Sir Max Hastings is one of the leading historians of the Second World War. His many bestsellers include All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945, and most recently, Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar. He also published studies on The First World War, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and The Falklands War, as well as a biography of Yonatan Netanyahu. A former international correspondent with the BBC, he later served as the editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and the editor of The Evening Standard.

In a special interview for the For a Righteous Cause Report with the Head of the Center, Prof. Uriya Shavit, that is certain to stir controversy, Sir Hastings (b. 1945) presented unorthodox views about the teaching of the history of the Holocaust in schools. He also expressed grave concerns about the fighting abilities and willpower of the Western World. Portions of the interview were edited for clarity and style.

You’ve lamented the downgrading of the teaching of history, not just military history, but history in general.

Well, there’s an irony: in Europe and the United States, books about history continue to sell pretty well, but the teaching of history is at a pretty low ebb. I’m appalled that I have a teenage grandson who’s at a very expensive private school, and this year, he’s doing almost no history at all. They’re all busy doing computer studies and gender studies, and God knows what, but they’re not studying history the way we did. Now, what one has to accept, I think, is that the way we were all taught in my generation, which is the linear approach – that you start with the Romans and you work through the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and so on – nowadays I don’t think you can expect school children or even university students to engage in history taught in that way. Nonetheless, having that sense of the span of history does seem enormously important.

I make myself very unpopular sometimes when I say, well, of course, the business of white or black slavery was a terrible business that reflected a deep discredit on European civilizations. But the whole of human history is a story of the exploitation of the weak by the strong. And if you look, for instance, so much is being taught now about white-on-black slavery. I think people should learn a bit more about other forms of slavery, for example, in the Industrial Revolution and the conditions in which millions of industrial workers [were employed], especially in the United States and Britain, and also agricultural workers. It was something very close to slavery, and it existed for centuries. It just seems to me terribly important that one has that sense of context of trying to look at some broad span, which nobody is trying to do [anymore].

And you are also unhappy with the way the Holocaust is taught.

Holocaust studies are very big in Britain, the United States, and so on. And God knows one is not suggesting that the Holocaust should not be taught. But again, the business of context seems enormously important. First of all, the study of what? I would like to see the teaching of the Holocaust framed in the context of, for instance, what Stalin had been doing in Russia, and what Mao did in China at the same time; there were huge genocides taking place in other places. Up to 1942, let’s say, Stalin undoubtedly killed more of his people than Hitler had tried to do at that stage. And, of course, most historians of China believe that Mao was responsible for far more deaths than Hitler.

Now, I know you won’t suppose for a moment that one is seeking here to downgrade the Holocaust. I was thinking about this when I was walking my dogs this morning. I think it is true to say that the Holocaust is the only example in human history where camps served as death facilities that were explicitly created to kill people on the scale that they were at Auschwitz. But also, I have imprinted on my mind the memory of the number of non-Jewish Poles who were killed in Auschwitz alongside Jews. One is always thinking about the Armenian massacres by the Turks. And again, one has to keep repeating this mantra – none of this is to downplay the Holocaust. It’s just trying to see the Holocaust again in the context of what human beings have done to each other in other circumstances. And God knows I have actually read several of the books about what the Turks did to the Armenians, and that, in itself, is an unspeakable story, as I am sure you know.

The Holocaust is an exceptional crime in the annals of history. Can’t we acknowledge and teach its exceptionalism as well as teach about other genocides?

Of course. But, my point is that as things stand at the moment… For example, I would say that most reasonably well-educated schoolchildren believe that the Second World War was about Jews, and, of course, it wasn’t. The Second World War was about power and territorial conquest in the original, and the whole business of the Holocaust was an act of insanity.

One particular aspect of the insanity is, to me, to have diverted the resources that the Nazis did to killing Jews in the middle of the war when logic might have told Hitler that if he could only achieve military dominance first, then he could do whatever he liked to the Jews, or for that matter to anybody else. But to divert resources in the middle of the war? It’s something that still puzzles me because the whole business of the Holocaust and the killing of the Jews was an act of such stupendous irrationality as well as wickedness. It’s almost impossible to look for rationality in the midst of it, but nonetheless, one is always interested in these questions.

