Fifty years ago yesterday, along with hundreds of thousands of others, I watched Winston Churchill’s body pass through London.
We were on a balcony in Whitehall. I was eight years old. Everything was military. The route was lined by servicemen. The coffin, wrapped in the Union flag, lay on a gun carriage. All this was fitting, of course, for the man who had served in the Army, run the Navy and then led us to victory in our greatest war. But the problems with which all Churchill’s successors have had to wrestle have – thank goodness – been chiefly those of peace. The war-footing model on which our peacetime policies were constructed in the Forties was gravely flawed. It is why we have a National Health Service, and why it doesn’t work.
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