The pro-EU MP Sir Nicholas Soames has claimed once again that his half-American grandfather, Sir Winston Churchill, would have wanted the UK to remain in the European Union.
“The last thing on earth Churchill would have been is an isolationist,” said Soames this week.
Last month Soames made similar remarks in a tweet directed at his fellow MP Boris Johnson.
Although Churchill died in 1965 he has become quite a factor in
the EU referendum debate.
It is certainly true that he was no isolationist – but it is a stretch to extrapolate from that position his automatic support for British membership of the EU.
Apart from anything else, as a half-American Churchill’s instincts would likely have gone against a political tie-up with foreign powers.
In 1930, in an article for America’s Saturday Evening Post,
Churchill wrote: “We have our own dream and our own task. We are with
Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not combined. We are
interested and associated but not absorbed.”
In 1944 he declared: “If Britain must choose between Europe and the
open sea, she must always choose the open sea.”
In 1953 he said: “Where do we stand? We are not members of the
European Defence Community, nor do we intend to be merged in a Federal
European system. We feel we have a special relation to both. This can
be expressed by prepositions, by the preposition “with” but not “of” —
we are with them, but not of them. We have our own Commonwealth and
Empire.”
When reminded of his speech in Zurich in 1946 calling for a “United
States of Europe” he retorted to an aide: “I meant it for them, not
for us.”
And in 1962 Field Marshal Lord Montgomery visited Churchill in hospital
and told reporters he had found him sitting up in bed smoking a
cigar, drinking whisky and “protesting against Britain’s proposed
entry into the [European] Common Market”.
The historian Andrew Roberts concludes: “Churchill would undoubtedly
have been pro-Brexit.”
The dead can’t speak for themselves – but that would certainly seem to
be the balance of probability.