Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny and 20 other acclaimed works, dismantles conspiracy-driven claims like Darrell Cooper’s (boosted by Tucker Carlson) that Churchill prolonged WWII or was a "Jewish puppet." Roberts counters Cooper’s $30M bribery allegation—Churchill was broke, took posthumous funds from Strakoch, and supported Zionism personally—not politically. He defends Churchill’s 1941 alliance with Stalin as pragmatic: Hitler’s 27M dead in Europe threatened Britain’s century-old anti-fascist legacy, while Stalin’s Eastern Front killed 80% of German soldiers. Roberts’ skepticism extends to modern Britain’s socialist policies, immigration surges, and economic decline, framing Churchill’s post-war struggles as a cautionary tale for today’s populist backlash. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Lord Andrew Roberts, a tremendous historian, great historian.
He's the author of 20 books, including the award-winning bestseller, Churchill Walking with Destiny.
His book on Napoleon, his biography of Napoleon, is literally one of my favorite history books and was incredibly helpful in helping me to understand modern Europe.
All of this is important because I've been talking a lot on my podcast about the lack of information, trustworthy information we are getting now in this country and how it makes it very difficult to use your other faculties like the faculty of reason if there's no content in it.
And we see the results of that in a lot of places, a lot of conspiracy theories, a lot of crazy ideas.
And among those crazy ideas has been the ones being put forward by Tucker Carlson, including his interview with the history buff Darrell Cooper, whom he called the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.
My own run-in with Darrell Cooper was when I was writing my book, Kingdom of Cain, I included a quotation from him, even though I found his facts all over the place.
I was writing about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and he did have this interesting quote.
And I had to take it out because as I was doing the final edit, he came on with the kind of ignorance that I think is not natural, just arises from philosophical immorality, I guess is the best way to call it.
So I wanted to bring on an actual great popular historian and talk about World War II and Winston Churchill and his role in our history.
Andrew, thank you so much for coming on.
I'm a true fan and I'm glad to meet you.
Well, it's a delight, Andrew.
Thank you very much for inviting me on the show.
I thought it was very interesting what you said about Nietzsche because, of course, Mr. Cooper considers himself to be a neo-Nietzchian.
That's part of where his sort of philosophy of history, insofar as one can say that, about a podcast who's never written a history book in his life, like Mr. Cooper, where he takes his sort of overall worldview from, I think.
It's very interesting.
The quotation I was using was this offhanded remark he made about similarities in the life of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, which was itself true, although it was surrounded by all kinds of mistakes in timing and so forth.
And I don't want you to have to make a career out of debunking this guy.
There are other things about this I want to talk about.
But I think we do have to talk about a little bit of this because Tucker turned him into one of the most popular podcasts on the air and gave him a lot of credibility.
His thesis was that Churchill was the main villain of the war because he was responsible for extending it from the mere invasion of Poland, Germany's invasion of Poland, which is a really interesting argument.
He left out the Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, parts of Lithuania, all those things that he had invaded before that.
But his idea basically was that Hitler was totally surprised when he invaded Poland and France and England declared war on him.
And Churchill then irrationally pursued attacks on civilian enclaves, hoping to get the U.S. involved.
And that was his entire war strategy.
So I'm wondering if you could just address the premise, if not the whole thing.
Yes, well, the premise, you mentioned about mistimings with regard to his views on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
And with regard to this central thesis of his argument against Churchill, the whole thing is based on a massive mistiming.
First of all, Winston Churchill was not even in the government when the Second World War broke out.
And he was not prime minister when Hitler invaded Luxembourg and Holland and Denmark.
Shortly afterwards, obviously, he also invaded France, by which time Winston Churchill was prime minister.
So to blame somebody for the escalation of World War II when he wasn't in the key deciding roles is just a straightforward error of fact.
What it's more interesting in, it seems to me, is why he's making these attacks, which I'm sure we'll come on to in the course of our conversation.
Yeah, I mean, he gets very quickly, as almost everyone that Tucker brings on does, to the evil Jews who had, according to him, had loaned Churchill as a group, I guess, is the way he put it, had loaned Churchill money and were manipulating to get him into office because he was a Zionist or at least was willing to pretend to be a Zionist.
