More than 80 years have passed since the end of the Second World War, but that conflict and Britain’s great leader, Winston Churchill, remain important reference points. After it was removed by presidents Obama and Biden, Donald Trump twice restored his bust to its former place in the Oval Office. When he wanted to signal displeasure with the UK prime minister’s unwillingness to allow him to use Diego Garcia as a base with which to attack Iran, Trump remarked that Keir Starmer was ‘no Churchill’. Recently, the former Danish prime minister and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told an audience at Churchill College, Cambridge, that the continent needed a ‘European Churchill’ and more ‘Churchill-style’ leadership.

One knows what Rasmussen means, and can agree with it at one level, but at a debate at the ‘other place’, I argued that we should stop fixating on Churchill. At the Oxford Union debate on whether Winston Churchill was a hero, I said that he was not one for today. I did so with trepidation, because I feared that my position might be compared to an earlier, infamous motion that was carried in the Oxford Union in February 1933, asserting ‘That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country?’ At the time, this vote was taken by many abroad as an indication that Britain would not resist the dictators who were then seeking to dominate the European continent. If we were to vote that Churchill was not a hero, would there not be a risk that Vladimir Putin or some other tyrant might draw a similar conclusion about Britain’s willingness to defend the international order today?

In important respects, Winston’s life was plainly heroic. If we are talking about physical courage, he had it in abundance. This is a man who repeatedly put himself in harm’s way, be it as a young officer on India’s North-West frontier, during the cavalry charge at Omdurman in the Sudan, or as a war correspondent in South Africa. If we are talking about moral courage, he had that, too. Churchill opposed the appeasement of Hitler at a time when indulging Germany seemed the smart thing to do, and his record of public service, culminating but not ending with his epic wartime premiership, is well-known.

My objections to idolising Churchill are not the conventional ones. They are not to do with his domestic politics, which were sometimes divisive. His stance during the General Strike of 1926, 100 years ago, and his rather wild rhetoric about the dangers of a Labour government in 1945, when he accused them of ‘Gestapo’-like tendencies, are examples of that. Nor are my objections motivated by his serious strategic errors in both world wars. It is well-known that Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, bears a huge responsibility for the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of 1915. In 1940, when Churchill was once again First Lord of the Admiralty, he sponsored the British landing in Norway, whose failure ironically made him prime minister. Then he sent troops to Greece, which provoked Hitler’s intervention and another military disaster. Churchill also strongly supported the brutal bombing raids on German cities which killed countless civilians, rather than directing the RAF to target more military targets. One could go on.

My concerns are not even about Churchill’s views on race and empire, which are well known. He was a man of his time: not the Britain of the 1930s and 1940s, when he was already an anachronism, but of the late-Victorian and early Edwardian periods. By the time of his premiership, his views were already considered retrograde by the standards of his contemporaries.

That said, one struggles to think of any great figures of the past who would qualify for hero status when measured by the standards of our own time. Not the Duke of Wellington, a military genius but an avowed reactionary. Not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, given his complicity with Southern Democrats. Not Martin Luther King, given recent revelations about his private life. And so on. We rightly judge all these people in their own context, and try to balance their achievements with their shortcomings. So, if Churchill is not a hero, overall, you might well ask, who is?

My objection is inspired by Alec Ryrie’s stimulating little book The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. Ryrie, who is a theologian, argues that after the Second World War, Jesus Christ, who epitomised moral goodness, was overtaken by Adolf Hitler, who epitomised evil, as the main moral reference point in modern society. Today, he suggests, we are living in a post-Hitler age, a time when the German dictator is, rightly or wrongly, no longer the principal reference point, either morally or politically. So, it should come as no surprise that Churchill, who has long been criticised on the left and in parts of the Global South, is now increasingly under attack from the right, especially in the United States, from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. In earlier times, in fact, Churchill had also been lambasted by right-wing Americans such as Pat Buchanan, so the critique is not new, though it is certainly more prominent.

I therefore suggest that in our age, where Hitler has ceased to be the absolute evil, his great nemesis, Winston Churchill, can no longer serve as the absolute hero.

We have seen this recently in the well-meant but ultimately misfiring attempts to mobilise Churchill’s legacy in support of Ukraine. President Biden, for example, introduced the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022, a deliberate echo of the Second World War Lend-Lease Act by which President Roosevelt had helped Churchill and the British war effort. Some have compared the ‘CRINKS’ – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea’ to the ‘Axis’ Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan during the Second World War. President Zelensky of Ukraine has been rightly praised for his leadership and widely compared to Churchill as an inspirational figure.

There is something to these arguments, but not enough to sustain them in the new post-Hitler age. In the end, most people do not think that Putin is Hitler, that Xi Xinping is the Japanese emperor, or than Ayatollah Khamenei was Mussolini. By extension, Churchill was a hero in his era, but his usefulness as a hero today is limited.

So, it is time, not to abandon Churchill but to let go of him. To let him rest. He has already more than done his duty.

Do not misunderstand me. We face great dangers today: from Russian aggression in Ukraine and perhaps in the Baltic and High North tomorrow; from the People’s Republic of China’s threats to attack Taiwan and snuff out freedom there; and from Iranian or Iranian-inspired terrorism across the globe. These dangers are compounded by the often eccentric behaviour of the current president of the Unted States, which makes his country a problematic ally today. Donald Trump not merely threatens to withdraw help but has actually spoke of attacking his allies (over Greenland). The America of today is not the one that Churchill would have recognised.

That is why we need new heroes, different ones now. We can find them in the Hong Kong protestors resisting the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party; in the Iranian opposition crowds who were so mercilessly suppressed by the mullahs; and in the heroism of the Ukrainian people and armed forces who for nearly four years have stood alone against the onslaught of a vastly superior enemy.

Britain has its own heroes, of course, such as the men and women posted to Estonia to deter Russia, the naval crew on their way to protect Cyprus, and the submariners who every day guarantee the nation’s nuclear deterrent.

It is for all these reasons that I would like us not to disinter Winston Churchill from the national pantheon – his place in British and world history is secure – but to seek new heroes for our time