But by the 1945 general election, Churchill's old fear, dating from 1917, that socialism and a centrally-planned economy could pose a threat to democracy and freedom, had revived. Looking ahead to the communist threat and the Cold War, he seized on Hayek's Road to Serfdom as the blueprint for his campaign. In a notorious speech, he warned against socialism as "an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police. They [the Labour Party] would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance." 

Many voters were disgusted by this denigration of his former partners in the wartime coalition, and they were not impressed by the provenance of Churchill's ideas, at a time when anything German or Austrian was tainted by association with the newly-liberated concentration camps. His deputy, Clement Attlee, described the Prime Minister's outburst as a "second-hand version of the academic views of an Austrian professor, Friedrich August von Hayek". Churchill lost the election by a landslide. 

But was Churchill, who had been so right about the threat posed by Nazi Germany in 1940, necessarily so wrong about the threat posed by big government in 1945? When we wonder why our budget deficits are now strangling our economies, or why our personal liberties have been circumscribed in so many ways that the individual feels impotent and crushed by the burden of the leviathan State, surely we can date the moment when we crossed the Rubicon to 1945. That year of victory marked the emergence of a new consensus in Western Europe, based on Keynesian economics and social democracy, which was institutionalised by the European Union and has remained largely intact until the present. It is this consensus that has now broken down and will have to be replaced by something closer to the Thatcher-Reagan free-enterprise model of the 1980s. Churchill had more than an inkling of all this when he envisaged the rapid dismantling of the bloated size and draconian powers of the wartime State. By the time he returned to office in 1951, the welfare state had expanded even further, and he was able only to abolish a few war-time controls, such as rationing. Today, we need to revive the Churchillian spirit by replacing many of the functions of government with private and voluntary means. David Cameron has called for "the Big Society" to replace big government, but there is concern that he has been over-influenced by President Obama's Alinsky-inspired and state-controlled "community organisers". I am inclined to think that, where politics and society are concerned, small is beautiful. Like Edmund Burke, Churchill sided with the "little platoons". Except on the battlefield, he was not on the side of the big battalions.

Today, the West manifestly has no leader with the clarity of vision and firmness of resolution of a Churchill, a Roosevelt or a de Gaulle. True, we do not face enemies as formidable and abominable as Hitler, nor rely on allies as treacherous and murderous as Stalin. Instead, we find a common mediocrity of friend and foe. But words retain the power to inspire us, and for the example of his oratory, if for nothing else, Churchill will continue to inspire us. Unlike, say, Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, Churchill making his broadcast of his "Finest Hour" speech may still be heard. "Rhetoric was no guarantee of survival," he wrote dismissively, and foreigners ignorant of "the temper of the British race all over the globe when its blood is up, might have supposed that [these words] were only a bold front, set up as a good prelude for peace negotiations". Churchill and his audience knew better. Two months later, on August 18, Churchill told the Commons about the RAF fighter pilots: "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." All who heard these words immediately recognised their immortality. They were intended nearly as much for American as for British ears: he desperately needed help from across the Atlantic, for as he remarked bitterly in private, the US was "very good at applauding the valiant deeds done by others". In public, however, he appealed on September 11, as London burned and the Battle of Britain reached its climax, for the Old World and the New to "join hands to rebuild the temples of man's freedom and man's honour, upon foundations which will not easily be overthrown".

Three score years and ten later, it falls to us to prevent the overthrow of those temples today. Once again it is the Atlantic alliance that defends these temples of freedom and honour against those who would tear them down, who dream of a global caliphate ruling over Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. Once again it is the Atlantic alliance that stands between civilisation and barbarism aided by perverted science, a beacon of light in a darkening world. And once again it is the Atlantic alliance that can and must rally the persecuted and the oppressed wherever they may be, not abandoning the downtrodden peoples of Iran and North Korea, China and Africa, Central Asia and Central America. Above all, we must not abandon Israel. Churchill told Eisenhower in 1956, on the eve of the Suez crisis: "I am, of course, a Zionist, and have been ever since the Balfour Declaration. I think it is a wonderful thing that this tiny colony of Jews should have become a refuge to their compatriots in all the lands where they were persecuted so cruelly, and at the same time established themselves as the most effective fighting force in the area. I am sure America would not stand by and see them overwhelmed by Russian weapons, especially if we had persuaded them to hold their hand while their chance remained." Today, Israel has again been restrained by America and Europe from destroying the threat to its existence, posed this time by a nuclear Iran, which is busily arming itself with Russian air-defence missiles.