Politics & Power Quote by Lord Mountbatten

Mountbatten’s portrait of Churchill reads like a grudging admiration dressed up as a field report. “Canny political animal” isn’t just a compliment; it’s taxonomy. Churchill is placed in a Darwinian ecosystem where survival depends on scenting opportunity, dominating rivals, and never mistaking ethics for strategy. The phrase carries a soldier’s faint disdain for politicking, yet it also grants Churchill a kind of predator’s legitimacy: not noble, but effective.

“Very devious” is the tell. Mountbatten isn’t naming a flaw so much as signaling a method - the willingness to maneuver, misdirect, and outflank, especially in wartime coalition management where enemies are obvious and allies can be more dangerous. Coming from a senior officer and royal insider, the word also suggests proximity to the machinery: he’s seen the back rooms, the sudden reversals, the calculated charm.

Then he pivots to “bursting with energy and determination,” a kinetic image that rescues the earlier cynicism. Churchill’s drive becomes the moral alibi for his tactics, implying that the deviousness was harnessed to purpose rather than vanity. The closing clause, “learning as hard as he could,” is Mountbatten’s most consequential note: it frames Churchill not as an infallible genius but as an adaptive operator. In the context of a rapidly changing war - new technologies, shifting alliances, disaster and improvisation - that hunger to learn reads as a strategic weapon. Subtext: Churchill’s greatness wasn’t purity; it was relentless self-upgrading, and Mountbatten is both impressed and wary of anyone that hard to stop.