Winston Churchill still stands at the centre of the modern Conservative party’s view of Britain and of itself. So it was inevitable that sooner or later the two Tory sides in the argument about Britain’s place in Europe would begin to battle it out for the ownership of Churchill’s view of Europe and as arbiters of which way he might vote in the forthcoming referendum.
On Monday, the two sides went head-to-head as David Cameron laid explicit claim to the wartime prime minister’s support for the remain camp in the cause of European peace stability. Boris Johnson insisted that Churchill wanted no part in the European Union.
Cameron’s speech stressed that Churchill was never by choice an isolationist from Europe in either war or peace. “Churchill never wanted that,” he said at the British Museum. After the war Churchill had argued passionately for western Europe to come together.
A few hours later, Johnson – who is also, in his own solipsistic fashion, a biographer of Churchill – accused the EU of becoming ever more anti-democratic and a force for instability not security. Johnson didn’t actually mention Churchill in his speech. But he did in questions afterwards, when he said that although the European project had kept the postwar peace, Churchill had wanted Britain to play no part in it.
So which of them is right? Which way might Churchill have voted if he was still alive and was, at the age of 141, still on the electoral register?
This is, of course, an unhistorical question. Churchill died in January 1965 so he can’t know what the issue feels like in May and June 2016, more than half a century later. But there are plenty of clues in his long career that suggest where his heart might lie.
One of those is Churchill’s enthusiastic attempt, at the height of the battle for France in 1940, to create political union between Britain and France in a plan which would have made every British citizen a citizen of France and vice versa, with a single government and single armed forces. By any standards, this was a radical sharing of sovereignty that would be difficult for a Brexiteer to swallow at any time.
Cameron is also right that the postwar Churchill was not an isolationist either. He might have, but didn’t, quote from a speech to the 1948 European congress at The Hague in which, then the leader of the opposition, Churchill said this about economic and political cooperation in Europe:
It is said with truth that this involves some sacrifice or merger of national sovereignty and characteristics, but it is also possible to regard it as the gradual assumption by all nations concerned of that larger sovereignty which can also protect their diverse and distinctive customs, and their national traditions.”
There’s not much there for Nigel Farage there, either.
But Johnson is right in one respect. Although Churchill made a speech in Zurich in 1946 in which he called for the creation of a United States of Europe, he did not seem to envisage Britain being part of it. Churchill was a British imperialist. He always saw Britain at the centre of the imperial network, later the Commonwealth. And he was an Atlanticist, not least by birth (his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, was born in Brooklyn), with a profound loyalty to the notion of the Anglosphere, which continues to attract many on the isolationist right today.
Nevertheless, Churchill did not share today’s Brexiteer obsession with pushing these issues to defining choices. He said in a Tory conference speech in 1948 that Britain was part of three “majestic circles” – the empire and Commonwealth, the English-speaking world and a “united Europe”. He called these circles “co-existent” and “linked together”. A year later, speaking to the European Movement, he said also it was essential to persuade the Commonwealth that its “interests as well as ours lie in a United Europe”. Tellingly, whenever Churchill talked about Europe he almost always talked about “we” not “they”.
And he wasn’t just a romantic visionary, he was also a pragmatist. According to his solicitor general Sir John Foster, Churchill became a convert to the European convention on human rights when a woman in the Channel Islands was arrested on a charge of bestiality, for which local medieval law prescribed the mandatory punishment of being burned at the stake.
Churchill sent the Royal Navy to spring the woman from custody and drop her on the French coast. As a result of that case, it was said by one of his ministers, Churchill was a firm supporter of Europe’s overriding written code of rights and principles, which his ministers helped to draw up.
Which way would Churchill vote on 23 June? We cannot know. But everything we know about Churchill’s sense of vision and his pragmatic approach to issues of the day suggests to me that he would be a committed voter to remain.