There will be no edition tomorrow because of the Bank Holiday. Back to normal on Tuesday.
What to see
Churchill in Miami in 1946. Getty
How Churchill beat the “black dog”
Winston Churchill was 40 before he ever entered an art gallery. Until then, says Sarah Hyde in Air Mail, the closest he came to art was an “affection for cartoons”. But in the summer of 1915, having been fired as First Lord of the Admiralty and in the grip of what he called the “black dog”, he picked up a paintbrush belonging to his sister-in-law Gwendoline. “Joy returned.” And so began a treasured hobby that kept the “lion of the free world” happy and engaged for the rest of his life. By the time he died in 1965, he’d created more than 600 works – he called them “daubs” – that today achieve eye-watering prices, 90 of which are now on display at London’s Wallace Collection.
Churchill loved to paint in the south of France, particularly the water, and was a welcome guest at the great villas along the Riviera before and after World War Two. He would arrive with his valet, who was in charge of the cigars and “mouthwash” (whisky and soda), his secretary, security guard, painting gear and white painting coat. Finished canvases would be taken home to his studio at Chartwell and fine-tuned using photographs for reference, then often dispatched as a thank-you gift to his hostess. Although he was always endearingly insecure about his artistic talents, Churchill’s journey as a painter is punctuated with stabs at validation. In 1921, he managed to sell four out of six pictures in Galerie René Drouin, in Paris, under the name “Charles Morin”. After World War Two, “David Winter” entered two canvases into the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. A certain Sir Winston Churchill was absolutely thrilled when they were both accepted.
Winston Churchill: The Painter will be on view at the Wallace Collection from 23 May to 29 November. Book tickets here.
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Property
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Comment
A Ukrainian drone targeting a Russian soldier
The age of robot war
“The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close,” says Noah Smith on Substack. In Ukraine, drones now account for an estimated 96% of Russian casualties. Territory still cannot be held without humans, but those humans have to hide in dugouts for months at a time, “terrified of emerging above ground lest they be instantly droned”. For a visceral sense of the horror, just watch any of the many videos shot from kamikaze drones in forests and bombed-out buildings as they meticulously and mercilessly chase soldiers to their deaths. Drones are also replacing bombers and missiles as the weapon of choice for long-range strikes behind enemy lines – Moscow was recently hit by more than 1,000 Ukrainian drones in a single attack.
What all this means is that every military not built around drones is functionally obsolete. At Nato’s “Hedgehog 2025” exercise in Estonia, thousands of troops – among them a British brigade – were “just walking around, not using any kind of disguise”. A team of 10 Ukrainians playing the enemy “mock-destroyed” 17 armoured vehicles and eliminated two battalions in a day. As one observing NATO commander concluded: “We are f***ed.” Particularly worrying for the West is the advantage Beijing holds in all this. Not only can China produce a whopping four billion so-called “First Person View” drones in a single year – vastly more than anyone else – it also controls the markets for two of their key components: lithium-ion batteries and rare earth electric motors. Should it choose to, Beijing could create a drone armada outmatching that of “every other country on the planet combined”. Western nations have to start re-orientating their supply chains for the “Drone Era”. If they don’t, that Nato commander will be proved right.
🚑🪖 Drones have made the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the frontline extremely challenging, says Sylvie Kauffmann in the FT. Advances in military medicine, especially in the second half of the 20th century, had brought down the ratio of battlefield fatalities to injuries to around 1:10 in the Afghanistan war. In Ukraine today, it’s back up to around 1:3 or 1:4, “close to that of the Great War”.
Inside politics
Migrants in the English Channel in 2023. Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty
No area of British public life is more warped by misperception than immigration, says Ian Dunt in The i Paper. The latest figures show net migration plummeting to 171,000 in 2025 – half the previous year’s total and a quarter of the year before. Asylum claims are down 12% andthe number of asylum seekers living in hotels has fallen by a third. Yet only 16% of the public think migration has fallen, while 49% believe it’s risen. This is a catastrophic communications failure from Labour. The fall in numbers is mainly due to policy changes brought in by the previous Tory government, so all Keir Starmer and co had to do was take credit for the work done by their predecessors – “the oldest trick in the book”. Instead, they reinforced the idea that immigration was out of control and floated solutions guaranteed to enrage their base. It’s like watching someone “firing a gun into his own foot, calmly reloading it and pulling the trigger again”.
The Knowledge Crossword
Life
Franziska Krug/Getty
The richest cat in the world
Karl Lagerfeld lived in a “surreal kind of grandeur”, says Chris Heath in The Atlantic. The great German fashion designer – the creative director of Chanel and Fendi – owned homes in Paris, Rome, the Côte d’Azur, Biarritz and Hamburg, as well as an enormous collection of Art Deco furniture, antique jewellery, a 300,000-book library, three Rolls-Royces and a “curious assemblage” of 509 iPods. His annual flower budget was rumoured to have been around €1.5m. But his most prized possession was undoubtedly his blue-cream Birman cat, Choupette, who became “the richest cat in the world”.
Choupette was “like a kept woman”. She had two personal maids – one for day, one for night – who, aside from their caring duties, were charged with writing down every detail of her behaviour when Lagerfeld wasn’t around so that he would know what he had missed. “Everything she did,” he said, “from what she ate, to how she behaved, if she was tired, and if she wasn’t sleeping.” As the fashion designer revealed more about the extravagance of Choupette’s day-to-day life – eating chef-prepared meals off fine china, travelling by private jet, starring on magazine covers – her fame grew. She earned millions of dollars starring in ad campaigns and was the subject of a glossy 2014 book, Choupette: The Private Life of a High-Flying Fashion Cat, featuring photos, biographical tidbits and details of her beauty regimen. When Lagerfeld died in 2019, he was cremated with a piece of aquamarine jewellery made in her likeness, and left her a sizeable sum, rumoured to be as much as $4m, so that she could “live on in the style to which she had become accustomed”.
Quoted
“To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.”
French filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard
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