I often wonder, and so does my Jewish wife: If Britain had been occupied by the Nazis, would the British people have behaved better than, let’s say, the French did in [failing to] protect Jews? And the answer is we can’t know, we can’t be sure. We have to accept the fact – this is another point that I’m always strongly in favor of being taught – that antisemitism remained well into my lifetime a real factor. Not in the violent sense; I don’t mean that British people wanted to see Jews taken away in cattle trucks. But casual social antisemitism is something that one has seen in my lifetime among all sorts of circles of people who should know better. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the issue of the French and their behavior, and it is absolutely terrifying to see what they did.

But I think one good thing is that we have become more aware, and even the French have become more aware of how appallingly the French behaved. And some other nations too, as we know, that the Dutch did not behave entirely impeccably towards their Jews and so on…

Well, that is an understatement. You know, there is more teaching of the Holocaust than ever before, and there is more antisemitism than at any given time after the Second World War, so does that perhaps say that there is little point in studying history because the lessons are not learned?

Again, another difficult issue on which it’s easier to pose the issue than to come up with answers is the degree to which antisemitism and anti-Zionism have become entangled. And of course, I don’t think there’s any secret about the fact that all my life, I’ve loathed Bibi Netanyahu, who I used to know in my younger days. And, of course, for him and people like him, it always suited their interests to seek to entwine antisemitism and opposition to the policies pursued by him and his kind.

It is sometimes genuinely very difficult to disentangle, and it’s still difficult in the dialogue in Europe to disentangle antisemitism from opposition to the Israeli Government’s policies. So, I’m just not sure if there is more antisemitism. I mean, I think the evidence, for example, attacks on synagogues and so on in Europe, I think the evidence probably is that there is more antisemitism, but I think one thing that’s very difficult… this issue is not an easy one. It would be stupid to deny that what’s gone on in Gaza has obviously dramatically increased antisemitism as well as anti-Zionism. But where one…

When a synagogue is attacked in London, that is antisemitism. They attack it because it’s Jewish; they have no idea if the people there are for or against the Israeli government. But to go back to my previous question, what’s the point of studying history if it doesn’t impact the way young people think?

The study of history does not provide answers because if it did provide answers, each generation would not go on repeating the same mistakes in many countries. But what it can do is at least teach you to be aware of the questions that one should ask. And I’d be the first to say that I don’t think the fact that I’ve devoted a lot of my life to studying history has made me a fount of wisdom. But it has made me more aware of how difficult many questions are, whereas, of course, one of the things that goes on, and always goes on, especially with the kids and the young, is they always want simple answers, and the answers are never simple.

For example, I often say in lectures that in international affairs, the word “solution” should be barred from the discourse because in all difficult issues, above all, in the Middle East, there is no solution. What you’re always discussing is how you can manage very difficult problems. When people start using the word solution, it means they expect that there will be satisfactory answers. And one thing one can certainly say about everything to do with the Middle East is that there can’t possibly be a solution. It’s a question of how you achieve some tolerable way of managing [the conflict]. But I don’t see how, for a start, one could possibly hope to have an intelligent conversation, whether statesmen or ordinary citizens, about what happens in the Middle East without knowing the history of the 20th century.

History should always be taught with humility, with no grown-up historian professing to be telling students the truth. We are all – each generation – making a guess at truth, a grab at truth. But humility, I think, is terribly important. I think I’ve written some decent books, but never for a moment would I make the claim that what I’ve written is the truth about the events I’m describing, because it’s not like that. Each generation passes its own judgments. But to me, it’s shocking that there should be a belief now that it’s only the present and the future that we need to concern ourselves with. How can one possibly make intelligent judgments about what the present looks like, never mind the future, without knowing something about where we’ve come from?

One reason why schools focus on teaching the history of the Holocaust, including in Israel, is that everything else became so controversial. The Holocaust has remained the one thing where there is consensus about what is evil and what is righteous.

I think that is an extremely valid point. I think that’s an extremely shrewd comment, and I would go along. I was one of the first historians in Britain to quite prominently write about the Bengal Famine. I’m sure you were aware that this was the great blot on Churchill. At least a million and perhaps more Indians died in the Bengal Famine when India was under British control.

There’s no doubt that Churchill’s behavior over that [period] was very ugly. But I think one should also desperately try to teach children, which they don’t do at the moment, that we can only judge each age by its own standards. We cannot judge them by ours. And with Churchill, when people say Churchill was a racist, I say, of course, he was a racist. Everybody of his age group, of his generation, young cavalry officers in India, were racists. That’s what they were. This is awful to us now, but this was how people behaved. In the same way, they hanged homosexuals. We don’t think this is a good thing now, but this is how they thought. So I think that would be one of my foremost pleas in teaching history, teach people that each generation must judge its own generation.

