Jaipur Notebook

Did Winston Churchill, like Donald Trump, also like to ‘grab them by the pussy?’ Last week at the Jaipur Literary Festival, I was on a panel discussion entitled ‘Churchill: Hero or Villain?’, where the Indian biographer Shrabani Basu told a large crowd that at a suffragettes’ demonstration outside Parliament in November 1910, Churchill, then home secretary, had ‘given instructions for police that they can batter the women and assault the women and sexually assault them as well’. He allegedly told policemen to ‘put their hands up their thighs, they can grope them and press their breasts’. ‘Can I just point out that that is completely untrue?’ I intervened. ‘He at no stage ever OK’d the sexual assault of any woman ever. It would be monstrous were it to be true, but there’s no evidence for it.’ To which Ms Basu replied: ‘It’s your word against mine.’ Welcome to post-truth history.

I’d been invited to the city of pink palaces by my friend and Cambridge contemporary Willie Dalrymple, who had also invited me to defend Brexit, speak on the art of biography, and plug my biography of Napoleon. The title of Willie’s best-known book, White Mughals, might well have been autobiographical, so much does his presence dominate the festival that was his brainchild and which is now celebrating its tenth year. He is the pasha of all he surveys.

It’s the world’s largest paid-ticket literary festival, so I was expecting large crowds, but nothing like the 3,000 people who turned up for the Brexit debate, covering the whole front lawn of the Diggi Palace. I was the sole Brexiteer on a stage of six people, but it went off all right, especially when I asked the crowd if, at their ‘midnight hour’ of independence in 1947, they had been told they would have better trade deals and market access by staying in the British empire, they would have foresworn their chance for sovereign independence.