She was 22 before a chance dinner invitation put her next to Winston Churchill, a rising young politician, son of the Duke of Marlborough’s third son, Randolph, and his dashing American wife, Jennie Jerome. Despite the lack of fortune that caused snickers among the upper-class mean girls, Clementine’s beauty enticed a number of suitors, but she backed out of two engagements because she found her prospective bridegrooms dull. The Hoziers’ acrimonious divorce, which marked Clementine’s childhood, left Lady Blanche in straitened circumstances and although Clementine showed great academic promise, her mother pushed her into society instead of university, hoping she would attract a suitable husband. There was some question about her paternity: Her titular father had been uninterested in procreation, and the “sexy, bored and lonely” Lady Blanche Hozier had looked elsewhere - reportedly, in Clementine’s case, to her own brother-in-law, Lord Redesdale (grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters). Tall, willowy and regal, Clementine Hozier had a rather slapdash upbringing for the wife of a prime minister, particularly one descended from one of Scotland’s most distinguished aristocratic families.
Churchill couldn’t promise a miracle, he told the House of Commons: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He forgot to mention a possibly more potent weapon: his wife, Clementine, the subject of Sonia Purnell’s thorough and engrossing (if occasionally overdramatized) biography. When Winston Churchill took office as prime minister of Britain in May 1940, Nazi Germany had brought Continental Europe under its domination, and it seemed as if, barring a miracle, Britain would be next.
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