The difference between Hitler’s speeches and Churchill’s speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.
He wished that Britain had ‘a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today’. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!
David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a ‘born leader’, declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister.
But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.
They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.
We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth-and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans.
It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench-an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem.
