August 2, 2024

John Harte, Churchill’s Challenges: 1918–1940, Pen and Sword, 2024, 224 pages, £25. ISBN 978–1036100360

Review by Alastair Stewart

Years ago, The Guardian published an article titled “Why Can’t Britain Handle the Truth about Winston Churchill?” It was not a rip-roaring parade of Churchill’s finest hours. Whereas detractors might score points in 800 words or less, however, Churchillians are forever accused of scrimping on the bad stuff if they apply the same brevity to the scope and scale of Churchill’s contributions to world history.

Thus, we come to the challenge of John Harte’s latest book Churchill’s Challenges: 1918–1940.” Remarkably ambitious in his scope, Harte attempts to knit together a social and cultural history of these years, including how Churchill both influenced the world and was defined by the issues of the day.

Harte wants to show us when and where the “scrawny little twenty-year-old second lieutenant became a global leader.” Was it his autodidactic adolescence or the scope and scale of traveling, reporting and fighting in Cuba, India, the Sudan, and South Africa between 1895 and 1900?

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The question is not a new one, but it never fails to fascinate. The problem is that the question is teased but never realised, and the title is somewhat limiting. 1918 marked the end of the First World War but hardly the start of the making of Churchill, already in his forty-fourth year. By then, he had held high office since 1908: President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Minister of Munitions. This is a recurring frustration within the book: one question leapfrogs to another with tantalising potential for deep insight. The book’s 175 pages of text, however, can only be a prelude to the total tonnage that must be weighted and examined to consider how events defined Churchill.

Churchill was Colonial Secretary only from 13 February 1921 until 19 October 1922. Yet, the office is given special consideration in the book. The dots are connected, but it is a false narrative to drive and cram so much into a cosmic alignment of evils with Churchill in the middle fighting the good fight. The book might better be called Churchill’s In-Tray if this is the route the author insists on traversing. No issue crossed Churchill’s desk that cannot be retroactively claimed as some genesis for today’s global woes, but even Churchill cannot claim a hundred-year prescience. Many others handled the same material as it passed through their “in-trays.”

The book claims to be the first of two volumes, but there is little confidence that a second will ameliorate or do justice to the author’s overly ambitious multi-pronged premise. This is a whistlestop biography of Churchill punctuated with events as diverse as the reshaping of the Middle East in the 1920s, the rise of Bolshevism, and the advent of Nazism. So short a book cannot adequately explain how Churchill responded to these enormous events, nor is there space to chart the course of his evolving thoughts.

Harte knows the era but not necessarily his subject. Churchill is here but not present, and the book never really decides what it wants to be. At times it is a perfectly satisfactory look at the geopolitical context before the Second World War. Attempting such a grand narrative, however, while simultaneously explaining Churchill’s influence within it requires more detail than has been given. But there is much here with promise, and a more episodic look at the likes of Lawrence of Arabia, Gertrude Bell, and the myriad other characters, events, and places that crossed Churchill’s path would have made more appropriate use of space. 

Churchill’s Challenge is Harte’s challenge and, perhaps, Pen and Sword’s challenge. All would have been served by more judicious editing to release the great potential of the author’s obvious knowledge.

Alastair Stewart is Chair of ICS Scotland.