Winston Churchill: one of his era’s great boozers

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s funeral. Depending on your mood, you could mist up while remembering the docklands cranes dipping as his coffin passed or angrily point out that he “sent in the Black and Tans, you know”.

This is a time to consider a complex career. Soldier, journalist, historian and politician, Churchill combined rugged imperialism with a romantic ardour not felt by later, more ideological Conservatives such as Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher.

Shall we ponder his martial errors? Shall we consider his unparalleled oratory?

Oh, maybe another time. Not enough has, this week, been said about Winston Churchill’s status as one of his era’s great boozers. Wither the festive politicians of the past? Whither their gimlets? What of their sidecars?

Among the more diverting recent musings on Churchill, we find an article in the Daily Telegraph seeking to dismantle the great man's reputation as a serious drinker. "Most historians agree that Churchill's supposed abuse of alcohol is a myth," Warren Dockter wrote, before going on, without any apparent injections of irony, to lay out a pattern of alcohol usage that would qualify the late prime minister as an honorary Pogue.

Apparently, Franklin Roosevelt needed three days to recover following a visit by his British counterpart. Dockter admits that, yes, Churchill drank hock at breakfast and whiskey throughout the day, but insists that the scotch was seriously diluted with soda.

The article goes on to explain that, like so many famous aficionados of the drier martini, Winston had a quip concerning how little vermouth was required. Luis Buñuel, the surrealist film-maker, suggested that light should be allowed to pass through the vermouth bottle and then fall on the gin.

Churchill wasn’t even having that. “I would like to observe the vermouth from across the room while I drink my martini,” he said.

Remember that this all comes from an article arguing how little Churchill actually drank.

Look at David Cameron on his bicycle. Look at him running healthily round the park. Rumour has it that when Cameron was a fellow member of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford with Boris Johnson, much claret was swigged and a few restaurants were vigorously dismantled. How long ago that seems. It’s hard to believe that the current Cameron ever starts the day with a mug of German wine.

What set Churchill and the top political boozers apart (not that he had any equals) was their capacity to function unimpaired while lugging round the equivalent of eight mini-bars in their gurgling bellies.

The famously thirsty, if rarely upright, George Brown was not in the same league. Though every bit as fond of the sauce as Churchill, the Labour politician had greater difficulty metabolising it.

Everybody now knows that the story about Brown asking the Archbishop of Lima – allegedly a gorgeous “vision in red” – to dance to the Peruvian national anthem is malevolently apocryphal, but it captures the essence of his bibulous instability so neatly that it functions more effectively than any truth.

Remembering Jim McDaid

Stories about boozy Irish politicians abound. As recently as 10 years ago, Fianna Fáil TD Jim McDaid was stopped driving drunk in the wrong direction on a dual carriageway. The fact that McDaid had spearheaded a campaign against drink driving added juice to the story.

Controversy still surrounds the level of drinking in and around Leinster House. If only they could all hold their whiskey (and their claret, gin, champagne and hock) like Winston Churchill, then . . . No, the theory doesn’t really hold up.

On balance, though politics is more boring when carried out by sober people, it is likely to be more efficient, less abusive and more civilised. Churchill’s brand of aristocratic high living saw him through the war years with cavalier élan. But the more prosaic challenges of peace required the man whose face greets you when you look up “sober” in the dictionary: Clement Atlee.

The Labour leader was a chap with “plenty to be modest about,” according to Churchill. There are worse ways to live a life.

I will find you and I will disarm you

You don’t have to agree with everything Liam Neeson says to admire his forthrightness. Taking a break from growling at animal activists opposed to horse-drawn carriages in New York City, Ireland’s biggest movie star has now come out in favour of tightening US gun laws.

Not surprisingly, the American right has taken offence at a bloody foreigner lecturing them about the second amendment.

Yeah, that’s right. Because a man who grew up in Ballymena during the late 1960s has no understanding of the misery that firearms can inflict on a community. These people!