His senior cabinet colleague Leo Amery recalled how Churchill had once referred to Indians “as a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He might have added that their leader was, in his opinion, the beastliest of them all. By the time he was prime minister a decade later, leading the fight against the Nazis, he remained implacably opposed to independence for Gandhi’s people. Read: The fading memory of South Asia’s partitionĪt the time, Churchill was out of office and seeking to rebuild his political career by working up British sentiment in defense of the empire. It is not clear whether Churchill remembered their meeting when, in the early 1930s, he began attacking Gandhi, whose Salt March had made waves around the world and established him as the preeminent leader of India’s struggle for freedom from British rule. Back then, Gandhi wore a suit and tie, as befitting a lawyer trained in London. The Englishman was then the undersecretary of state for the colonies the Indian, a spokesman for the rights of his countrymen in South Africa. As is his hatred for Mahatma Gandhi, a figure he repeatedly mocked, calling him (among other things) a “malignant subversive fanatic” and “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace.”Ĭhurchill and Gandhi met once, in November 1906. This is especially so in India, my own country, where his undying opposition to freedom for Indians is both well known and widely deplored. Outside the United Kingdom, Churchill has always had a decidedly mixed reputation. When the dust settles, as it soon must, Churchill will revert to being the figure of sanctity that he has always been. The claim provoked vigorous denunciations from prominent politicians, as well as more sober reflections in op-ed pages. So it came as something of a surprise when a senior Labour Party politician recently described him as a “villain” for having ordered troops to fire on striking workers in the Welsh town of Tonypandy in 1910. Within his homeland, Winston Churchill’s colossal contribution to saving his people from Hitler eclipses all else, and he is widely regarded as the greatest Briton of all time. _įollow all AP stories on the British royals at. The queen formally appointed her prime minister in a ceremony at Balmoral Castle on Sept. Truss won a Conservative leadership contest to replace Johnson as leader of the governing party. In July 2022 members of his government began to quit en masse, forcing him to announce his resignation. Johnson will go down in history as the prime minister who “got Brexit done,” but his tenure was defined by his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and scandals over rule-breaking government parties and lapses of ethical judgment. May tried three times to get Parliament to back her Brexit deal and resigned after she repeatedly failed. The three-year tenure of May, Britain’s second female prime minister, was almost entirely consumed by Brexit. He attended the Heatherdown school with the queen’s son, Prince Edward. Cameron was the youngest serving prime minister during Elizabeth’s reign. Brown’s brief time at Downing Street ended after a disastrous election performance for Labour in 2010.
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