So the anniversaries are catching up on me. It must mean I am getting old.

This week marked 50 years since Winston Churchill died. I remember it well.

I even compiled my first book about it, as a primary school project.

But since those days I have realised that Churchill was much more than the hero of World War Two.

Moving to Wales made me aware how hated he was in the valleys for his part in the Railway Strike of 1911, when two men were shot dead in Llanelli by the Army after Churchill literally head the Riot Act read.

And he was so wrong about the Boers too, and Gandhi, even Gallipoli, and the Welfare State which the Tory Government, for which he was a ga-ga Prime Minister in the early 1950s, tried to abolish.

My mum was a fan of his war-time leadership, but my dad was part of the Army which voted him out in 1945.

No doubt they realised it was the end of the war-time Government of All the Talents - Attlee, and leading industrialists and trade unionists - which was about to be disbanded and replaced by a similar selection of quislings and near-traitors the Conservatives had foisted on us in the late 1930s.

Churchill was lucky that circumstances gave him so much good to counterbalance the bad.

Lucky, too, that he was the man who wrote the history of the war, and that he was out of power for so long, so cannot be held responsible for the same number and kind of political mistakes we see today.