Brexit May 1940

Abstract

The chapter explores the trajectories of the Churchill myths in the UK, from 1940 to the time of Brexit, unearthing the how the past (May 1940) exists in the historical present. It reviews how the myths operated in popular life as well as in the formal historiography. It demonstrates how the shifting configurations of Churchill underwrite the larger political shifts. It introduces the making of the myth at the end of the 1940s; the long stretch of Churchill as the personification of the Westminster system, in the latter decades of the twentieth century; and the present reimagining of him in harder populist mode.