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Throughout his career Churchill was an outsider, accumulating a reputation for bad judgement and untrustworthiness. Only risk-takers and fellow outsiders would back him and he needed the company of like-minded individuals to create a social environment in which his personality could flourish. They were the acute and vigorous sparring-partners with whom he could hold the lively discussions which were life itself to him, in the convivial and epicurean surroundings he craved.
They were Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, who deployed a fortune amassed in obscure financial dealings to make a position for himself; F.E Smith – later Lord Birkenhead - a fantastically successful and well-paid lawyer; Brendan Bracken, the model for the shady parvenu politician Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; the young Bob Boothby who would make a name for himself by conducting a scandalous adulterous affair with Harold Macmillan's wife, and Charles Lindemann – later Lord Cherwell – an ascetic, vegetarian and near-teetotal, who adored the cut and thrust of competitive conversation which was more important to the group than high-living.
Together they were Winston's bandits, and this remarkable book tells the story of their friendship and of the part they played both in Churchill's triumphs and disasters.