Winston Churchill was famously described by one biographer as “gloriously unfit for office” when he returned to Downing Street in 1951.
Now Roy Jenkins’s appraisal has arguably found new weight with the emergence of a memo that suggests Churchill’s favoured Cold War strategy included nuclear strikes and bombing Russia and China into submission.
The “shocking” strategy of threatening 20 to 30 cities is outlined in a memorandum from Julius Ochs Adler, the New York Times general manager, describing a conversation at Churchill’s home in Kent on Sunday, April 29, 1951. During lunch the 76-year-old statesman was drinking Pol Roger champagne from a glass “of unusual size and shape, holding at least twice as much as those in front of the other places”. Churchill, at that