‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts,” Ron DeSantis said, as he pulled out of the race to lead the Republican party. It was a strange way to announce that what counts – the continuing bit – is the thing you don’t have. Also, it is quite contestable, for such a short statement; failure isn’t necessarily fatal, but it does depend on what you have failed at. Still, what set most pedants afire wasn’t the substance but the attribution: DeSantis said it was Winston Churchill; the International Churchill Society disagreed. Meh, let’s not split hairs. It is a sort of obvious notion, made of words, so it is surely the kind of thing Churchill would have said, had he said it.
This is my favourite kind of Churchill-eering, where politicians summon his ghost simply by adopting similar rhetoric. Penny Mordaunt’s fabulous “Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!” before going on to add, “Never forget those who went before us and remember that without a Churchill, you can’t have a Zelenskiy” during her speech to last year’s Tory conference was a classic of the genre: a pitch-perfect throwback to “We shall fight on the beaches”, having first removed the beaches, the landing grounds, the fields, the streets, the hills, any obvious enemy, any clear sense of what was being defended and any endgame. Churchill here stands in as an all-purpose fighty-man, and as such wouldn’t make much of a cultural export, since everyone’s history has those.
It took Boris Johnson to repackage Churchill for an international audience, not so much with his book, The Churchill Factor, as in his strategically idiotic attack on Barack Obama in 2016. He was mayor of London then, when the most he could screw up was planning on the Vauxhall gyratory which, to be fair, quickly cohered as a literal and figurative shrine to the emptiness of late capitalism, and is probably the most coherent thing he ever did. But in his downtime, he wrote a column for the Sun, enraged that Obama had moved a bust of Churchill out of the Oval Office (a full seven years previously), contending that the “part-Kenyan president” was motivated by anti-colonialism, “ancestral dislike” of the British empire. To follow the logic, Johnson, having German heritage, would also have reason to dislike Churchill, but he is not doing logic, he is focusing on Obama’s race, which I feel Obama should have met with unending hellfire, rather than a mild: “No, we just moved Churchill to a different corridor.”
Too late to worry about that now: Churchill, in Johnson’s new frame, stood not only for nostalgia, a comforting world order with the posh at the top, but also for white supremacy and colonial brutality as an essential part of that past. Winston was now a mascot for the anti-woke warriors, the embodiment of their core principles: the past is better than the present; the world makes more sense with the posh at the top, just listen to their lovely cadence; the dicey bits – racist exploitation and carnage – are expiated by nostalgia (it was all a long time ago) and implicitly celebrated by it (weren’t things better then?), and anyone who disagrees hates their country.
It makes no sense as an export, least of all to the US, which had made its feelings plain about the yoke of the British empire 99 years before Churchill was born. It doesn’t even make much sense as a British narrative, which had previously been happy to dial down Churchill’s imperialism, concentrating on its more nuanced expressions, and use him mainly as the totem of Britain’s successful fight against fascism. In Johnson’s revision, Churchill the Coloniser is as valorised as Churchill the anti-Nazi. Its nonsensical nature is why it’s the perfect cultural export: stripped of all meaning, just some loud, posh vibes, caricatured to the point where you can’t remember what the original looks like, political rhetoric’s answer to Saltburn.
Loth as I am to get into combat about who knows Churchill the best, between me, Johnson and DeSantis, we all know this, right? He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid; he would have hated this. He would be turning in his grave.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
