On the tenth of May, nineteen forty, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain.
That is also the day German forces attacked the Netherlands, Belgium and France. The two things happened within hours of each other. He walked into the job on the single worst morning available.
He was sixty-five years old. He wrote afterwards that he went to bed at three in the morning feeling a sense of profound relief, because at last he had authority to give directions over the whole scene, and that he slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams, because facts are better than dreams.
That is a very strange thing to feel on that particular night. To understand it you have to know what the previous ten years had been like for him.
Churchill spent most of the nineteen thirties out of government, on the back benches, being ignored.
He had made a great many enemies and a great many mistakes. In the previous war he had pushed for a landing at Gallipoli that went catastrophically wrong and cost tens of thousands of lives, and he had never fully lived it down. He had changed political party twice. He was regarded, by a lot of sensible people, as brilliant, unreliable, and finished.
And throughout that decade he stood up in the House of Commons, over and over, and said that Germany was rearming, and that the figures the government was giving out were wrong, and that Britain was not ready.
He was right. He was also tedious about it, and he had cried wolf on other subjects often enough that people had stopped listening, and it is not true that everybody secretly knew he was right and was being cowardly. Most of them genuinely thought he was wrong.
Historians call these his wilderness years. It is worth remembering that at the time, nobody thought they were a prelude to anything. They looked like the end of a career.
Then, in the space of eight months, everything he had been saying turned out to be true, and the country needed somebody who had not spent the decade being reassuring.
The part of this story that most people do not know happened over three days at the end of May, nineteen forty, while the army was still on the beach at Dunkirk.
The War Cabinet was five men. And there was a serious proposal on the table that Britain should find out, quietly, through Italy, what terms Germany might offer.
It was not a mad idea. Look at it from that room. France was collapsing. The entire British army was trapped on a beach with no obvious way home. Britain had no allies who could fight; America was neutral and intended to stay that way. The man arguing for it, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was not a coward or a traitor. He was doing what a foreign secretary is supposed to do, which is to ask what happens if the fighting goes badly.
Churchill argued the other way for three days, in meeting after meeting. His case was partly practical: that any terms offered to a country in Britain's position would be terms that left it disarmed and therefore unable to refuse the next demand, or the one after that.
And partly it was not practical at all. At one point he told the wider cabinet that if this long island story of theirs was to end at last, it had better end only when each one of them was lying on the ground, choking in his own blood.
The men in that room stood up and cheered and crowded round and thumped him on the back. Halifax gave way. The proposal died, and there was no announcement, because officially the argument had never taken place.
The minutes of those meetings stayed secret for thirty years.
It is worth saying plainly what that means. The single most important decision of the war in Europe, the decision that Britain would keep fighting when there was no rational military reason to expect it could win, was taken by five men in a room, by argument, over three days, and the public was told nothing about it at the time or for a generation afterwards.
Churchill's real weapon that summer was the English language, and he used it with a deliberateness that is easy to miss.
His first speech as Prime Minister offered the country nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Read that again and notice what it is not. It is not a promise of victory. It is a promise of difficulty. He led with the bad news, and he did it on purpose, because a promise of easy success would have been destroyed by the first month of bad news.
In June, after France fell, he told Parliament that if the British Empire lasted a thousand years, people would still say that this was its finest hour. He was talking about a country that had just lost, and he was inviting it to imagine being looked back on.
In August, about the fighter pilots, he said that never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. It is one sentence. It contains no facts at all. People repeated it for the rest of their lives.
He wrote most of it himself, out loud, pacing about, dictating to a secretary who typed it in a special layout that looked like lines of poetry so that he could see the rhythm on the page. He rehearsed. He worked on individual words for hours. The apparently spontaneous growl was rehearsed too.
He was not a comfortable person to work for.
He kept impossible hours. He worked in bed in the mornings, surrounded by papers, with a cat somewhere on the covers. He dictated letters from the bath, and continued dictating while getting out of it, which several secretaries mentioned in their memoirs with a certain weariness. He took a proper nap every afternoon in pyjamas, insisted this was the reason he could work until two in the morning, and expected everybody else to keep up without one.
He smoked cigars more or less continuously and drank through the day in a way that alarmed visiting Americans, and yet nobody who worked with him ever recorded seeing him drunk when it mattered, which remains one of the small mysteries of the period.
He designed himself a one-piece zip-up garment for air raids, essentially a giant romper suit, and wore it in front of foreign heads of state.
He could be magnificently unfair. He shouted. He interrupted. He would demand a report be on his desk by morning and then not read it. Several of the generals who worked most closely with him thought he was a menace to good planning, and said so in their diaries, in detail.
And they also, almost without exception, thought that nobody else could have done what he did in nineteen forty.
It is worth being honest that Churchill is not a simple hero, and pretending otherwise does him no favours. Gallipoli was his. His views on India were harsh even by the standards of his own time and his own cabinet, and his handling of the Bengal famine in nineteen forty three is argued about bitterly and fairly. He was on the wrong side of a number of arguments that look obvious now.
Here is the fact that surprises people most. In the general election of nineteen forty five, ten weeks after victory in Europe, the British public voted him out. He lost, heavily. The country that had followed him through the war did not want him running the peace.
He took it about as well as you would expect, which is to say badly, and then he came back and won again six years later.
Here is something to think about tonight. For ten years Churchill was the man who kept saying the unpopular thing, and for ten years being right did him no good whatsoever. Then the situation changed and the same stubbornness that had ruined his career became the exact thing the country needed. How much of being right is timing?