Churchill had a dark side but it didn't stop him being a great man, Michael Dobbs tells STEPHEN LEWIS...

MICHAEL Dobbs had no idea when he was writing his latest novel, Winston's War, that a major new BBC series about the Cambridge Spies - Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt - would be starting the very week the paperback edition of his book was published.

There is a delicious irony to such timing because the version of Guy Burgess created by Dobbs is certainly vivid. Dobbs portrays the homosexual traitor as drunken, dishevelled, wildly promiscuous and self-loathing. Yet he is at the same time filled with a doomed idealism worthy of one of Graham Greene's anti-heroes.

It is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait from a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.

Dobbs admits that had he been writing about Burgess' exploits after the war, when he and his fellow traitors were responsible for the deaths of many British agents, he would have been much less sympathetic.

But the fictionalised Burgess of Winston's War is a young man of 27, with the flicker of idealism still alive in his soul and a determination to stop Hitler at any price - something he shares with Winston Churchill.

The novel opens on October 1, 1938 - the day after Neville Chamberlain returns from Munich clutching a piece of paper signed by Hitler promising 'peace in our times'. He is given a hero's welcome by a nation desperate to avoid war.

In Churchill's darkest hour, the future PM is reduced to a choleric, drunken, melancholic old man, reviled and mocked as a warmonger by the Establishment and the British public alike.

Burgess, then the BBC's man at Westminster - the "Andrew Marr of his day," as Dobbs describes him - comes to visit Churchill at his beloved Kent home of Chartwell. And a relationship is forged that, in this novel at least, is to have a momentous effect on the shape of British history.

In the novel, it is Burgess - devious, drunken, depraved, tortured Burgess - who uncovers the damning inside information about the corruption at the heart of Chamberlain's government which enables Churchill rather than the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax to succeed Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940.

That such a momentous meeting between Churchill and Burgess happened is indisputable, Dobbs insists - even though you won't find it written about in any history book. It's the coming together with a common purpose of two such different men that lies at the heart of his novel.

"Burgess and Churchill stood side-by-side, coming from totally different sides but fighting for the same cause," Dobbs says. "That's why I decided to have a close look at Burgess. I felt that I understood a lot more about him, where he was coming from and why he did what he did."

Winston's War charts the 20 months of conspiracy, chance and outright treachery that, against all the odds, propelled Churchill from reviled outcast to wartime Prime Minister and, ultimately, Greatest Briton.

It is a novel - but a novel in which the main events and characters are based as closely as Dobbs could manage it on fact. The portrait of Chamberlain is scathing, picturing an arrogant, dry, incompetent and yet all-powerful prime minister presiding over a nation and an empire in decay, who simply had no idea of the threat Hitler posed to his world.

"Some people would say he's not as bad as that," admits Dobbs. "That he dithered and delayed because he realised that Britain was not strong enough and needed time to build up its forces."

But, even though it is not so long since a million or so people were demonstrating on the streets of London against war with Iraq, he himself clearly doesn't buy that. For a start, he says, the war with Iraq wasn't remotely comparable with that against Hitler. And, as he pursued his research into Chamberlain, he says he found that he was far more arrogant, powerful and devious than he had ever imagined.

The portrait of Chamberlain in the book is completed by a damning portrayal of his trusted henchmen, Sir Horace Wilson and Sir Joseph Ball, the "two most voracious goblins" lurking in the dark and devious corridors of Westminster power. These two arch-manipulators make Alistair Campbell look as though he is running a creche, Dobbs insists.

Dobbs was at Mrs Thatcher's right-hand side as she stepped into Downing Street and was a key aide to John Major when he was voted out. So he calls on all his insider's knowledge of the workings of Westminster in bringing to life all the political chicanery that eventually led to Churchill's grand elevation.

It's a controversial portrayal of the great man which isn't above hinting he had a dark side. At one point, Churchill does a secret deal to purchase thousands of Mauser rifles off the Germans. He intended them for use against Hitler - but during one of his darkest moments, when it seems all he loves could be destroyed due to the incompetence of the men keeping him from power, there is a hint that he would not be above using them against his own political opponents.

A frustrated Churchill as a dictator in the making? He deliberately hinted at that, Dobbs agrees - not because he believed Churchill would have become a dictator. "But there was in him a darkness. If things were going really badly, and we had a quisling Government in this country - what would he have done? He was a man who was very determined."

Then, as now, there was a dark side to politics, Dobbs says. "You have men and women of high principles and idealism, yet in order to do anything they have to get their fingers on the keys of power, which requires them to play a different game and compromise those principles along the line."

Churchill was ultimately redeemed by having been proved right - but it's a timely reminder that in politics, as in life, matters are seldom black and white.

Winston's War by Michael Dobbs is published in paperback by HarperCollins, price £6.99.

Updated: 09:02 Wednesday, May 14, 2003