Absolutely.
Needless to say, this is total, what we call in England, bulls.
The idea that Winston Churchill altered his views in any way because of anybody who lent him money is to fatally misunderstand the kind of person Winston Churchill was.
He was broke pretty much all his life.
Constantly spent more money than he earned, but he didn't care because what he tended to do was to write articles and books and so on and be able to pay off his debts.
He did take money from some people who were Jewish.
He also took a lot of money from people who weren't.
He was a Zionist.
He did believe in the state of Israel and so on.
But the idea that that somehow affected his politics is complete rubbish.
The fact is that the Jewish people who gave him money did so because he liked Jews.
He didn't like Jews and follow their Welten Schauerung against Adolf Hitler because he was being given money.
So that's the first point.
The second point is that actually people such as Sir Henry Strakoch gave him money in their wills when they died.
That's how he got the large amount of money from Sir Henry Strakoch.
One could hardly accuse Strakoch therefore of trying to bribe him, considering the fact that he'd only get the money when Strakoch was dead.
That does make it a little difficult for him to manipulate the government.
I guess the narrative that Tucker Carlson is pushing, and I don't know if Darryl Cooper is pushing this, is basically the idea that we should have been fighting Stalin all along, that Churchill's choice to ally with Stalin, even though he knew what Stalin was as well.
Is that a mystery?
Is there some reason why he made the choice that it was Hitler who had to be fought, Hitler, who he repeatedly called a thug?
Yes, Hitler was in the position to completely dominate Europe, to take the hegemonic position in Europe that had hitherto in British history been the number one danger to Britain.
You know, always for the last 500 years, we've tried to ensure that the Channel ports should not fall under the control of a hegemonic European power.
That was why we fought against Philip II of Spain at the time of the Spanish Armada, against Louis XIV at the time of the Wars of Spanish Succession, against Napoleon, against the Kaiser in the First World War and so on.
You know, it's self-protection.
Stalin and Russia posed no threats to France and Belgium and so on.
Adolf Hitler did.
So that's the strategic side.
The other side is that Churchill recognized in Hitler a profoundly evil man who was placing race in the sort of position that Stalin also placed class, but he was wiping out the whole basis of European civilization and made it clear that he wanted to and he was in a position to.
The idea that we should have gone to war against Stalin, who was first of all, of course, on the other side of Europe.
And also the major threat to Hitler is ludicrous.
Stalin, if you work out actually what ultimately destroyed Hitler, it was the fact that for every five Germans who were killed in the Second World War, four died on the Eastern Front.
So the Russians killed 80% of German soldiers, not bombing them from the air.
That was done by the British and the Americans.
But when it came to actual stopping Hitler, you couldn't do it without Stalin, frankly.
Churchill's Alcohol Myth00:12:53
Right.
So it was strategic in that regard.
I'm wondering, Churchill's purpose here was basically to save Europe and he did need the help of the United States.
Is it fair to say that his entire strategy, I mean, I've heard the old story, I don't even know if the story is true of Churchill reacting to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by saying, ah, well, then we've won.
But was that in fact?
Yeah, he said that after he heard the news, he slept the sleep of the saved.
He knew from that moment on that it was going to be all right and they'd see their way through.
Now, of course, it wasn't the one question that can be asked about that is that, of course, Hitler didn't declare war on America until four days after Pearl Harbor.
He was under no obligation to do so.
But what Churchill spotted was that once the Roosevelt administration in the United States was in the war against Japan, it would only be a matter of time before it was also fighting the stronger of the two fascist enemies, which was always Germany.
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There are two other points I want to address.
And as I say, I hate to just talk to you about this one historian, but it is kind of important because of the attention it's gotten.
One which struck me as the silliest thing that this guy, Cooper, said, was that Hitler didn't really reveal his anti-Semitism until late in life.
And he posed the Holocaust as kind of a mercy killing.
I mean, I shouldn't laugh, but it was so ridiculous that here they had invaded all these people, these places, taken all these prisoners, didn't know what to do with them.
