Ian Bell: Churchill was a reckless egoist and last of the imperialists who perpetuated his own myth

The Morris version of man and empire was romantic and melancholic, though with few illusions. "Churchill died," began one of the last of many pages, "and it died with him. It had lasted too long anyway..." After the funeral, nevertheless, after the monarchs and statesmen and bandsmen had packed up and gone home, there came a final image of a train steaming towards Oxfordshire, carrying the old body "sadly home again, to the green country heart of England".

In truth, there wasn't much greenery to be seen on 30 January 1965. TV brought us only gloomy black and white pictures of what looked like a very gloomy London. Richard Dimbleby's famous, sonorous narration of the ritual conveyed the significance of the moment with great skill. For all that, even we children could catch the forlorn undertone: nostalgia, regret, even a touch of self-pity.

No ill was spoken of the dead. In Winston Churchill's case, it meant that a host of inconvenient facts were omitted after his passing on a freezing 24 January half a century back. One truth, no disgrace in itself, was confusing to the old statesman's admirers barely two decades after the great victory over Hitler's Reich. It bothers them even yet. It refuses to fit the legend.

This: on 5 July 1945, just two months after the Nazi surrender, British voters threw Churchill and his party out of office. It was an act of great deliberation, and massively decisive. The Tories lost 204 seats. They were beaten by more than three million votes. The war hero's bizarre warning that Clement Attlee and Labour would resort to "some form of a Gestapo" if allowed into power did not have the desired effect.

Churchill had misunderstood the people. He would be back in office by 1951, but in the summer of 1945 one part of his gaudy myth was stripped away. The common fighting men and their families had given their blood, sweat and tears for reasons he had never valued or comprehended. The idea of a National Health Service, the idea he had treated with contempt? The demand for housing, for better schools? The Beveridge reforms? Churchill's Tories had argued that these necessities were unaffordable.

Close to 12 million voted Labour in 1945 because they had shared memories. Some had very particular memories of Winston Spencer Churchill. Attlee probably got his landslide in 1945 - "unexpected", some historians still insist - because a previous generation had fallen for the "land fit for heroes" promise in 1918. Their sons and daughters were not prepared to be fooled twice.

Labour's landslide said they were very clear in their thinking. At the moment of Germany's surrender Churchill was massively, personally popular. Two months later, he was deemed unfit to run a bankrupt country crawling from the rubble of war. No one was more shocked than the Tory leader, but that was probably because, not for the first time, he had succumbed to his own molten, chivalric rhetoric.

Had he "embodied the spirit of the country"? The Labour landslide said otherwise. What might have been true during the darkest days of 1940 gave way to a different truth in 1945. The people said the country and its victory were theirs, not Churchill's. The future, whatever it held, was not to be shaped in the heroic self-image of an Edwardian grandee who would be none the worse, all things considered, for being put in his place.

In my memory, nothing was made of that during the coverage of the 1965 funeral. In those Cold War days it was more usual to say simply that the great man had seized victory from the jaws of defeat in a last glorious gesture for the empire he loved above all else. True, 50 years ago there was an uneasy awareness that American wealth and power had kept Britain in the contest. Less often acknowledged was the awkward truth that Hitler was defeated by the vast sacrifices of the USSR.

Half a century ago, as in 1945, there was also the question of empire itself. James Morris, like many others since, was perfectly correct in depicting Churchill as the last of the imperialists, a man who might have favoured a post-war Council of Europe, but who gave his first loyalty to "the English-speaking peoples" - rarely other than white - and to their colonial possessions, held by right of conquest.

By 1945, it was a fantasy. By 1965, as James Morris conveyed, it was a relic. In a Britain struggling to balance the books, in a country discarding its colonial claims year upon year, the few voters who cared had no interest in perpetuating a Churchillian view of the country, far less the world. Even 50 years ago, some of the dead statesman's pronouncements on the empire were less inconvenient than embarrassing.

He had opposed the independence of India for decades. Famously, he had dismissed Gandhi with a breathtakingly racist disdain as "a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East ... " Churchill found it "nauseating" that this "half-naked" individual should even attempt to "parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor".

Where India was concerned, more than rhetoric was at stake. When four million were dying during the Bengal famine of 1943, Churchill did not deem the matter important enough to warrant the diverting of food supplies. When the Viceroy, Field Marshal Wavell, pleaded for aid, the Prime Minister answered with a telegram wondering why, if stocks were low, "Gandhi hadn't died yet".

His admirers concede much when they defend the maverick. Was he disloyal to individuals and parties? Repeatedly. Was he prepared to turn troops on striking Welsh miners in 1910 and break the 1926 General Strike by any means necessary? Some of those who voted in 1945 had not forgotten. Was he culpable for Gallipoli? His taste for the grand strategic delusion guaranteed it. Did the great man of the people once favour the enforced sterilisation of the "feeble-minded"? Yes, he did.

Churchill was the inept Chancellor who probably did as much as anyone to cause the depression when, in 1924, for the usual daft patriotic reasons, he returned Britain to the gold standard at pre-war parity with the dollar. The killing of 200,000 refugees at Dresden can meanwhile be entered in his ledger. This too, though the fact is rarely mentioned, was the menace who in 1947 urged the United States to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR.

Churchill did not win the Second World War. His bloody-minded victory was in refusing to admit even the possibility of defeat when Britain truly did stand alone. All else has disappeared in the shadow of that fact. Today, as 50 years ago, a reckless egotist is forgiven, the rest forgotten, his beloved empire above all. Now only yearning nostalgia, the most pernicious of his legacies, remains.