally support the work of the fellowship.
… and recent GB News recruit, former TalkRadio splutterer, and man with the face of a trainee estate agent who spent his first morning on the job trying to buy pinstriped paint, Patrick Christys, claiming that the charity has declared Churchill a “toxic relic of a bygone era [that] must be erased from our collective consciousness”. Who to believe?
In his monologue Christys takes a similar line to his colleague Wootton:
I don’t remember Julia Weston winning a war, do you? The fact is we’d be living in a Nazi-occupied German colony now if it wasn’t for Sir Winston. To get to the studio today, if it even existed, I’d have to have walk past giant swastikas, members of the SS and so much more…
I don’t know, I think Nigel Farage, GB News’ proudest turd in the punchbowl, who allegedly sang Nazi songs at school and boasted about his initials being NF — the same as the National Front — would’ve done quite nicely with Goebbels as his boss. He wouldn’t have had to change much of his rhetoric.
What the right-wing press are angry about is not ‘cancellation’ but context. They don’t want history told by a multitude of voices. They want the simple black and white of old war movies where they get to be the goodies.
That’s why we’re being served things like History Reclaimed and The Daily Telegraph’s in-house version History Defended3, where the first two video/article packages are praise for Clive of India (Clive of India was no sociopathic thug, but a British self-made success story) and, surprise, surprise, an encomium on Churchill (The woke attacks on Winston Churchill are libel and lies). Andrew Roberts, the star turn in that second piece, does know you can’t libel the dead and you certainly can’t libel the dead by quoting things they actually said and did.
One of the many overused Churchill quotes is actually useful here: He said, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it” and he did — six volumes of The Second World War alone — solidifying many of the myths that his modern defenders cling onto like children with cuddle blankets.
Telling the truth about what Churchill did before the war, during the war, and after the war is not cancelling him. His own grandchildren can see that but the right-wing newspapers simply won’t. They don’t want to remember Churchill the man; they want to harness and weaponise Churchill the symbol, Churchill the idea, and Churchill the proof that they are right and we are wrong.
If right-wing commentators and columnists are still pretending the British Empire was great in a thousand years, people will say: This was their whine-est hour.
Does he shit in the woods? I’ve no proof but when did that ever stop Dan Wootton from claiming outrageous things? I firmly believe that Dan Wootton defecates in forests with wild abandon.
Extreme racism and utter disinterest in whether thousands lived or died go way past ‘foibles’ in my book, but we can’t expect desperate Dan to know what words mean or how to use them properly.
The frontman for this dreck is former Brexit Party and Sun guy Steven Edginton, who first came to dubious and limited fame as the source of the equally dubious diplomatic cables story taken up by Isabel Oakeshott.