And it was kinder in some sense to just wipe them out than to let them starve to death.
An amazing claim, really, but I think I have to ask you to address it.
Well, let's take the two claims.
The first idea that he comes up with about Hitler not really pursuing anti-Semitism until the time of the mass industrialized killing in the Holocaust in 1941 onwards.
And this is utterly ludicrous.
Any reading of Hitler's speeches or looking at the from going back to the 1920s, of course, long before he came to power in January 1933, then what he did in power in January 1933 onwards with regard to the various anti-Semitic laws that he passed, the Nuremberg laws, laws which forced Jews out of professions and to wear the Yellow Star and so on.
Then the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the East, in Poland and elsewhere from the September 1939 on to 1941, where there were mass killings, up to 2 million or so before you even have Auschwitz and the other death camps opened.
So there is no doubt whatsoever that Hitler was driven primarily by anti-Semitism from the very earliest days of his political career, long before he became Führer.
And when he did become Fuhrer, he did everything he could to put these anti-Semitic actions into place.
And no serious historian has, not one serious historian on either side of the Atlantic has come out in favor of or in any way supported the remarks made by Mr. Cooper on this subject.
With regard to the second aspect of it, which was, remind me, sorry, I was getting overexcited just then.
What was the, oh yes, the Russian civil, the Russian, largely Russian, but also others, prisoners of war.
The fact is that they had no, the reason that they had no plans to feed the 3.5 million or so Russian prisoners of war was not that they were so surprised about having captured them.
They had gone into enormous planning.
The German general staff planned Operation Barbarossa down to the last Tintak.
The fact is that they wanted them to starve to death.
They were perfectly happy about killing them in vast numbers, which of course they did in their millions.
The way in which Darryl Cooper is essentially swallowing what was ultimately Nazi propaganda is shocking considering that we've had 80 plus years of the truth being very, very plain to see.
Yeah, it's also incredibly well documented that the idea that we're being conned is incredible in itself.
The only other part of this I want to address, and I want to actually address this as a way of moving into a more general conversation about Churchill, is Darrell Cooper called him a psychopath, talked about him playing with toy soldiers and being an alcoholic.
Now, I have to admit, having read how just reading how much Churchill drank in a day has made me hard for me to stand up straight.
It's an amazing quantity of liquor, and yet he always seemed to behave in great control of himself.
Yeah, but I think it's very important with this, you know, because this has been put about, it started to be put about by Goebbels during the Second World War about the idea of Winston Churchill being an alcoholic.
He was not an alcoholic.
He had a rhinocerine capacity for alcohol.
It's true.
He could drink you and I under the table without any trouble whatsoever.
However, that doesn't make him a drunk.
He was, in the whole course of the Second World War, all the people around him who are keeping diaries and watching him closely, including Harry Hopkins, who was sent over by FDR partly in order to find out whether or not Churchill was a drunk, recognize that A, he exaggerated how much he drank.
Secondly, in the evenings, he would have tiny amounts of whiskey and huge amounts of soda, although he would be carrying on drinking that until about three o'clock in the morning, night after night.
He was somebody who was the master of his alcoholic intake rather than the servant of it.
And there's a marvelous story about C.P. Snow, one of his friends, who said that Winston couldn't have been an alcoholic because no alcoholic could have drunk that much.
And in a sense, that was right.
He kept his sort of blood sugar alcohol level at a pretty much level way all the through the Second World War.
But what we don't have is any example of decisions taken as a result of him being drunk.
There was one occasion in the, I think, March of 1944 when this happened.
And what the people did was to hold another meeting the next day as though the one the previous night hadn't happened.
And so that was the way they got around the fact.
But to get drunk, by the way, one day in a war of a couple of thousand days with the kind of stress and strains on the British Prime Minister at that time, I think it's extraordinary he didn't drink more.
Talking to Lord Andrew Roberts, the historian, author of Churchill Walking with Destiny, and also his biography of Napoleon, which is, as I say, one of my favorite history books.
One of the amazing things about Winston Churchill is that had he died at the age of 60, which was entirely possible, his reputation would have been very different.