Bottom line, if you were appointed Secretary of State for Education tomorrow, how would you like the Second World War and the Holocaust to be taught in schools?

It’s all a matter of nuance. A French philosopher said in the early 19th century [that] all the great truths in life are to be found in nuances. This is also true of the teaching of the Second World War. I would love to think that, of course, any schoolchild must learn about the Holocaust. But I think it’s important they should also know about the Nazi-Soviet Pact. They should also know about what happened in the 1930s.

I would say that at the moment, if you ask most British schoolchildren to write an essay saying what [they] know about the Second World War, they’ll probably say, “The Second World War was about Jews.” Well, it was a little more complicated than that.

So that there is no misrepresentation of your thoughts, I just want to clarify that you do think that every European schoolboy and schoolgirl should learn about the Holocaust in depth.

Yes, I think it is critically important that every child is taught about the Holocaust. I just wish to God they learned about some other things as well.

Going back to the utility of teaching history, some Israeli intelligence officers are well educated, academically, about the history of the Middle East. It did not help much on October 7.

Again, I do not believe that the knowledge of history means that you automatically come up with the answers, but it should at least empower one to ask the right questions.

I suppose I’ve lived for many years steeped in the history of the Middle East. Recently, I haven’t been there very much; I think 2007 was the last time I was there. But when I was younger, I used to travel a lot all over the Middle East, and one couldn’t make any sense of anything in the Middle East unless you had some knowledge of history. So it seems to me knowing some history does not, as I said, make you a fount of wisdom, but at least it should prevent you from making some of the worst mistakes.

I remember, actually, when I was dealing with the Netanyahus all those years ago in the late 1970s, I remember they were always giving me copies of books about Israel’s right to the West Bank and all that sort of stuff. I read them all in those days, and I’ve still got some upstairs. Some of them are pretty mad books about Israel’s claims of a Greater Israel from those days. Although this may sound odd to you, while those books that they gave me in those days were pretty mad, I’m not sorry I read them because you need to know. It helps me understand, even today, what goes on in the minds of some of those people in the Israeli cabinet alongside Netanyahu.

I’ll share with you something personal. Whenever I’m in London and stand in front of Westminster, I have tears in my eyes, and I’ll tell you why. There was a moment in history when pure evil was about to take over the world, and there was this one island that stood alone against it. And I, as a Jew, would not be alive and having this conversation with you had it not been for that Island. And I feel you are frustrated that the heroism, courage, and endurance that, in the end, Britain manifested and was alone in manifesting at that crucial moment in history is not conveyed to schoolchildren today.

I’m passionate, as you know…. There are a lot of historians these days who are very much against the great man theory of history or the great person theory of history. They believe that the pattern of events is decided by great movements, not by the doings of individuals. I am, on the whole, inclined to disagree with that. I think there have been [great men who changed history]. Among many reasons I revere Churchill so much is that I think Churchill almost alone convinced the British people, or certainly convinced the British Parliament, that we could and should continue to resist [Nazi Germany]. There’s no doubt in my mind that under a different British leader, Britain would have sought some sort of deal with the Nazis.

I’m always very struck by an early opinion poll in Britain, Mass Observation, the first sort of system of opinion polling in Britain that started in about 1936 or 1937. Mass Observation did a poll in November 1939 about attitudes to the war. And this was during the so-called phony war before Hitler invaded the West. This poll found that a lot of British people couldn’t understand why we were going on with the war; that we’d gone to war to save Poland, and Poland was gone.

The British and French armies were confronting the Germans in the West, but they didn’t seem to be getting any place, and many people interviewed by the Mass Observation poll said that they hoped some deal could be stitched up with Herr Hitler sooner rather than later. And of course, this was also true of the City of London, where a lot of the most prominent businessmen and so on in the winter of 1939, early 1940, desperately wanted a compromise peace.

Now, what changed was that in the summer of 1940, when Hitler started raining bombs down on Europe and then on Britain, he actually did Churchill the biggest favor because the British people were forced to confront the fact that there were only two choices: one was to give in, and the other was to resist.

And if Hitler had been smart, which, thank God, he was not, he would have just left Britain alone to rot in the summer of 1940. He would have turned east if he wanted to turn east. He could have done stuff in the Mediterranean, which we need not go into in detail. But if he’d simply left the British to rot [it is not certain that] Churchill could have kept control of the agenda and so on.

