Not just the politician's wife

CLEMENTINE CHURCHILL by Joan Hardwick John Murray pounds

He commenced talking politics in the vestry and was quite oblivious of the fact that he had to take out the bride." Lloyd George's merry quip on the wedding in 1908 of Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier was designed to illustrate the extent to which the young Churchill lived and breathed politics, and his unpreparedness for tolerating any distraction from this consuming passion. Perhaps Clementine Churchill's most remarkable achievement in almost 60 years of marriage was the way in which she came, by degrees, to accept the predominance of her husband's political career in their married life, and even to reach an accommodation with it.

Although Churchill could be tender and affectionate, his unbridled egotism sometimes made him a thoughtless and selfish husband. His "black dog" depressions, especially during his periods in the political wilderness, after the Dardanelles fiasco, for instance, were a heavy burden on his wife. Furthermore, his extravagance, especially on his dream home at Chartwell, placed additional strains on their relationship, and worries about money were an unhappy reminder for Clementine of her impoverished childhood during which her mother, the indomitable Blanche, had gambled away what little family money there was at French gaming tables.

Politically, too, they were often divided. Clementine never wholeheartedly followed Churchill out of liberalism into conservatism, and was to preserve an idiosyncratic form of radicalism all her life. At the beginning of their marriage, they fell out over women's suffrage. Churchill, like his mother, Jennie, was a fierce opponent of the suffragettes, unlike Clementine who, while she refused to condone the violence of the suffragettes, expressed sympathy with their ultimate aim. Over the years Clementine was often to express her dislike of what she called her husband's "rough-fisted, 'Hunnish' attitudes", and during the 1945 General Election she was one of the few members of Churchill's inner circle to round on him for his infamous speech, in which he compared the Labour Party's methods to those of the Gestapo.

Clementine's great contribution to Churchill's career, in fact, was that she could say to him exactly what she thought. What their daughter, Mary Soames, once called her mother's "highly developed critical faculty" was clearly invaluable. One aspect of her life which Joan Hardwick's new biography usefully highlights is the extent to which Clementine kept herself informed on the major issues of the day. Churchill sometimes found her advice too negative; but, more often than not, he appreciated the guidance of his "sagacious cat".

When necessary, however, no one showed more loyal concern for Churchill. The story of Sutherland's portrait of Churchill has often been told, and Hardwick adds an new illuminating detail. The House of Commons had commissioned the portrait to mark Churchill's 80th birthday, but his dislike of the portrait was evident on its unveiling. He saw himself depicted as a man "who looked like a down-and-out drunk who has been picked out of the gutter in the Strand". The portrait was consigned to the cellars at Chartwell. Only after Clementine's death did it emerge that she had destroyed it, ensuring the painting that had so distressed her husband would never be put on public display.

Joan Hardwick's slant on Clementine's life is to argue that behind a carefully maintained family facade of perfect marriage, perfect wife there lies an altogether more troubled version of events. Clementine was often miserable in her marriage, and even at times considered divorce. The problem with this interpretation is that no one, not even Mary Soames in her 1979 biography of Clementine, has ever argued that the Churchills' marriage was not at times stormy. Indeed, given the volatile temperaments of the two protagonists and the time they were together, it would be surprising if their relationship hadn't had its ups and downs.

Hardwick provides little new evidence, introduces a lot of extraneous anecdotal material, and blandly works over some rather familiar territory. Lack of quotation from original sources deprives the book of much-needed vitality, and Hardwick appears to have assumed that the embargo on the Churchill-Clementine correspondence (Mary Soames is revising her biography and compiling a book of her mother's letters) extends to other relevant papers in the collection at Churchill College, Cambridge. This is not the case. There is an interesting book to be written about Clementine Churchill, but this is a sadly stillborn project.