Churchill, cited as a witness against himself, testifies happily for his 1911 vintage and leaves the House the definition it never returned: democracy as the worst form of government except all the others.

11 November 1947 — Armistice Day — with Attlee's government at mid-term, its nationalisation programme rolling, and the Parliament Bill introduced for a plainly tactical reason: to ensure the Lords could not delay steel nationalisation past the next election. Morrison had opened by quoting Churchill's own 1911 speeches on the Parliament Act, an invitation the old man accepted with relish, coming to the House against his doctor's protest to testify for his younger self. The speech is late-Churchill parliamentary performance at its ripest — the Gibbonian abuse of Morrison, the brake-and-engine conceit, Morley and Asquith summoned from the Edwardian twilight — wrapped around a serious constitutional claim about mandates that both parties would spend the next seventy years borrowing when in opposition and ignoring in office. Its immortality, though, rests on a subordinate clause: the 'worst form of government' aphorism, which Churchill was careful to attribute — 'it has been said' — and which the world has attributed to him ever since. The Bill passed in 1949 under the very Parliament Act procedure it amended; steel was nationalised, denationalised, and renationalised; and the aphorism outlived every ton of it.

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