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Charles Moore hails ‘brilliant’ No More Champagne’ in The Daily Telegraph

Charles Moore, author of the official biography of Margaret Thatcher, quoted at length from David Lough’s ‘brilliant new book’ No More Champagne in a recent centre-page editorial article for The Daily Telegraph. The well-known columnist, who edited the newspaper earlier in his career, wrote that Boris Johnson’s opinions deserved no less respect simply because he was a man of many parts and might appear disorganised.  Moore disclosed that he happened ‘by coincidence’ to be reading No More Champagne.  He then illustrate his argument by several excerpts from the book which showed how frequently Churchill was distracted from his politics by the need to earn money by writing.

Read Charles Moore’s full article here; and see below a resulting piece in the editorial column of The Week dated 11 March 2016.

Extract from The Week

But consider Boris’s hero, Winston Churchill. In a new book, No More Champagne, David Lough points out that while German tanks were rolling into Poland in September 1939, Churchill was dictating passages of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, with which he was appallingly late. And while supervising the dispositions of the British fleet off Norway in 1940, he was also busy revising his passages about Edward the Confessor, desperate to satisfy his publishers and reduce his £5,602 overdraft (about £210,000 in today’s money). None of this seemed to affect his capacity to think clearly about the destiny of a continent. There are good arguments to be made against Boris and Brexit, but Sir Evelyn’s doesn’t strike me as one of them.

Jolyon Connell