June 3, 2015

Finest Hour 101, Winter 1998-99

Page 09

Addition to your useless information file: Cover Magazine quotes Mission Pharmacal, which has determined that the average volume of Churchill’s snore was 35 decibels….Finest Hour‘s 1999 Samuel Hoare Award for the Most Unchurchillian Parliamentary Behaviour was won outright the first week of January. Despite a close run by US Congressman Gephardt, who called for a return to collegiality while wags played recordings of his speeches branding colleagues child-starvers, the Award went to the gentleman who pie-bombed the Dutch Finance Minister, announcing the replacement of Holland’s guilder by the euro. The Minister was wiping off the first pie when splat, he took another one…. 1998 Award went to Russia’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky, for flinging glasses of water at his critics in the Duma…. Her grandfather’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples is recommended by Telegraph Magazine’s Emma Soames: “If there was a fire I’d go for all the books I haven’t read…I’d probably get burned as I tried to pick it up.” (No, it’s light.)….Churchill battled to receive duty-free cigars, the Daily Mail reveals, bucking postwar Labour duties as high as 150 percent….Worse, Churchill commissioned a military investigation, Operation Unthinkable, considering a preemptive war by the Anglo-Americans against the Soviet Union starting in July 1945, according to secret documents released by the Public Record Office. Look for disapproving additions to the Feet of Clay Collection soon….28 Hyde Park Gate, the Churchills’ London home from 1945 to 1965, was offered for rent at £10,000 a week by actor Anthony Andrews; for longer term leases he will settle for only £7,000…. 11 Downing Street, once occupied by WSC and Lord Randolph Churchill, has been opened to visitors for the first time as part of a series of selected “Heritage Open Days”….”Can you describe Churchill in one sentence?” the Sunday Telegraph challenged Sir Martin Gilbert, who has spent about eight million words on the official biography. Sir Martin replied: “He was a great humanitarian who was himself distressed that the accidents of history gave him his greatest power at a time when everything had to be focused on defending the country from destruction, rather than achieving his goals of a fairer society.” Game, set and match?