Book review: Dinner with Churchill: Policymaking at the Dinner Table

ASKED to choose their ideal dinner-party guest, many people tend to pick Winston Churchill. He would undoubtedly make a fitting companion, for as Cita Stelzer reminds us in this amusing little book, he was one of modern history’s great trenchermen.

“It is well to remember,” he wrote at the turn of the 20th century, “that the stomach governs the world.”

It certainly governed the great man himself. When, with Britain gripped by wartime rationing, Churchill suggested “a series of Cabinet banquets, a sort of Salute the Stomach week”, few of his colleagues could have been very surprised. Even in the depths of wartime, meals were gargantuan occasions. At Chequers dinner kicked off with drinks at 8.30pm, before an hour’s dedicated munching and then a further couple of hours while Churchill lectured his male guests or made them watch a film. Finally, at about one in the morning, the Prime Minister would turn to his exhausted officials. “Now,” he would say, “down to business!”

Although Stelzer’s book nominally focuses on “dinner party diplomacy”, with chapters on eight diplomatic meals from Newfoundland to Potsdam, this is really an excuse for a familiar but entertaining assortment of Churchill anecdotes. Although he was rarely drunk, his booze intake was genuinely prodigious. Off to cover the Boer War as a young reporter in 1899, he took 40 bottles of wine, 18 bottles of 10-year-old Scotch and 12 bottles of Rose’s Old Lime Juice. And even at the age of 74, his picnic habits would put lesser men to shame: his hamper for a day-trip in Morocco, for example, included poached eggs, two hams in aspic, two slices of cold beef, a cold chicken, potato salad, bread and butter, two fruit tarts, cheese, oranges and “lots of wine and brandy”.

Churchill was used to being waited on hand and foot, and though he claimed to like “plain food”, Stelzer’s menus tells a different story. Whether Churchill ever realised how the other half ate remains doubtful. “Not a bad meal, not a bad meal,” he remarked when shown the latest rationing plans after the war. “But these are not rations for a meal or even a day,” an embarrassed colleague explained. “These are for a week!”

Dinner with Churchill: Policymaking at the Dinner Table

by Cita Stelzer

Short Books, 304pp, £20