Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

by Thomas E. Ricks,
The San Francisco Chronicle, May 25, 2017

Throughout the 1930s, Winston Churchill was a political pariah. Determined to keep Adolf Hitler mollified, leaders of his own Tory party, including Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, excluded him from positions of leadership. When he insisted in a speech at Oxford University in 1934 that Germany was arming for war, Churchill was greeted with derisive laughter. In the House of Lords, Baron Ponsonby opined that he had “the greatest possible admiration for Mr. Churchill’s Parliamentary powers, his literary powers, and his artistic powers, but I have always felt that in a crisis he is one of the first people who ought to be interned.”