Eminent Churchillians

A bestseller in Britain, Roberts's slashing and unsettling reappraisal of key figures in Britain of the period 1940-55 portrays Winston Churchill as a profound, unrepentant racist and white supremacist, even by the standards of his time. Roberts ponders the irony that Churchill's government, because of liberal guilt and postwar fatigue, made no move to limit immigration; the results, he argues, were the imposition of a multiracial society upon an unwilling nation and reliance on low-wage labor, which slowed the drive for greater industrial productivity. The Conservative party hierarchy, Roberts shows, fought an undeclared war against Churchill, privately airing doubts about his leadership even during critical moments such as the Battle of Britain. Lord Louis Mountbatten, in Roberts's scathing profile, was a mendacious hustler whose negligence and incompetence caused many deaths in WWII and contributed to the bloodshed attending India's partition. Also profiled with acid wit are King George VI, ardent supporter of appeasement of Hitler; Walter Monckton, Churchill's minister of labour, conciliator of trade unions; and popular historian Sir Arthur Bryant, a toady and Nazi sympathizer. (July)