Friday 20 February 2009

hard to resist

Hard to write a really bad book about Churchill. He's just a great story. John Keegan's short one a few years ago has lots of the usual stuff. I particularly liked this bit about his minor heart attack in December 1941:
His doctor, Lord Moran, confided to his diary that the correct treatment was six weeks in bed. He recognised that to give such professional advice was impossible. The news that the prime minister had become an invalid would have a 'disastrous' effect on the war effort, 'when America had just come into the war, and there is no one but Winston to take her by the hand.' To tell Churchill the same would be equally unjustifiable, because of 'the consequences on one of his imaginative temperament of the feeling that his heart was affected. His work would suffer.' Moran therefore decided to keep professional silence and hope for the best.

Great use of discretion. Worked out alright.

When Churchill was PM again in June 1953, he suffered a serious stroke which left his left side paralysed. Lord Moran doubted he'd survive the weekend but 'over the next four months he dragged himself back to health by sheer determination. "This astonishing creature," Moran recorded, "obeys no laws, recognises no rules."' In August he was presiding over the cabinet again, and in November he was back before the House making a speech which his fellow Conservative MP Henry 'Chips' Channon described as 'brilliant, full of cunning and charm, of wit and thrusts ... it was an Olympian spectacle ... In eighteen years ... I have never seen anything like it.'

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