And I'm wondering a lot of people who hate him look to World War I and his behavior in World War I and think it a vast failure, but it doesn't seem that way entirely to me.
I mean, Gallipoli was a disaster, but he was not wholly responsible for it.
I'm wondering, what would his reputation have been, do you think, if he had not made it to World War II?
I think it would have overall been pretty positive.
Remember, he was the man who made the Royal Navy ready for the First World War.
He made sure that we were in a position to ship the British Expeditionary Force across to France and Flanders without the loss of a single man in 1914.
And the way in which the Royal Navy defeated the German Imperial Navy was largely down to him and everything he'd done as first sea lord, sorry, first Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 onwards.
So that's very positive.
He also, of course, was tremendously brave in the First World War himself after the disaster of Gallipoli, which, as you say, was not entirely his fault, but nonetheless was his idea.
He went into the trenches and took part in over 30 trench raids, was incredibly brave there.
He didn't need to.
He was a married man in his 40s.
We weren't calling them up to go to the trenches, but he volunteered and did that.
So, no, his First World War was not the train wreck that, as you say, his detractors make it out to be.
My father-in-law, who's a very talented historical novelist, he wrote a book called The Year of the French about the Irish Rebellion.
And he, as an Irish partisan, he once said to me, goading me, that Winston Churchill was a terrible man.
And I said to him, oh, come on, he single-handedly saved Western civilization.
And my father-in-law, who's also very witty, said, yes, but it's the only good thing he ever did.
So I wonder if from an Irish perspective, was there reason to hate Churchill outside of Britain, his heroism in Britain?
Well, I don't think the Irish should hate him.
And when it came to Western civilization, it would have been helpful if the Irish had done a little bit more, frankly, i.e. declare war against Hitler, rather than have Éamon de Valera, their president, cross Berlin to sign the Book of Condolence when Adolf Hitler died.
No, overall, he was a very good thing for the rest of the world, especially, obviously, those parts of Europe that were attacked by the Nazis, but also in waking up everybody to the threat of Stalin in the Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri in the March of 1946.
Graza Olive Oil Sizzle00:02:59
He foresaw the threat posed by the Kaiser before the First World War, the threat posed by Hitler, and then afterwards, the threat posed by Stalin to Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
So, you know, these three great moments and dangers for Western civilization, in each case, he foresaw them and he prescribed what to do about them.
So really, those, I think, there's nobody else who has that kind of other single statesman of the 20th century who has that sense of foresight, allied, of course, to the oratory and the capacity for rhetoric to actually get people to do something about it.
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One of his most wonderful pieces of writing is his memoir of his youth, which is just one of the great reads, I think, in English literature.
Blessing in Disguise00:07:56
He was so, at least as he depicts himself, and I think as history depicts him, he was such a courageous person and such a witty and informed person.
Did he perceive himself to be a great man that early on?
Did he think himself destined for the kinds of things that he ended up doing?
Oh, far earlier, far earlier than writing that book, which was published in 1930.
When he was 16 years old, he told his friend at Harrow School, Merlin Evans, that there shall be great and terrible dangers that shall fall upon London and Britain, and I shall be instrumental in defeating them.
He actually believed that his destiny from the age of 16 onwards was to do exactly what he half a century later did do as prime minister during the Second World War.
And that sense of destiny, it's very interesting.
I go into this in some detail in my book, Churchill Walking with Destiny.
I chose that title because Churchill himself used it in the last paragraph of the first volume of his Second World War memoirs.
He was talking about what happened, how he felt the day that he became prime minister on the 10th of May, 1940, the same day that Hitler unleashed Blitzkrieg in the West.
And he said, I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.
And the reason he felt this strong sense of destiny was all the amazing number of times in his life that he had cheated death.
Car crashes, plane crashes, near drowning, a house fire that he was caught in.
He left a dugout in the First World War.
Five minutes later, it was hit by a German whiz-bang and everybody inside was decapitated.
He was involved in any number of near-death experiences on four campaigns on five continents, sorry, five campaigns on four continents.
And so this led him to believe that he was a man of destiny.
After the war, after World War II, he was kind of unceremoniously kicked out of office, it seems to me.
