News about Winston Churchill

The Archbishop of Canterbury has revealed his family's ties to slavery. The Most Reverend Justin Welby disclosed that his ancestor owned enslaved people on a plantation in Jamaica and was compensated by the British government when slavery was abolished. In a personal statement, Dr Welby reaffirmed his commitment to addressing the legacies of slavery. The Church of England's most senior bishop revealed he recently made the discovery that his late biological father, Sir Anthony Montague Browne, who was a private secretary to Winston Churchill, 'had an ancestrial connection to the enslavement of people in Jamaica and Tobago'. Montague Browne, the son of a British army colonel, was born in May 1923. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then joined the RAF. He died in 2013 aged 89.

The Shadow Housing Secretary (left) is described as 'formidable' by Lord Soames (right) and the person who can 'not only unite the party but reinvigorate us'. Writing in the Mail, the former MP hails her 'positive vision' as well as her 'no-nonsense approach' that he believes can win back former voters. The 76-year-old Lord Soames, a minister in John Major 's government, says that Mrs Badenoch already has the most support from elected Conservatives. The latest tally - just 10 days before the ballot of party members closes, with the winner to be announced on November 2nd - shows that more than 220 councillors, 40 MPs and 40 peers are backing her, as are more than 30 candidates at this year's election.

A wartime soldier's unseen photos of the VE Day celebrations in London have been discovered - in his old uniform (inset). The black and white images show huge cheering crowds gathering in Leicester Square, central London as news of Germany 's surrender was announced on May 8, 1945. One woman is seen unable to contain her excitement as she raises her hands aloft in celebration at victory. Among the jubilant crowd on May 8, 1945 was George Axe, a Royal Signals soldier from Exeter, Devon.

The standees, which sell for £38.99 a piece, include life-sized cut outs of three of Taylor Swift 's exes, high-profile politicians and even popular animated characters. Cuts outs of The 1975's Matty Healy, actor Jake Gyllenhaal and Marvel actor Tom Hiddleston have drawn the most attention online, likely due to their connection with the songstress, with others pointing to an effigy of Shrek. There are dozens of these standees available on the Tesco website, with customers able to take cut outs of King Henry VIII and Boris Johnson home, as well as Winston Churchill and Hillary Clinton .

An Italian business tycoon who 'nearly killed off Bond' will lift the lid on his chaotic purchase of the legendary MGM film studio in a new BBC documentary tonight.  Waiter turned movie mogul Giancarlo Parretti bought the classic franchise for $1.3billion in 1990 with grand plans to revamp it.  But within weeks of his takeover, cheques to Hollywood stars bounced, the 17th Bond movie was put on hold and hundreds of staff lost their jobs. 

The Rhins of Galloway is a 28-mile-long peninsula located in southwest Scotland, full of rugged cliffs, haunting ruins and abundant birdlife. Martin Symington travels there, noting that you 'feel as if you have entered a secret world'. Read on for more...

To quote Winston Churchill: 'Those that fail to learn from ­history are doomed to repeat it.' It may seem odd for a Labour MP to quote a Conservative Prime ­Minister, but I have good reason for doing so. For my party is sleepwalking into an industrial disaster. We must not turn our back on workers and their families, just as Margaret Thatcher abandoned mining communities four decades ago. To give some context to this statement, which I write with huge sadness and not a little fury, I have worked tirelessly over the past few months to tell anyone and everyone who will ­listen that the closure of the oil refinery at Grangemouth - planned for next year - will be ­cataclysmic.

How very odd it is that we pay so much attention to MI5 and its chief Ken McCallum, warning us last week of all the perils supposedly stalking the land, which just so happen to justify his enormous budget. Have you ever heard the head of a tax-funded organisation pleading for fewer resources, or downplaying his importance? No, nor have I. Well, you may believe all this if you wish. But first ask yourself what MI5 is. The answer is disturbing, and doesn't really fit with my idea of what sort of country this is. Many people wrongly refer to it as a spy service, and to its boss as a 'spy chief'. But it is not. It works entirely at home. It is in fact a secret police force which once quite justifiably kept an eye on Nazi and Communist sympathisers, who were in many cases actively working for our national enemies during the Second World War and the Cold War. This was probably necessary, even if the idea is pretty repellent.

Pamela Churchill Harriman has been seen by history as a gold-digger who was merely 'an expert in rich men's ceilings'. But, as Ysenda Maxtone Graham discovers in Sonia Purnell's new biography, Pamela was in fact a shrewd political operator with the ear of Churchill.

Boris Johnson is even more popular than Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. That is if you judge Prime Ministers on sales of Toby Jugs, peculiar £35 collectables immortalising some of those to have resided in No10 Downing Street over the past three centuries. MailOnline can reveal that, since 2018, the Houses of Parliament Gift Shop has sold 389 jugs decorated to resemble Mr Johnson. For context, that is more than the combined total for Theresa May (116), Rishi Sunak (74) and Liz Truss (109).

England's unlikely defeat of the Spanish Armada was celebrated with songs, medals, portraits and prints. Queen Elizabeth I, previously hated, became Gloriana, writes TERRY DEARY. Although that David vs Goliath scenario was rather hammed up, Britain faced a real mammoth task in the Second World War when the Nazi war machine launched its reign of terror onto the world. Winston Churchill stirred millions with his words of defiance, not least the immortal line: 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.' In his new book, famed Horrible Histories creator TERRY DEARY delves into Britain's most consequential enemies.