So I personally believe, going back to your point, that that was one of those moments in history where the fact that Britain continued to resist owed almost everything to Churchill’s extraordinary personality and to what he did. And most of the rest of them would have given in. Everybody says there was this cabinet meeting, I forget the exact date, May the 28th, I think, at which Churchill persuaded the cabinet to carry on, but any idea that the appeasement camp was sort of over after that, [well,] it wasn’t. There were still many people saying in corners, why can’t we just make a deal because there’s no rational way of keeping this going. So this is why I’m almost, I won’t quite say, a worshiper of Churchill, but nonetheless, why my admiration for him is almost unbounded.

Other than Churchill, there were hundreds of thousands who sacrificed their lives for the cause; I mean, they…

Most of them, I mean, well, I don’t know. It’s a very long conversation. Those four years during which Britain [was under attack], most British people this day don’t realize how fortunate we were by comparison to the peoples of Europe, who were either occupied or remained…one does understand this huge Russian sense of resentment that we don’t give sufficient credit to the fact that the Russians took this stupendous toll of casualties while we were sitting in relative comfort in Britain. And there is still this huge resentment in Russia about that.

If you say, what about the Nazi-Soviet Pact? Well, of course, they [the Russians] know nothing about the Nazi-Soviet Pact and so on, but nonetheless, the British people still don’t realize how extraordinarily fortunate we were.

A lot of British people study the Battle of Britain, but [not] the plight of the peoples of occupied Europe. I don’t just mean those who were sent to concentration camps or to death camps, but to be occupied by people of such unspeakable cruelty as the Nazis and to endure what they did.

Even though I’m about to be 79 and I’ve been writing books about all this for a very long time, I never cease to be awed by what people endured and suffered. And I’m never surprised by the moral compromises that a lot of them made. Yes, one is still dismayed and surprised by the attitude of the French to their Jews, but I’m not surprised by the degree of collaboration. I suspect the same would have happened in Britain.

When I observe European politics today, it always fascinates me how much the Second World War is still present. Whether it’s debating migration policies or Russia’s aggression, it’s as if the Second World War has ended just yesterday. Also, on bookshelves, and your works are evidence of that, I think there are more books on that period than on any other. There are far more books published on the Second World War than, say, the Great War. Why is that?

I think it’s because there’s still a belief among Europeans, rightly or wrongly, that the two wars were of a morally different order. Most people in Britain grow up, in my view, in many ways wrongly believing that we should not have gotten involved in the First World War and that we could have somehow stayed out of it.

They don’t see the Kaiser’s Germany as an evil remotely comparable with Hitler’s Germany, and they’re sort of half right about that. I mean, nobody in their right mind would compare the Kaiser’s Germany with Hitler’s Germany in terms of the evil of the Nazis, but I think they’re very naive in supposing that we could have stayed out of the First World War.

Be that as it may, they are still pretty confident the Second World War was “the good war,” whereas they’re much less confident about the First World War in that way. And in a way, they’re half right because, thank God, they do realize that the Second World War had to be fought. They do realize that Hitler was an evil with whom and with which there could be no possible compromise.

But again, I go back to the fact that to me, at the heart of Churchill’s genius is his understanding that there could be no compromise with the evil of Nazis at a time when there was still an enormous number of people, far more than we would care to think today, who did believe that there could be some sort of compromise with evil.

Going back to your question about the First and Second World Wars, I don’t think it’s too surprising. [Aside from believing it was a just and essential war, there are other reasons why it is studied so extensively]. It sounds like a frivolous thing to say, but the Second World War was an unspeakable experience for everybody engaged in the Eastern Front almost from beginning to end, but for a lot of people in the West, by comparison to the First World War, it wasn’t so bad. I mean, the casualties were not nearly so ghastly, and people find redeeming interests and excitements in the story of the Second World War. [Also], the First World War, they feel all the battles were the same. They were all bloodbaths in which nobody ultimately prevailed.

In America, you’ve got Midway on the Coral Sea; people see redeeming quality, and actually, they’re wrong to see that. There’s a great phrase and I’m trying to quote this from memory, but which is always imprinted on my brain; it was said by a Norwegian resistance hero, and I’ve quoted him in my books. But again, I’m forgetting his name for now. I think his name was Hansen. He wrote in his memoirs in about 1948 that “although wars bring adventures that stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies and sacrifices, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.”

