Winston Churchill: Why has Britain’s wartime prime minister been called a 'villain'?

Row erupts over Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell's remark about complex legacy of victorious Second World War PM

Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell has attracted a storm of criticism after describing Sir Winston Churchill as a “villain”.

Responding to a question posed by Politico, Mr McDonnell cited Sir Winston’s decision to send in the Lancashire Fusiliers to help police quell a Welsh miners’ strike in Tonypandy in November 1910 while serving as home secretary as the reason for his judgement.

One miner was killed and 580 people injured, 80 Metropolitan Police officers among them, in the incident in the Rhonda Valley. Critics of his order argue it was an excessive use of force against the workers, who were merely exercising their democratic rights by engaging in industrial action.

As prime minister three decades later, Churchill led the fight against Nazi Germany, holding his nerve and delivering some of the most stirring rhetoric ever uttered by an Englishman as the Allied Forces overcame Adolf Hitler to salvage Europe from totalitarianism.

Churchill biographer and ex-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was among those to denounce Mr McDonnell’s stance on a man voted the greatest Briton of all time in a 2002 poll by the BBC. He said: “Winston Churchill saved this country and the whole of Europe from a barbaric fascist and racist tyranny and our debt to him is incalculable.”

“If John McDonnell had the slightest knowledge of history he would be aware that Churchill also had an extraordinary record as a social reformer who cared deeply for working people and their lives. JM should be utterly ashamed of his remarks and withdraw them forthwith,” Mr Johnson wrote on Twitter.

Churchill's grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames agreed, telling The Daily Telegraph: “Frankly, it’s a very foolish and stupid thing to say, surely said to gain publicity.

“I think my grandfather’s reputation can withstand a publicity-seeking assault from a third-rate, Poundland Lenin. I don’t think it will shake the world.”

While no one seriously disputes the heroism of Sir Winston Churchill or the value of his rousing leadership in the face of Britain’s “darkest hour”, criticisms of his character are commonly raised in the 21st century, notably last January in response to Gary Oldman’s Oscar win for playing him in the Joe Wright biopic Darkest Hour.

Every inch a son of British imperial adventurism, Churchill was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst and, as a young man in 1895, joined the British Army as an officer, where he naively sought excitement in “jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”, as he phrased it.

He took part in raids on the Swat Valley in what is now Pakistan, telling himself the actions against a people fighting for a land they considered their own was justified because his opponents harboured a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill”. In Sudan, he boasted he had personally killed three “savages”.

Serving in South Africa during the Boer War, he advocated the use of concentration camps in the belief they produced “the minimum of suffering”. As many as 14,000 of the 115,000 black South Africans held in British camps died during a conflict he had engaged in on the promise of “great fun galloping about”.

In middle age, he deployed the infamous Black and Tans in the Irish War of Independence in 1919, a force comprised of temporary police constables who developed a reputation for carrying out brutal acts of violence.

As colonial secretary in 1921, he advocated extreme measures against the Kurds rebelling against British rule in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), writing in a government memo: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes... [It] would spread a lively terror.”

His policies as prime minister were often controversial. He refused to supply aid to Bengal during a deadly famine in 1943 (although Britain was itself enduring wartime adversity at the time) and suspended civil liberties in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s.

In that conflict, 11,000 Kenyans were killed and 100,000 held in British detention camps. Many of them were tortured, US president Barack Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama thought to be among them.

Those inclined to make the case against Churchill can find any number of overtly racist statements attributed to him.

He dismissed Kenya’s Kikuyu people as “brutish children”, India as populated by “a beastly people with a beastly religion”, Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung” and denied that a wrong had been done to the indigenous communities of North America and Australia because “a stronger race, a higher-grade race... has come in and taken their place.”

He even suggested Mahatma Gandhi “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back”.

Though Churchill’s attitudes and decision-making could be hateful or extreme – even by the standards of his own time – he was, ultimately, just a man, fallible, complex, contradictory and open to inherited prejudices.

He was raised in a historical moment at which the expanse of the British Empire was so vast the sun never set on its territories and when mining magnate Cecil Rhodes could trumpet its governing class’s alleged exceptionalism as a matter of orthodoxy: “To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life”.