Churchill Didn’t Say That
by Christopher Hitchens
Slate
January 24, 2011
The King’s Speech is riddled with gross falsifications of history.
Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter in The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer and the latent Anglophile. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history. One of the very few miscast actors””Timothy Spall as a woefully thin pastiche of Winston Churchill””is the exemplar of this bizarre rewriting. He is shown as a consistent friend of the stuttering prince and his loyal princess and as a man generally in favor of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis of the abdication.
In point of fact, Churchill was””for as long as he dared””a consistent friend of conceited, spoiled, Hitler-sympathizing Edward VIII. And he allowed his romantic attachment to this gargoyle to do great damage to the very dearly bought coalition of forces that was evolving to oppose Nazism and appeasement. Churchill probably has no more hagiographic chronicler than William Manchester, but if you look up the relevant pages of The Last Lion, you will find that the historian virtually gives up on his hero for an entire chapter. Continue reading “Hitchens: Churchill Didn’t Say That”