A bulldog in chains

Study it in any depth, and you find yourself piecing together a 5,000-piece multi-dimensional jigsaw whose straight lines - alliances - invariably shatter in the restless pursuit of national advantage. All quite fascinating if you enjoy putting the pieces together and tracking down those shifting, invisible edges of power but, come on, what does that ever have to do with real life? How can diplomatic history be anything other than mind-numbing?

Well, try this. It's February, 1945. The Second World War isn't quite won yet, but the end is in sight. The three Allied leaders are gathered in Yalta, trying to put the world together again. Stalin asks Churchill to make sure the Nazis can't possibly reinforce their armies on the Russian front, pointing to a city on a map spread out in front of him. Churchill doesn't say anything, just nods at his Air Force chief, and that's it. Dresden. Fifty thousand people dead, maybe a hundred thousand. Who can tell?

More consequences? Poland - the country for which Britain had gone to war, a land free of quislings, innocent of collaboration - is sacrificed. Roosevelt, who knows he's dying but is determined to set up the United Nations before he goes, needs Stalin too much to worry about the Poles. He'll betray the Chinese for the same reason, going behind Churchill's back right up until his death just six weeks later.

Although it's a novel rather than a work of non-fiction, Michael Dobbs's Churchill's Triumph brings into vivid focus that one wintry week in Georgia when Europe's fate was decided. It's a compelling story, expertly told, and builds on the totally credible portrait of Britain's cantankerous but brilliant wartime leader Dobbs has drawn in his last three novels - Winston's War, Never Surrender and Churchill's Hour.

But why, if you want to understand what happened at Yalta, read a novelist rather than a historian? Even Churchill knew the answer to that one. Historians, he once wrote, are obsessed by the piece of paper, the treaty, the permanent record. But that's only ever a small part of the story: to tell it properly, you've got to fill in the background: those meetings when nothing was decided but minds were quietly being changed, the long empty days when nothing seemed to be happening but, unseen by most observers, everything was.

And for that, for a diplomatic history that is vibrant and personal rather than dry and academic, it can indeed make sense to turn to someone who works, like a novelist, from the inside out, from character rather than facts.

Dobbs - once he's got past his book's rather gaudy airport novel-style opening - fits the bill perfectly. The reason for that isn't just the deep cynicism about politics that pervaded his House of Cards trilogy, nor the practical knowledge of realpolitik on which he can draw as Tory chief of staff in the mid-1980s, or the theoretical knowledge that preceded it in his nuclear defence studies doctorate.

His fascination with Churchill has even deeper roots. "I can still remember being 16 and watching those grainy black and white images of his funeral," he says. "My mother, a London girl who had lived through the Blitz and had almost been killed in it, was in floods of tears. From that moment on, I wanted to know who that man was."

The answers that his research uncovered don't always match most historians' portraits of Churchill, which have, Dobbs insists, unexpected lacunae. Take the facts Dobbs uncovered about young Winston's first days at school. When Dobbs visited St George's School at Ascot he was shown two whole boxes of source material from the relevant time. After he'd finished working his way through them, he thanked the staff for their patience, adding that he imagined he'd be just one in a long line of Churchill obsessives interested in the material. Not so, he was told; in more than ten years no-one else had asked to look.

Yet those same primary sources, Dobbs is convinced, tell a story that begins to explain some of the many demons that drove Churchill. "The school was then run by a clergyman of the sort who wouldn't be left within a thousand miles of today's children, insisting on swimming naked with them and then chasing them through the woods. The records speak of him beating one boy, who lost control of his bowels. The head, a complete sadist, then lost control of himself, and couldn't be stopped beating the boy. His strategy was to break every one of the children in his care - and then rebuild them in his own way.

"One day when Churchill was eight, he stole a pocketful of sugar from the pantry. After his pants had been stripped off, he was beaten by the headmaster until blood was spurting everywhere. A couple of terms later, Churchill's nanny, concerned that he was sick and starting to stammer, saw those welts on his body and told his parents that the school was literally killing him.

"What did Churchill do? The next time the head took boys down to the swimming pond, he breaks into the headmaster's study, sees his favourite boater hanging on a hook, takes it down to the woods and kicks the shit out of it. It's an insane piece of defiance from an eight-year-old boy but the point is, he wasn't broken, he was an insanely defiant 60-year-old too, and you can't understand the one without the other."

IT IS THE SAME MAN WE SEE IN DOBBS'S NOVEL - A brave egotist, certainly, as atrocious to work for as the diaries of his chief military adviser, General Allenbrook, made crystal clear; gregarious, lonely, yet possessed of one overriding quality: the strategic vision that enabled him to see beyond the present's pressing concerns and defy the odds against him.

Historians have always reckoned Yalta was one of Churchill's greatest defeats, that he was let down by the Americans, outmanoeuvred by Stalin, that he had virtually no cards left to play. So why does Dobbs's very title carry its own bit of revisionism?

"I think he was playing a very dangerous game," says Dobbs. "He knew he had to say extraordinarily nice things about Stalin, because he didn't want the alliance to unravel, and that he couldn't rely on Roosevelt. But he insisted, against them both, that even if Poland was going to be given up, that it should at least have the promise of free elections and proper frontiers. And that mattered because it gave a moral ascendancy to the West in the Cold War that was to follow - everyone knew it was Russia's fault when those conditions were not met.

"He also insisted, against both of them, that Germany should be capable of rising from the ashes and not be reduced to a completely agrarian country - insisting, as he'd done in 1919 when it made him hugely unpopular with his constituents in Dundee, that it be treated with a degree of leniency. If it hadn't been for Churchill, I don't think the Communists would have stopped at East Germany and might well have pushed through to the West, even into France."

So, I ask him, even though former Chancellor Kohl's memoirs, published this month, revealed Margaret Thatcher stamping her feet in rage in 1990 at German reunification, a strong Germany was in fact the bulwark against Communism that Churchill had fought to win at Yalta?

At first I think Dobbs is going to quote his fictional prime minister, the suavely cynical Francis Urquhart from House of Cards, and say that while I might think that, he couldn't possibly comment. But he smiles, slightly sadly. "No, that certainly wasn't her finest hour," he admits.

At 57, Dobbs's own political dreams are - with only a few regrets - long ago buried. Right now, he is trying to decide whether his next novel should be about Churchill fighting in the trenches in the First World War, or a modern version of House of Cards.

"The times have to be right for a book like that. Politics have got to be dark and cynical. But after Iraq, when we were spun into a war I'd have gone to the barricades to prevent us taking part in, there's no doubt that they are."

And there's no doubt, too, that Dobbs, one of the brightest and best mass-market storytellers around, is just the man to put it all into fiction.

Churchill's Triumph, by Michael Dobbs, is published by Headline, priced 17.99.