ANDREW ROBERTS: Reform candidates who fail to honour Churchill

Would Britain have done better to stay out of the Second World War?

Ian Gribbin, the Reform party candidate for Bexhill and Battle, certainly thought so as recently as July 2022, when he posted on the Unherd website that ‘Britain would be in a far better state today had we taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality‘.

It is a shame, he continued, that ‘Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than looking after its own people’.

Elsewhere, Mr Gribbin states that ‘We need to exorcise the cult of Churchill,’ and to recognise that ‘in both policy and military strategy, he was abysmal’.

Although Gribbin has since apologised for these comments, Reform’s official spokesman has not – preferring, instead, to double down on the sentiments when speaking to, of all publications, the Jewish Chronicle.

According to Reform, Gribbin’s remarks were no more than neutral analysis, ‘written with an eye to inconvenient perspectives and truths. That doesn’t make them endorsements, just arguing points in long-distant debates.

‘[Gribbin’s] historical perspective of what the UK could have done in the 1930s was shared by the vast majority of the British Establishment, including the BBC of its day, and is probably true.’

Reform’s dismissive views of Churchill, Britain and our war-time sacrifice are troubling enough. This, after all, is a political party which openly seeks to rival the Conservatives at Westminster.

But Reform’s stance is positively disturbing in the light of the recent revelation that no fewer than 41 of its candidates are Facebook friends with a man called Gary Raikes, the leader of a neo-Nazi group called the New British Union which has called for a ‘Fascist revolution‘.

That’s why it is now imperative that the Party come clean. Just where does it stand on Winston Churchill’s leadership in the Second World War – and on Britain’s determination to oppose the Nazis?

Reform pretends that Gribbin was taking part in a long-running debate about Appeasement in the 1930s, but in fact it appears that Gribbin was talking about agreeing a WARTIME TRUCE with the Nazis.

If Reform UK genuinely thinks that Britain should have remained neutral in the Second World War, the case deserves to be argued on its merits – if only to be despatched more efficiently.

It is a well-known trope that has been put forward over the years by respected historians such as Dr John Charmley, the late Alan Clark MP and Professor Maurice Cowling of Cambridge University, but also, before that, by Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.

It simply doesn’t stand up to serious investigation.

Adolf Hitler offered Britain neutrality on July 19, 1940, ten months into the war and less than a month after he had invaded Russia. He did so in the hope of freeing dozens of German divisions guarding his western flank and transporting them to fight against the Soviet Union in the east.

If Britain had declared neutrality – and had not conducted bombing missions on Germany from August 1940 onwards – the Fuhrer would have been able to use the totality of the Luftwaffe in his invasion of Russia rather than 70 per cent of it.

Even so, Hitler got to within 40 miles of Moscow, where Joseph Stalin’s personal train sat ready to take him to safety beyond the Ural Mountains.

A neutral Britain would have been in no position to help Russia with convoys of tanks and planes.

Our refusal to fight would have fatally confirmed the United States in its isolationism, and thus our country could not have been used as the unsinkable aircraft carrier from which the British, Americans and Canadians launched D-Day – the start of the extraordinary campaign which ultimately liberated Western Europe.

For half a millennium, British strategy has been to oppose the hungry ambitions of European tyrants. This explains why we fought the Spanish Armada, the War of Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars and the Great War.

We took part not because, as Gribbin put it, ‘Britain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality’, but out of clear-sighted realpolitik. We wanted to ensure British security.

Since Adolf Hitler ripped up every treaty he ever signed, no meaningful neutrality would have been possible.

We can be certain that, once he had defeated Russia, Hitler would have turned on us. And in doing so, he would not have been fighting on two fronts – the weakness that eventually destroyed him.

Reform’s spokesman was correct to tell the Jewish Chronicle that Britain lost ‘a massive amount of blood and treasure’ because of Churchill’s decision to fight on, but it was a fraction of what she would have lost if she’d had to confront the Nazis later – and without Russia and America as allies.

Britain did not go to war to save Jewry, but Churchill was inspired by his moral loathing of Nazism. And Mr Gribbin, who points out that he has a Russian-Jewish maternal grandmother, probably owes his life to this.

His grandmother is unlikely to have survived had Hitler controlled the entire European continent from Brest to the Urals throughout the 1940s.

The cost for Britain was heavy: the loss of empire abroad and the rise of socialism at home. But these things were the necessary price to pay for the untarnishable glory of contributing to the crushing of Nazism. The empire was on the way out by the mid-1930s, anyhow.

Equally, if the Soviets had defeated the Nazis, a neutral Britain would also have been in a desperate situation, with Stalin – every bit as expansionist as Hitler – as the master of Europe.

Without a British and American army in France, there would have been nothing to prevent the Red Army reaching Paris.

We would have been faced with a communist Europe, one which posed just as much of a long-term threat to British security as the Nazis.

Winston Churchill’s decision to fight on when Hitler offered peace was his greatest single act of statesmanship. And it is disgraceful that the Reform Party’s official spokesman should denounce it.

As it happens, Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, is a military history geek and, like me, an admirer of Churchill. He, for one, knows that Churchill’s military strategy, so far from being ‘abysmal’, was inspired.

It was Churchill who devised military strategies for North Africa and the Mediterranean and then sold them to the Americans, ensuring the Germany First policy – committing the U.S. to war in Europe – was adopted by President Franklin Roosevelt.

It was Churchill who ensured that D-Day did not take place until total air dominance was achieved and the Battle of the Atlantic won, and he who kept the Big Three – himself, Stalin and Roosevelt – together, bravely travelling a combined total of 120,000 miles outside the United Kingdom to do so.

At the very least, Gribbin is historically ignorant – certainly too ignorant to be a parliamentary candidate – and the Reform party should sack him on that ground alone.

But it also needs to root out other members who are more interested in PR and posturing than honouring the memory of Winston Churchill.

How, otherwise, can Reform criticise Rishi Sunak over missing one part of the D-Day commemorations – when its own spokesmen are suggesting that D-Day should never have happened in the first place?

Is this the sort of ‘patriotism’ that British voters really want to choose?

Andrew Roberts is the author of Churchill: Walking With Destiny.