Winston Churchill’s political life was a ride on a roller coaster. He began his first dizzying ascent to power when he received a ministerial post in December 1905. From there, despite an occasional folly, he went up and up at unheard of speed. He reached the heights for the first time in August 1914, at the age of thirty-nine: as First Lord of the Admiralty he became a national hero, lionized by the press and the public because he had anticipated the outbreak of war by mobilizing the Fleet. But  he fell even further and faster than he had risen, his ruin accomplished in a mere matter of months by the disastrous Dardanelles expedition the following year, for which he was blamed and, indeed, vilified by critics to whom the frustrated young politician could not reply.

On May 17, 1915, the embattled young First Lord of the Admiralty arrived at the House of Commons to deliver a speech defending his conduct of the Dardanelles operation and announcing the name of the admiral he proposed to appoint as the new uniformed chief of the Navy. To his dismay, he learned that the Prime Minister would not permit him to speak. Thereafter, on security grounds, the government forbade Churchill to make public the documents and information that he believed would clear him. The dimensions of his disgrace at first were incomprehensible to him; it took days for him to realize that he was going to lose his high office.