Tomorrow is the birthday of the man who in 1999 was voted the greatest Englishman of the millennium. He was born on the 30^th November, 1874 and died on the 24^th January, 1965. In his 90 years he achieved more than most ordinary men or women would achieve in several lifetimes. He was a soldier, a journalist, a Nobel Prize winning writer, a historian, a painter and the greatest politician and statesman of his age.

Winston Churchill was a true colossus and though not without his faults (is any human being flawless?) he was a politician with qualities that today’s political pygmies can only dream of. If his political career was chequered prior to 1940 his achievements thereafter were nothing short of remarkable. His grim resolve and defiance became the embodiment of British resistance to Nazi tyranny and ultimately proved invaluable to the allied victory in the Second World War.

Still, it’s easy for me or any other Englishman to speak in such terms of one of our own and there is admittedly a danger that we may overstate the case and not always be as objective as we should. I will leave the final word, therefore, to a foreigner, the American political commentator and philosopher, Thomas Sowell who said of Churchill –

“It is enough of a claim to historical greatness for a man to have saved his own country. Winston Churchill may have saved civilisation”.