Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table by Cita Stelzer

I NTRODUCTION
    O n 27 October 1953 a Labour MP asked Winston Churchill during Prime Minister’s Questions whether he would “indicate if he will take the precaution of consulting the consuming public before he decides to abolish the Food Ministry?” Churchill replied, to gales of laughter, “On the whole, I have always found myself on the side of the consumer .” It was true; Churchill always was a great consumer when it came to food, but also when it came to drink and cigars. As this well written, meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated book shows, Churchill’s appetites were enormous, and not least his appetite for life.
    Nobody could be better qualified to have written this book than Cita Stelzer, an assured political and society hostess around whose own dinner tables on both sides of the Atlantic well-informed conversation sparkles, but it is nonetheless astonishing that the subject of Churchill’s dinner diplomacy has not been written about before. For as the author authoritatively proves in her first chapter, Churchill used mealtimes – and primarily dinners – almost as political weapons.
    Dinner parties provided the ideal opportunity for Churchill to establish a personal dominance that allowed him to get his way so often that Stelzer’s scholarship counts as ground-breaking in identifying the phenomenon. His great gifts of conviviality, intelligence, humour, memory, anecdotal ability, wit, hospitality and – not least – alcoholic hard- headheadness , all helped him to charm and ultimately to persuade all but his most intellectually prosaic of guests. The fact that his daily afternoon nap meant that he rarely flagged even into the early hours of morning helped a good deal too, especially when surrounded in wartime by busy men who could not indulge in the same luxury.
    Yet as Stelzer acutely observes, the social etiquette of dinner parties also provided an opportunity to discuss great matters of state with powerful decision-makers in an environment where there were no agendas, civil servants, stenographers or private secretaries to formalise things. Conversation could be directed towards the most important issues of the day without the impedimenta of official records, committee minutes or any of the other barriers to open expression that so often tend to inhibit free exchanges of view.
    When Churchill went to war he fought with every weapon in his formidable personal arsenal, and Stelzer brilliantly shows how one of these was undoubtedly the dinner party.During the course of a life devoted to persuasion, Churchill employed argument, eloquence, anger (both real and feigned), occasional threats, charm and even sometimes tears, but here we also see his deployment of the dinner party as a means of getting his way. How much better his methods than those of Hitler and Stalin …
    Now that we already have biographies of Churchill’s grandmother, his bodyguard and his (wholly obscure) constituency association chairman, it is high time that we have one of his stomach. It helps that good food and drink and cigars mattered to Churchill, and that he had a late-Victorian aristocrat’s taste for the best in all three. Stelzer’s meticulous research proves conclusively that if he had not been the greatest world statesman of the twentieth century – perhaps of any century – he would have made a very fine sommelier or maitre d’hôtel at the Savoy or the Ritz hotels.
    However, this book is not simply a paean to all things Churchillian: Stelzer also acknowledges the great man’s chronic unpunctuality at mealtimes, the fact that he would practise his seemingly impromptu aperçus, and of course the way that he was able to supplement the rationing rules that made life difficult for so many of his countrymen for six long years of war (and several more of peace too). Yet if, as Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach, Winston Churchill certainly marched to victory in the Second World War on his stomach,