When this book first came out in 1966 it covered the entire period during which Charles Moran had been Winston Churchill’s physician from 1940 onwards. It caused a good deal of controversy, less because it was in any way hostile to Churchill than because it showed him as a fallible human being. The Churchill family were particularly exercised by its publication. Ran dolph Churchill said that all he asked of Moran was that he should have followed the standards of the ordinary GP, which he had failed to do. Randolph’s sister Mary Soames, denounced the work as disgraceful. It was so, even though her husband Christopher had emerged from it in a near-heroic light, keeping the entire show on the road after Churchill’s stroke in 1953 with the aid of Jock Colville and Lord Salisbury.
Moran was conspicuously less generous about the part played by R. A. Butler, who thought in retrospect that his best chance of becoming prime minister had come and gone in that year of Churchill’s illness. The reasons for his exclusion, when he was 50, did not lie soley in his lack of attraction for what was then the Tory high command. It was thought also, by the same group, that to put anyone except Eden into No. 10 would be ‘unfair to Anthony’. For Eden had also been ill in 1953 and was almost as unwell as Churchill — perhaps more so — even if in a different way.
If the decision had been taken to be as unfair as you like to Anthony (the Tories can be ruthless enough when it suits them) the beneficiary would not have been Butler but, rather, Salisbury. No objection appears to have been taken to his peerage — it does not seem to have come up at all — though allowances have to be made for Moran’s inclination to love a lord and for his sympathy with the reactionary Churchill entourage.
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