An Albanian migrant used a legal loophole to sneak back into Britain after being deported and won the right to stay under the European Convention on Human Rights. Ardit Binaj, 32, (not pictured) entered the UK illegally in a lorry in 2014 before being arrested the next year for burglary. He was jailed for 30 months in 2016 for the break-in, alongside a six-month prison term for another burglary and 18 weeks for a separate theft.

Another of the king's ravens has died at the Tower of London with the bird facing a ghastly death as it got its head stuck in a cage before attacked by his fellow birds. Gripp is the third raven to have died at the tourist attraction in the past three years, causing threat to the crown if a 350-year-old myth is to be believed. The raven died in July 2023 but its fate has only come out now, according to the Metro. King Charles II is said to insist there must always been six ravens present at the fortress otherwise that the kingdom and the Tower of London will fall.

The Diego Garcia atoll - the biggest of the islands, which covers just 10 square miles of dry land - serves as a strategically important base for navy ships and long-range bomber aircraft. Since the island's population was exiled in the 1960s, with foreign military personnel taking their place, few have been allowed access to its shores, allowing rumours to swirl about what goes on there. Around 1,000 miles from the nearest landmass, with no commercial flights allowed to land and those wanting to step foot on the island needing a permit, very few have been allowed to stay there.

MAILONLINE BLOG: Follow live coverage of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham as four MPs bid to succeed Rishi Sunak as leader. Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat will address delegates this week.

PATRICK MARMION: Best-selling children's author and Second World War fighter pilot Roald Dahl is the latest historical figure to be put in the dock of public opinion and held to account for historical racial slurs. The court in question is the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea, where Dahl is appearing in the shape of John Lithgow - best known as Winston Churchill in The Crown and from the TV series Third Rock From The Sun. Here Mark Rosenblatt's new play examines the fallout from revolting anti-Semitic insinuations Dahl made in 1983 in a review of a book - God Cried - by Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy, about the bombing of Lebanon the previous year.

The rare photos of the war time leader were discovered among a box of maritime memorabilia bought recently at a job lot at auction. Its owner noticed the album inside, decided to get it individually valued and was left 'surprised and taken aback by the historical importance' of his new purchase. Inside it they found 125 pictures from the early 1900s for a 30-year-old Churchill aboard the yacht Oceana. Various images show Churchill steering the yacht with a cigar in his mouth, relaxing on the deck and striking a pose with his girlfriend and future wife Clementine Hozier.

When Pamela Harriman died at the age of 76 after collapsing in the pool at the Paris Ritz, the verdicts on her colorful life were mostly far from flattering. By 1997, the British-born aristocrat and daughter-in-law to Winston Churchill, had risen to serve as President Clinton's handpicked ambassador to France , the first woman in that role. Yet it was commonly held that she was 'expert only in the subject of rich men's ceilings', as one wag put it. Pamela had taken hundreds of lovers, certainly, enjoyed sexually charged thrills on jets and yachts and received dozens of marriage proposals in her time. She was also one of the greatest unsung political players of her time with an influence over prominent world leaders that spanned more than 50 years and two continents.

It was one of Britain's greatest ever structures, constructed in London's Hyde Park in just 190 days between 1850 and 1851 - in time for Prince Albert's Great Exhibition. Now, a study answers the mystery of how London's 1,850-foot-long Crystal Palace - at the time was the world's largest building - was assembled so quickly. Designed by renowned English architect Sir Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park at a cost of £80,000 (nearly £10 million in today's money).

A portrait of Winston Churchill, regarded as the 'most famous photo' ever taken of the legendary British prime minister, was stolen from a posh hotel in Canada during the height of the pandemic. It went undetected for years until a worker noticed that the portrait was askew. Esteemed Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh took the picture in 1941 after Churchill delivered a rousing wartime speech to the Canadian House of Commons.

Millions watched the intimate video in which the Princess of Wales revealed that her chemotherapy has finished, but even the most eagle-eyed may have missed these intriguing aspects, say Nikki Sutherland and Natasha Livingstone.

On that historic summer's day in July 1865, team leader Edward Whymper (below right) was so cock-a-hoop about reaching the summit and claiming this prize for Britain that he threw rocks down at the rival Italian team he had raced to the top. After watching gleefully as they 'turned and fled', the fearless 25-year-old and his six companions celebrated by planting a tent pole in the snow and tying a shirt to it as an impromptu flag, before taking in the view. Quoting a line from the 18th-century poet Thomas Mordaunt, Whymper described their time at the peak as 'one crowded hour of glorious life'. But for four men in his party, that glorious life was about to come to an abrupt end in what many people at the time believed was a horrifying accident - but others claimed was murder.

Speaker Mike Johnson awarded the families of the 13 U.S. service members who were killed during the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal with Congressional Gold Medals on Tuesday. The emotional ceremony took place under the stately U.S. Capitol Dome as a military quartet played solemn and respectful melodies to honor the sacrifice of the many young men and women killed. The families of the lost soldiers sat quietly as Republican and Democratic leaders eulogized the fallen and paid their respects. 'The families who have been left to pick up the pieces continue to deserve transparency, appreciation and recognition,' Johnson said opening the ceremony. 'Although we can never fully measure your lost, we can and we must memorialize the ultimate sacrifice that was paid.'

Daryl Cooper - a podcast host and so-called historian - caused controversy when he said that not only did the Nazis not intend to murder millions but that Winston Churchill is the main villain of the war. The show caused outrage online, especially after X CEO Elon Musk quote-tweeted the video, writing: 'Very interesting. Worth watching'. Musk has since deleted the post. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates issued a harsh rebuke to the episode of the show.