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If He Were A She: Winston Churchill

WINSTON CHURCHILL

The British Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955 was best known for grimacing in photographs, being a lover of hats and being one of the best war leaders of the twentieth century.

So if he had been born with breasts and unpredictable mood swings, what would have happened?

If he was born a woman, Churchill would most likely still have been heavily involved in politics. By 1920, women were just beginning to become a presence in the British Parliament, after the huge suffragette movements of the late 1900s and 1910s. If his brash and independent streak surfaced in his womanly body, then we can assume that Churchill would have been at the forefront of the handbag waving women’s rights activists and thus would have been one of the first women to run for parliament. And she may well have scrambled in as well.

Mrs Churchill sounds like a she’d have been a roaringly good woman, and probably would have been mucking about in Westminster. So I guess you were being a total dicks when you claimed that the world would have been different, except for maybe we’d have a Churchill Saucepan instead of a Churchill Tank.

Pipe down. True, by 1940, when Churchill was elected Prime Minister for the first time, there were a few female MPs, and some had held their seats for years, but women were yet to hold powerful seats, or be given powerful roles in government, and they still faced a great deal of prejudice from within parliament itself. We suspect that many of the old boys poking around the House of Commons still thought of women as some whacky alien creature whose sole job was to bake delicious cakes and do something about those little pink people who spent their days crying and crapping themselves. Indeed, Churchill himself, in a sparring match with female MP Nancy Astor, claimed that having a woman in parliament was like having one intrude on you in the bathroom (to which, she replied “You’re not handsome enough to have such fears”). Thus, we confidently claim that although Winnie Churchill probably would have been a Member of Parliament by 1940, she would not have been anywhere near powerful enough to run for party leader, or win a general election. Besides, nearly all of the first female MPs joined the socialist Labour party, and in 1940, the right-wing Conservatives were in power, and Churchill had stepped into power after Chamberlain’s resignation without having to win a general election.

Well that’s a bit shit. So how would the world have looked if the Good-Housekeeping-reading Churchill hadn’t have been able to gather her skirts and dash for power?

Well, without Churchill taking over after the resignation of the appeasement loving Joseph ‘ooh, let’s give Hitler what he wants and hope he doesn’t then bend us over the dining room table and ravish us’ Chamberlain as PM, who knows what other kind of soggy napkin Great Britain could have had as a leader? Churchill is regarded as one of the best wartime leaders of all time and it’s unlikely that a similar character could be found in the British cabinet. In fact, power was almost handed to Lord Halifax, who was pre-eminent in the House of Lords (the higher body of British parliament), but the Lords were, and still are, more out of touch with the populace than the ministers in the Commons.

Halifax, whilst a practiced politician, shared a lot of views with Neville Chamberlain, who, as history can attest, was an arse. Halifax was also one of the main architects of appeasement, claiming that Adolf Hitler’s massive rearmament scheme and Germany’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland was not only of no threat, but to be welcomed. And when Halifax, as foreign minister, visited Nazi Germany in 1937 to meet with Hitler (who he assumed was footman upon their first meeting, and tried to present the dictator with his coat) ignored commands from his then-Prime Minster, Anthony Eden, to warn Hitler against attacking Czechoslovakia, and instead, went hunting with Hermann Göring.

Eden resigned in 1938, exasperated by Halifax’s general dickheadedness, and Halifax continued to mine this rich vein until the outbreak of war whereupon he was nearly handed the reins of power, presumably by ministers even more idiotic than he. In fairness, Halifax declined, and the reins were handed to an eager Churchill, but if Churchill had not been there, we can only think that this aristocratic boob would have taken the reins, and galloped Great Britain to an inglorious decline, whereby they would have continued to appease Germany until Adolf was shacked up in King George’s bed and the citizens of the Western Europe were all suddenly eating a lot of sausages and Woody Allen films would be doing brisk business on the black market.

So we probably dodged a bullet there then.

Damn straight. Thank Christ for Churchill’s testicles.