Winston Churchill was not a socialist. You know this. I know this. And yet here I am, 18 years of age, inexplicably using my lips and my vocal cords to formulate, in the presence of two Cambridge University history professors who most definitely know that Churchill was not a socialist, the phrase “… and Churchill, in a very real way, was himself a socialist”.
This is an entirely new sentence; an entirely new thought that I have never in my life entertained or elucidated, and which I hear for the first time as it leaves my mouth. Indeed it’s conceivable that nobody in the span of human existence has ever expressed this exact idea in these exact terms. Because Winston Churchill – and two decades on, I really can’t be clear enough on this point – was not a socialist.
