The greatest one-man show on earth

Winston Churchill was an extraordinary human phenomenon, and Lord Jenkins is quite a phenomenon too. An MP for 30 years, a famously reforming Labour Home Secretary, hero-founder of the Social Democratic Party (long since merged into the Lib Dems), Chancellor of Oxford University, recipient of honours and awards innumerable, member of six London clubs ... and well-known biographer of British prime ministers. Having written about his own Life at the Centre (1991) and appraised Nine Men of Power (1975), he has worked up to the most powerful man and premier of them all.

Size matters, to all but the most leisured of prospective readers. Churchill biographies come in all sizes, from flyweight "brief lives", like Lord Blake's and Piers Brendon's, to the sumo amplitude of Sir Martin Gilbert's eight volumes. At 900 pages, Jenkins weighs in among the heavies. Nothing much can be added to the facts since Gilbert set them in concrete, but there is still room for illustrative anecdotes and commentary and - a weightier matter - critical evaluation of Churchill's performance in each of the successive roles and scenes of the one-man show he ran through our island story from 1898, the year of his first book, to November 1958, when he received, from the hands of General de Gaulle, the Croix de la Liberation in Paris: the last important public event he could manage.

A great man's lifetime can be studied at every level from close to the ground up to the mountain peaks above the clouds. Jenkins prefers to work near ground level, and is at his inimitable best on Churchill's relations with the vast variety of people he had to live and work with. His comings and goings are, however, tracked so closely and vivaciously that some of the more controversial high points of the Churchill story get short-changed.

For example: he deals fairly and at some length with the wretched Dardanelles/Gallipoli affair in 1915, concluding in the end that Churchill was more at fault than he was ever able to admit; but when he gets to the Second World War, he says next to nothing about the great bombing offensive to which Churchill devoted much energy and agonising. He has a good long chapter on those tense "Twenty-One Days in May" 1940 when Churchill, catapulted into Number 10, was confronted by so many disasters that, near the end of the month, he had to spend hours arguing in the War Cabinet that Britain should fight on rather than seek a negotiated peace. But when we get to the postwar years, when Churchill became visible to the young Roy Jenkins MP, although there is a most thorough and illuminating inquiry into how the great man got his books published and how much he made from them, there is little about the Nuclear Deterrent and not much about "Europe".

The latter is strange, considering that Roy Jenkins has famously been as good a European as a Briton can be, serving at last as President of the Commission. There are fewer than six pages on Churchill's postwar Europeanism, and nothing relative to the fascinating question: did the founder of the Special Relationship find that it mattered more to him than Europe, and what would he have thought of Britain's Americanisation? That Churchill after 1950 shifted away from his early dedication to the European movement is beyond dispute. Jenkins credibly explains it as visceral attachment to our imperial legacy, not to mention his party's insularity. By the 1960s, however, the old Empire had gone, leaving Britain as pig-in-the-middle between Europe and the United States. Churchill's clever and observant private secretary John Colville, ruminating on this matter in the 1970s, wrote that "deep down Churchill, for all his American blood and his British bulldog spirit, was a dedicated European". What would Lord Jenkins say to that?

He has been at home for so long in the societies of literature and politics, it is not surprising that his book is rich in agreeable stories and digressions. The best of the stories, one that Churchill himself would have loved, is about the visit to Washington in 1944 of his sparring partner General de Gaulle.

Wishing to pay his respects to General Pershing, commander of the American army in France 1917-18, de Gaulle was taken to the Appalachian old people's home where the ancient warrior was still, just, alive. The sight of a French uniform stirring something in the Pershing brain, he enquired: how was his old friend Marshal Petain? De Gaulle, who had been fighting for four years to unseat that puppet of Nazi Germany and who was under the Vichy regime's sentence of death, admirably replied: "La derni?re fois que je l'ai vu, il se portait bien."

The digressions may not always advance the argument, but they are good fun and usually instructive: for example, how far leading members of the Cabinet took their observance in 1915 of the "King's Pledge" to abstain from alcoholic beverages for the duration of the war; the king virtuously kept to it, but Churchill went on drinking as usual.

A curious feature is the recurrent appearance of the other prime ministers whom Jenkins has biographised, especially Gladstone, whom Jenkins oddly uses as the principal yardstick for measuring Churchill's stature. Fans of Jenkins's biography of Gladstone may be glad to meet this spectre at the feast, but not everyone else will understand it.

His conclusion that Churchill was "the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street" is not one that Churchill himself would have disputed. His grandson Nicholas Soames told Jenkins that when he was six he once sneaked past the guardians into the old man's study and, starry-eyed, asked: "Grandpapa, is it true you are the greatest man in the world?" "Yes," replied Churchill, "and now bugger off."

Churchill by Geoffrey Best was published earlier this year by Hambledon.