THE world’s leading Churchill expert has accused Cambridge University of an “extraordinary” lapse of scholarship after it claimed to have unearthed proof that the wartime prime minister had expressed “perverse” antisemitic views.

The university last week announced that one of its history lecturers had discovered a “suppressed” 1937 article by Churchill in which he said “the Jew . . . looks different. He thinks differently”. He described resentment among some in Britain against “Hebrew bloodsucker” money-lenders.

However, Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill’s official biographer, said this weekend that the article, which was never published, had been ghost-written by a member of Oswald Mosley’s fascist party. He added that Churchill had refused to have it published because it was not his work and did not reflect his views.

Gilbert said Richard Toye, the lecturer who “found” the article and includes it in a new book, Lloyd George and Churchill, must have failed to consult Gilbert’s compilation of Churchill’s writings published in the 1980s, which describes it. “I’m amazed. My book would have been on the shelf in the same library. I immediately recognised the name of the article,” said Gilbert, whose own new book, Churchill and the Jews, will be published this summer.

The article is controversial, not only for its apparently racist sentiments but also because it goes against the accepted view that Churchill was a strong ally of the Jews and was one of the prime movers behind the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Toye, a lecturer at Homerton College, came across the text, entitled How the Jews Can Combat Persecution, while researching his book.

This weekend Toye admitted that he had failed to spot Gilbert’s reference to the article, but stood by its importance. He agreed with Gilbert that the ghost-writer of the article was Adam Marshall Diston, a member of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, but said Churchill had approved the article and actively tried to have it published.

Toye stood by his view that the article cast doubt on Churchill’s reputation as an unwavering supporter of the Jewish cause.

“I have to be very careful what I say,” said Toye. “I don’t want to say he was antisemitic, but this sheds fascinating new light on his views about Jews, which were very inconsistent.”

Three years later, just before he became prime minister, Churchill clearly rejected the views in the article when he turned down a request from the Sunday Dispatch newspaper to publish it. “The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and nonJew is that the Jew is ‘different’,” the article says. “He looks different. He thinks differently. He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed.”

The article, written the year before Hitler began large-scale persecution of the Jews with the “kristallnacht” pogroms, continues that racial tensions were heightened because “the Jewish community turns in upon itself”.

Other parts of the article use virulent language to describe what it claims is many Britons’ stereotyped view of Jews, continuing: “Every Jewish moneylender recalls Shylock and the idea of the Jews as usurers.

“And you cannot reasonably expect a struggling clerk or shopkeeper, paying forty or fifty per cent interest on borrowed money to a ‘Hebrew bloodsucker’ to reflect that, throughout long centuries, almost every other way of life was closed to Jewish people; or that there are native English moneylenders who insist, just as implacably, upon their ‘pound of flesh’.”

Andrew Roberts, also a biographer of Churchill, said the article was “of its time”, adding that it should not detract from “a lifetime of pro-Jewish sentiment”.

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