BOOK REVIEW / Bureaucrat bites bulldog: 'Churchill' - Clive Ponting: Sinclair-Stevenson, 20 pounds

NO MAN is a hero to his valet de chambre, and we live in a society of valets. With us, heroism is at a discount. On the wilder shores of political correctness, it is seen as a form of psychopathology: a symptom to be analysed rather than a virtue to be emulated. Faced with greatness, exceptional beauty, talent or courage, our instinct is to search for feet of clay.

If the talent in question is political, we search with special zeal. For one of the hallmarks of our mass consumption tellyocracy is a pervasive disdain for public life. Long before the Thatcher governments started to privatise nationalised industries, a complex cultural revolution privatised politics. The public sphere, once perceived as an arena of heroic contest, is now seen as a theatre of the absurd. We are ruled, we tell ourselves, by pygmies. And we tell ourselves that because we are more comfortable looking down than up.

Until now, Winston Churchill has defied this ethos of mediocrity. The marmoreal slabs of Martin Gilbert's multi-volume biography recalled a vanished age. It was the historiographical equivalent of a statue in Parliament Square, based on the premise that here, at least, it was still possible to apply the conventions of a time when politics was seen as a noble activity and political leadership as a mystery that deserved respect. Even John Charmley's brilliant revisionist riposte, though Chamberlainite rather than Churchillian in inspiration, at least took Churchill's politics seriously and painted the face as well as the warts.

In Clive Ponting's new biography, however, mediocrity has its revenge. The disorderly and disconcerting mysteries of political leadership are viewed through the prism of the tidy-minded bureaucrat which the author once was. Page after page glows with the knowing smirk of the politically correct, and there are so many warts that the face is invisible.

Churchill, we learn, drank too much. He treated his wife and children deplorably. He extorted huge advances from his publishers, sponged shamelessly off rich friends and spent money like water. He delivered long monologues at meetings, refused to listen to others and could not bear opposition. His judgement of other people was appalling. He was an elitist, a sexist and a racist. He fought to preserve the privileges of his class, had contempt for democracy, was beastly to the suffragettes, despised Hindus, feared coloured immigration and wanted to sterilise the degenerate. Insensate ambition drove him to folly after folly. His unnecessary but never-ending interventions in high strategy were uniformly disastrous, a fact which his grossly overpaid books were written to conceal. With such a contemptible figure at its head, it is a miracle that Britain did not lose the war. Since Ponting himself was not around at the time, we can only assume that his equally tidy-minded predecessors in the butler's pantry of Whitehall must have done the trick.

The trouble with Ponting's book is not - emphatically not - that the last word on Churchill had already been said, still less that the Churchill cult which prevailed in the post-war period should be taken at face value. As the row over D-Day shows, this country has still not come to terms with the painful contrast between wartime glory and peacetime decline. Indeed, the past 20 years of British history are inexplicable unless that failure is taken into account. Part of the explanation for it lies in the iconography of wartime Britain, and Churchill is still one of the most resonant icons. There is plenty of room for revisionism.

But revisionism is not for valets. Still less is it for the priggish hindsight of a politically correct posterity. Churchill's drinking habits, bouts of depression, monumental self-centredness and ambition-driven errors of judgement were part of him, and therefore part of history. A rounded portrait would certainly include them. But they were not the whole of him. He also had genius - a word which has no place in Ponting's vocabulary. The key to Churchill's life, and therefore to an important part of our history, lies in the interplay between genius and folly. And that interplay is, by definition, incomprehensible unless both receive due weight.

Ponting the prig is an even more dangerous guide to the mysteries of past greatness than Ponting the valet. His chief message is that Churchill was not a late-20th century bien pensant progressive, and that this is shocking and dreadful. But how on earth could he have been? He was born in 1874, not 1974. He could no more escape the limits of time and place than Ponting can. The elitism and racism which Ponting condemns were commonplace then - and among bien pensant progressives as much as among reactionary aristocrats. Churchill's assumption that some races are superior to others, and his fear that overbreeding among degenerates might degrade the British race, were as politically correct in 1910 as Ponting's shocked distaste for them is today. And if anything in life is certain, it is that Ponting's views will seem as shocking and dreadful to progressives of the late-21st century as Churchill's do to him.