The Tory Party has been in power for eighty-five of the past 135 years. In 2019 they won their largest parliamentary majority in more than three decades. They have had a long way to fall since, and they’ve done it at incredible speed.

As Geoffrey Wheatcroft shows, we have witnessed not simply the collapse of the party but the shattering of its very foundations. Bloody Panico! opens the sorry tale with the Tories’ return to power in 2010, with ‘Call Me Dave’
Cameron at the helm. The turmoil of the referendum followed, as Boris championed a Leave campaign he didn’t believe in for supporters with no clear idea what they were demanding.

Beyond the pantomime of Boris, Truss’s kamikazee premiership, and the squirming managerial tedium of Sunak, the party is riven by resentment and confusion. It is a maelstrom of petty and shameless in-fighting. The Tories’ ancient instinct for survival has deserted them, along with any shred of concern for public well-being.
The next general election could see them cast into the wilderness for decades.

Leading political commentator Geoffrey Wheatcroft argues that this is an existential crisis for the party, a tipping point in British political history.

A radical biography for a new generation

In A.J.P. Taylor’s words, Churchill was ‘the saviour of his country’ when he became prime minister in 1940. Yet he was also a deeply flawed character.

Giving due credit to Churchill’s achievements but making no secret of his failures, Geoffrey Wheatcroft takes a radically different approach to other biographies. Going far beyond a reappraisal of a life and a career, he reveals the complex shadow Churchill has cast over post-war British history and contemporary politics.

Telling the story of Churchill’s extraordinary life and the equally fascinating one of his legacy, Churchill’s Shadow focuses on how we as a nation have been living in the grip of his self-written myth ever since his death.

‘This is the indispensable biography of Churchill for the post-Brexit 2020s’ David Kynaston, author of On the Cusp: Days of ’62

‘Wheatcroft is a skilled prosecutor with a rapier pen…this could be the best single-volume indictment of Churchill yet written’ New York Times

‘A clear-eyed, incisive and superbly balanced account of Churchill, the man and the myth’ Robert Gildea, author of Empires of the Mind

‘Stimulating, erudite and above all entertaining’ ROBERT HARRIS

In A.J.P. Taylor’s words, Churchill was ‘the saviour of his country’ when he became prime minister in 1940. Yet he was also a deeply flawed character, whose personal ambition would cloud his political judgement. While Churchill’s Shadow gives due credit to the achievements, it also reveals some spectacular failures; indeed, it appears that for every Finest Hour there were many more Gallipolis.

But this book goes beyond the reappraisal of a life and a career: it reveals that Churchill has cast a complex shadow over post-war British history and contemporary politics – from the ‘Churchillian stance’ of Tony Blair taking the country to war in Iraq to the delusion of a special relationship with the United States to the fateful belief in British exceptionalism: that the nation can once again stand alone in Europe.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft takes a radically different approach to other biographies and studies of Churchill, zooming in on crucial moments in his life that help us understand the man in his many contradictions. Churchill’s Shadow both tells the story of his extraordinary life and the equally fascinating one of his legacy, focusing on how Churchill was viewed by contemporaries and those who came after.

As we struggle to work out who we are as a nation, how our complex legacies of war and empire shape our past and our present, we do that in the long shadow of Churchill. He set about writing his own myth during his lifetime and it is a myth – with all the delusions and hangovers myths bring – in whose grip we have been living in ever since.