Winston's War is the first novel in a tetralogy authored by Michael Dobbs of House of Cards fame concerning Winston Churchill's leadership in the resistance to Hitler's regime before and during World War II. The main conceit of Winston's War is a relationship that develops between Churchill during his time out of office and his brief tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty and Guy Burgess, the Soviet mole, who fled to the Soviet Union in 1951 accompanied by his fellow spy Donald McLean. During the time of this story, Burgess was employed by the BBC as a producer of "Talks" programming. Later he took his talents to the MI6 before joining the Foreign Office and after the war to a position at the British Embassy in Washington. In his personal life Burgess was a flamboyant homosexual and a chronic drunk. Dobbs takes as his point of departure an item from a book by Tom Driberg regarding a meeting that occurred between Churchill and Burgess. Driberg who was a gossip columnist on Max Beavesbrook's Evening Standard newspaper went on to become the leader of the Labour party, a member of Parliament and eventually was raised to the peerage and membership in the House of Lords as Baron Bradwell. In his personal life he might have been the alter ego of Burgess based on his sexual proclivities, bouts of drunkenness and it is suspected espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Dobbs intersperses his account of British political inside baseball with narratives of the lives and activities of very common Brits. There is Mac, a Jewish emigre who served serious hard time in the Soviet gulag. He makes a living as a barber to some of the leading personalities of the government, e.g., Foreign Secretary, Edward, Lord Halifax. As a result of this role, he is privy to a lot of gossip that he assiduously ignores based on personal indifference and reluctance to jeopardize his job. Mac becomes involved romantically with a "hooker with a heart of gold" whose work name is Desdemona but whose real name is Carol Bell. She has two children to provide for and has been seduced and abandoned by their father(s). It turns out that Carol only turns tricks three days a week and earns an income the rest of the week cleaning offices in Westminster including ministers in Neville Chamberlain's government, e.g., Home Secretary, Sam Hoare (a whore cleaning up after a Hoare) - a happy coincidence for the novel's plot!

As it turns out among Mac's customers is the ubiquitous Burgess who propositions Mac over drinks, not for romantic purposes, but to slip him a little G2 based on the stray comments from Mac's high and mighty customers while cutting their hair. When Mac starts to fall in love with Carol he sees an opportunity to provide an income sufficient to enable her to give up prostitution. So Mac obtains from Carol the contents of the Minister's wastebasket which he transfers to Burgess for money that undoubtedly is of Russian origins.

Burgess passes all of this on to Moscow but also uses it to indirectly aid Churchill with whom he shares an objective of seeing Winston replace Chamberlain who at the outset of the narrative has just returned from Munich bearing a piece of paper signed by Hitler that means "peace for our time". Chamberlain is a national hero lionized by the King, the Conservative Party (with a few conspicuous exceptions), the press and the common man. Through the efforts of his associates, particularly Sir Horace Wilson and Sir Joseph Ball. These gentlemen are the villains of the piece whose mission in life is to promote the virtues of Neville Chamberlain and to suppress any criticism of his person or policies in the press. They also use the position to perform what we would call "opposition research" designed to discredit any opposition to Chamberlain's appeasement policy among members of Parliament, especially within the Conservative Party, or in the newspapers.

Along the way Dobbs entertains us with another relationship between Churchill's acolyte, Brendan Bracken, and Anna Fitzgerald, a niece of defeatist U.S. Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy. The young and lovely Anna initiates a (chaste) relationship with Bracken and passes on his indiscretions to a Swedish lover who is well connected and has extensive business interests in German enterprises.

The gravamen of this novel is the non-stop intriguing to promote and preserve the Chamberlain government under the auspices of the indefatigable Wilson and Ball versus the efforts, including intrigues, to bolster Churchill with the goal of his replacing Chamberlain as prime minister. The back and forth between Churchill and Kennedy is riveting and would make for a great scene if a movie was ever done based on the novel.

As fiction this is an outstanding read. For a non-fiction account of the downfall of Chamberlain and the elevation of Churchill I recommend Five Days in London by John Lukacs. I look forward to being further entertained by the remaining three volumes in this series. ( )

słowa Churchilla-"władzy nie zdobywa sięza pośrednictwem urny wyborczej, ją się dzieli. Władza pochodzi od ludzi. tylko wyjątkowo skażona forma demokracji bierze tę władzę po to żeby niewolić własny naród."

An interesting and entertaining re-imagining of events leading up to Churchill's becoming Prime Minister, this novel leans towards the cynical except in its portrayal of Churchill himself. ( )

Fiction and fact and speculation all entwine to form a great read. This is the story of the days leading up to Winston Churchill becoming PM in 1940. Dobbs uses his, and our, imagination to take us inside the minds and hearts of all the major players. Yet, this is no simple fantasy: it is thoroughly researched and even the most speculative bits are not inconsistent with the known facts. And it is written by someone who knows just how grubby politics can be. Did I mention "House of Cards"? ( )

An interesting bit of historical fiction, speculating not about the war, but the runup to it, and the events and personalities of the time, specifically Churchill's wilderness years to his premiership. ( )