Churchill’s position after 1914, as a still very young (forty) senior minister, turned on his vastly greater knowledge of naval and military commanders than that possessed by any of his ministerial colleagues – except for Kitchener. But this was by no means a clear advantage. It bred jealousy at least as much as friendship.

sympathise with all your extravagances – even more than you do with mine – it seems just as suicidal to me when you spend £200 on a ball dress as it does to you when I purchase a new polo pony for £100. And yet I feel that you ought to have the dress and I the polo pony. The pinch of the whole matter is that we are damned poor.30

whippersnapper

‘Ambition was the motive force,’ Churchill wrote of Savrola, ‘and he was powerless to resist

Out of these pressures Churchill evolved two firm rules which he followed faithfully for the rest of his life. The first was that expenditure should be determined by needs (generously interpreted) rather than by resources. He stood the famous maxim of Dickens’s Mr Micawber on its head. Second, he decided that when the gap between income and

‘Out of £2,700 a year [approximately £135,000 at present-day values] £800 of it goes to you 2 boys, £410 for house rent & stables, which leaves me £1,500 for everything – taxes, servants,

He got his mother to send him twenty-seven volumes of the Annual Register, in which, beginning with Disraeli’s second government of 1874–80, he studied the bare details of every major parliamentary debate and legislative development of these years of his very early childhood. He then summarized the accounts and gave his own moderately progressive

neither Churchill nor Truman had in their early life anyone to knock the corners off the knowledge they were solitarily and a little laboriously accumulating.

his career was without rival in making so much noise and achieving so little.