Why was that?
No, it was because the people, the British people, after six years of war, first of all, didn't want the Conservatives because they had been the appeasers before the war, who they blamed for the outbreak of war, quite rightly in many cases.
And Winston Churchill was only standing in one of the 650 constituencies, which he won, of course.
But we don't have a presidential system in Britain.
And so he lost.
And he wasn't expecting it because the crowds were so huge cheering him, but they cheered him out of sort of thanks for the war.
But then they voted Labour to have all the free stuff that the socialists were offering in the 1945 general election.
And when his wife Clementine, as the results were pouring in and it was clear there was a landslide against him, said that it might be a blessing in disguise, Churchill replied, well, from where I'm sitting, it seems quite effectively disguised.
I know you can't answer this with any kind of certainty, but I'm wondering, just using your imagination, what would have been different if he had won, if he had been kept in?
I think it would have killed him.
He was 70.
By then, he was exhausted.
He desperately needed a time off.
He would have, of course, been one of the first world leaders.
He actually was in opposition, the first world leader who was able to warn against Stalin and the imperialism of the Soviet Union after the Second World War.
But nonetheless, the strain and stress to have continued with that would probably have polished him off.
So in fact, Clemy was right.
It was a blessing in disguise.
He was able to go off to write his history of the Second World War, to go off on these long holidays to Morocco, painting, and basically rebuilding himself, recharging his batteries and later becoming prime minister again in the October of 1951.
That second time, I guess it was about four years, five years.
Were there accomplishments then that should be remembered?
Not really.
No, it wasn't the best period.
I mean, one looks back on the 1950s actually as being quite a golden age.
You had almost full employment, you had very low inflation, you had lots of areas of British public life that were pretty superior, frankly, to what we have today.
But that said, he was pretty much past it, especially as he had a stroke in the July of 1953, the month after the coronation.
And he was 80 years old in the November of 1954 and still prime minister.
And he was going a bit deaf.
It wasn't his finest hour, what's called the Indian Summer Premiership.
My last question.
I lived in England through most of the 90s.
And one thing I learned from doing that is you really can't know another country until you've lived there.
And if you're not living there, the news you get, especially if you live in America, is very distorted.
What do you think about what's happening now in Great Britain?
It looks to an American, through the news that we're receiving, it looks dire.
It looks like the country is in terrible danger of vanishing altogether.
Is that true or is that just the way we're hearing the news?
No, I'm afraid it is true.
Yeah, these are not good days for Britain at the moment.
We've got a socialist government which is hiking up taxes for everybody and which doesn't seem to be able to do anything about the massive immigration, especially illegal immigration that we are seeing coming over the English Channel.
We've got a sort of very much class-based, class-resentment government that plays on the politics of envy, which is very unattractive, of course, and I think bad for our politics.
We've got a right-wing party to the right of the Conservatives, which is essentially a populist party somewhat along the same lines as the populist parties that we're seeing in Europe.
It's not anti-Semitic, which is unusual for populist parties, but at least it's not overtly and not yet.
But it's not good British politics, quite frankly.
We've got food price inflation that's pretty much out of control now and a government that doesn't seem to know what to do about it, even though it has a huge majority and it's going to be in power for the next three years.
So I'm quite down on my lovely, beautiful country at the moment.
But then, of course, it's worthwhile saying that I would be saying this because I am a peer, I have a member of the House of Lords, and I sit on the Conservative benches there.
So you can't really expect anything but a bit of doom and gloom from me.
But I have to say, it's worse than it's been for a very long time.
No, okay.
Absolutely Terrific Biography00:00:37
Lord Andrew Roberts, a wonderful historian, author of Churchill Walking with Destiny, also a terrific biography of Napoleon.
I hope you'll come back.
It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you and I hope to see you again.
I'd love to do that, Andrew.
Yes, please.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Once again, Lord Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill Walking with Destiny.
And if you have a chance to read his Napoleon biography, absolutely terrific stuff.
Really readable, informed, and rich and deep, but just the way history ought to be, not the way we get it too often on our podcast.
Come on over on Friday for the Andrew Clavin Show.