And I think one has to… In my books, I keep repeating, even though I write all those books about these things, that any idea that there is any sort of redemption to be found in war is deeply flawed and that, in the end, wars are ghastly. I always remember most of the men in my family had, dare I say it, rather enjoyable wars and exciting wars. They won decorations, and they did exciting things, and so on. One of my cousins was in the SAS. So my mother used to say to me when I was a child, “Don’t listen to your father and his cousins talking about the war and saying what an exciting time they had.” She said that war was absolutely ghastly. And, of course, my mother was absolutely dead right.

Going back to this business of context, when I started writing books, which was a very long time ago, I was stupid enough to think that the history of war is mostly about men, the protagonists, and the soldiers. And actually, it’s not. Soldiers are always a relatively small minority in all wars. In the end, if one’s going to write the true story of any war, it must be about victims, and especially women. But it took me years to understand that. And I think one of many things I understand in the 21st century, which I did not understand [earlier in my career], is that for my books to have any value at all, they need to address the predicament of victims, the predicament especially of women, as well as what young men did.

Another phrase of one of my heroes among historians is by Professor Sir Michael Howard, who died some years ago. Michael, who himself fought in the [Second World] War, used to say that it’s amazing how many young men will do stupidly brave things on the battlefield. When you’re 20 years old, there’s almost no act of stupidity you won’t commit to win a military cross, and he won a Military Cross when he was 20 years old. And that remark of Michael’s made a great impression on me, too.

So, when I’m lecturing or writing about war now, I think I am doing so in a very different spirit from when I was young. I’ll go back to Israel’s history. I was a correspondent in 1973 in Israel. And at that time, I was in love with the idea [of war]. And because Israel was in such chaos in 1973, I was able to get much closer to the action than one ever normally can in Israel’s wars. I got to the Golan, and later, I was down at Suez. Looking back, I wrote in almost adulatory terms about what I’d seen the IDF doing, especially up on the Golan. I look back, and I was so young then and so stupid. I did see a glory in war, which I’m rather ashamed to look back on. And you know, one should have been more grown up and had a better sense of person.

Well, the other side of the coin is this: my impression when I speak with young Europeans today, also young Brits, is that the idea that they might have to at some point wear a uniform to defend their independence and freedom – it’s not even that it’s terrifying for them, it’s incomprehensible, it’s bizarre.

It’s absolutely true and certainly it goes for my children and grandchildren. I grew up with a sense of romance about military affairs, which again was entirely and deeply flawed. And I look back in embarrassment. But the worst aspect today is that there is resistance throughout Europe, including Britain, to the need for adopting a military means to defend oneself and protect oneself.

I’ve often raged in my columns in The Times about the gulf between European promises to Ukraine and the reality of what’s been delivered. That again and again, the words have been cheap. That many successive British prime ministers have pledged undying support for Ukraine, but the actual deliveries of weapons have fallen far, far behind, and I’ve repeated many times that without the Americans, Ukraine would be toast and its…

That’s very dangerous, isn’t it?

Incredibly dangerous. I write in The Times about once every couple of months arguing that unless we start to take defense seriously, we, or our children or grandchildren, are going to be terribly, terribly shocked by what aggressors are capable of doing to us. Putin thinks that we are decadent and thus vulnerable.

Why are young Europeans today so averse to the lessons of history, which are that sometimes you have to fight if you want to remain free?

Hard to say, but again, I went too far the other way when I was young; I saw the romance I felt when I was briefly attached to our Parachute Regiment, and I thought that parachuting and, you know, wearing the red beret, and so on, that this was something very romantic and exciting. I look back now, and I went far too far in that direction. I used to think that to show oneself a real man when one was young, one had to do dangerous things and probably be shot at. And nowadays, very sensibly now, my children or grandchildren don’t think that, of course. They don’t understand there is a middle ground between my stupidity in one direction when I was young and their stupidity in another direction today.

The difficulty of mustering any political support for a serious defense policy is worse in Europe. You know, I mean, I’m constantly looking at the statistics, and the Europeans are doing almost nothing about defense. I never believed that the Germans would make good on those pledges [they made to Ukraine], and of course, they haven’t, and especially now that the German economy is in considerable trouble.

Again, why?

