Andrew Neil on Winston Churchill: when this country needed a hero, he was there

What would Winston Churchill have made of the hysterical debate yesterday, which tried to boil his legacy down to whether he was a ‘villain’ or a ‘hero’? Mr S wonders if the man who liberated Europe might have been amused at the situation, not least by being called a ‘villain’ by a shadow chancellor who thought it fit to wave Mao’s little red book at the dispatch box.

More clear, is that after all the rubbish talked about Churchill’s life on the airwaves yesterday, including some awful Question Time responses, one man seemed to get the tone just right. Andrew Neil, introducing the political show This Week, gave this monologue on Churchill’s legacy and the difficulty of judging historical figures by today’s standards, last night:

"Churchill had many blemishes and they cannot be washed away. But when this country had dire need of a hero, he was there. There was nobody else. And he was heroic, like no Briton before, or since."