ABSTRACT
Had Churchill retired from politics in the 1930s he would have been remembered as a modestly successful politician who had secured some claim to fame through his involvement with Lloyd George in building up the Liberal government’s welfare state between 1906 and 1914. Given his talent, that would have been something of a failure. It was the Second World War which rescued his reputation and raised him to the status of one of the most successful British politicians of the twentieth century.