Politics is mostly about telling electorates what they want to hear. The idea of leadership of the kind that Churchill displayed is deeply unfashionable, and there is a great unwillingness among national leaders, except in the Nordic countries [to support Ukraine].

Nordic countries are behaving much more intelligently and there is a much more real understanding there of how serious the threat from aggressors, especially the Russians, is. But we are, I fear, probably after I’m dead, headed for some terrible, cruel shocks when we discover that to abandon violence, to abandon the use of force, it requires two people. And it’s no good us saying, well, we’ve decided that [using violence is] a barbaric practice.

The other thing that we don’t learn, of course, is that having appeased Hitler in the 1930s, we were phenomenally lucky in 1940. From 1940 to 1944, Britain was able to rearm. In a book I’m writing at the moment, I’ve said it’s quite extraordinary that Britain and the Americans were granted four years to repair to return to fight Hitler on the continent. Four years of doing almost nothing.

Now people say but we were fighting in the Mediterranean or in this, that or the other, but this was on a tiny scale compared with what was going on elsewhere. We were granted these four years to rearm and prepare to engage the German army on terms that suited us. Well, in real life, in normal circumstances, you do not get granted that much time to prepare.

There’s no chance now that we will be given anything like that sort of time [in future conflicts]. The state of preparedness of the British Army [today] is almost moribund. I mean, we sent most of our effective weapons systems to aid Ukraine, and they have not been replaced since the Ukraine war started. One big contract has been placed with British firms for 155mm artillery ammunition to replace stocks sent to [Ukraine]. One contract. I frequently ask my military friends if that has changed. Have any more contracts been signed? And the answer is no.

Again, I write in The Times probably about every two months saying we have to get real about defense and rearmament, not just on a British scale, but in Europe too, but there is just not the will to listen.

People nod and say, “Oh, good article in The Times, Max.” But of course, no one will do anything about it. And the politicians are overwhelmingly preoccupied and it’s what I call – I referred earlier to that poll – the “bomb problem.” Because no bombs are falling as they weren’t in November 1939, people can’t see why they need to do anything. It’s only when bombs are falling that people tend to get real about defense.

If I were a populist, I would say it’s TikTok’s fault; that it’s a spoiled generation. But the fact is, 90 years ago, people made the same mistake in England as they do today.

I agree with you totally. And I hate to think how many words I’ve expended talking about and writing about this. And there are, of course, other people [who write this]. I don’t mean I’m all alone. I mean, there are people like me who have some knowledge of history and defense.

The one thing Trump is right about, big time, is that the Europeans have had a free ride since the 1950s in terms of defense and security, which the Americans have looked after. And again, a point that we ought to make, is that the time is over when the Americans are prepared to do our defense for us and pay for our defense. We’re going to have to do it ourselves, and there is no real will or understanding of this in Europe. This is very depressing.

If Argentina was to invade the Falklands tomorrow, would there be a will to fight back and reclaim it? And then, even if there is the will, is there the ability?

I don’t think so. I think that the Falklands was a one-off, and it was an extraordinary war. All wars are political, but the Falklands was completely [political]. The Falklands was an act of madness, and most of us who were down there understood at the time that this was mad because Britain had no real strategic interest in the Falklands at all.

The South Atlantic was meaningless in those days of the Cold War, and in those days, most of the armed forces, as well as most of the body politic, thought that, frankly, it was a lost cause. In the end, the best reason for fighting the war was that it empowered Margaret Thatcher to do many very good things for Britain in the decade that followed.

But at the time, I remember many conversations I had down South with the people who were f ighting the war, and most of us realized it was, in a sense, a ridiculous war. But it sort of did good things. It did good things morally.

I mean, at the time we went down South, the British people were terribly resigned to failure – economic failure, political failure, and so on. Well, the terrific lift that it gave, I mean, the mood when they came back, the triumphalism. In fact, Michael Howard said to me a few years before his death – because he was violently opposed to Brexit, to Britain’s departure from the European Union, as I was, as I am – he said, “such a pity about victory in the Falklands. Just at the time when the British were getting realistic about our diminished place in the world, we go and win this little war down South, and we convince ourselves that we’re a great imperial power again.”

I see that war differently. It brought down a murderous junta and it reestablished the principle that liberal democracies fight back, and I don’t know if the entire wonderous decade of the 1980s, the revolutions across the world, would have happened if Thatcher were not there.

Of course, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. I’ve written that, too. I’ve always said we owe a great debt to the Argentine junta… they did wonderful things for Britain.