Winston Churchill's detractors accuse him of having been an alcoholic. The evidence, however, contradicts that.

His daughter, Lady Soames, recalls that the "Papa Cocktail" was a smidgen of whisky covering the bottom of a tumbler, which was then filled with water and sipped throughout the morning. In his autobiography 'My Early Life', Churchill claimed he earned this habit as a young man in India and South Africa.  "The water being unfit to drink, one had to add whisky and, by dint of careful application I learned to like it."  Churchill remarked to those who took whisky neat, "you are not likely to live a long life if you drink it like that."

Undoubtedly he did drink a lot at meals, though most doctors acknowledge is better than drinking on an empty stomach. In fact Dr. Mather reported that Churchill's blood pressure was a healthy 140/80 well into his eighties.

No colleague ever reports seeing Churchill the worse for drink, thus his  famous quip "I have taken more out of alcohol, than alcohol has taken out of me."

When Bessie Braddock MP made her infamous accusation "you're drunk!", his bodyguard Ron Golding was with him at the time. He insisted that Churchill was not drunk "just tired and wobbly" - hence his devastatingly lucid response: "And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober tomorrow".

It seems, like his cigars which were rarely smoked beyond a third, and usually discarded after being well-chewed, that drink was at least partly a prop. It amused him to allow people to think he had hollow legs: his famous declaration to the King of Saudi Arabia that his own absolute rule of life required drinking before, during and after meals -  was intended to shock a tea-total monarch. After all, he knew his limit: "my father taught me to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk."