LAURENCE REES: The single most overrated leader?

SIR MAX HASTINGS: There were so many. A basic fact about leaders in Western Democracies, was that Roosevelt and Churchill constantly found themselves imprisoned by propaganda, because when you appointed a general or an air marshal or an admiral, the newspapers and the radio for months thereafter built him up into a great popular hero. Once he’d been built into a great popular hero he became fantastically difficult to sack. So there’s no doubt that Portal would have loved to have sacked Bomber Harris in the winter of 1944-45, but he couldn’t because propaganda had told everybody this was Bomber Harris; the master of Britain’s bomber offensive, a great popular figure. Macarthur in the Far East, a great national figure; there is an almost endless roll call of inadequate commanders who had been allowed to become so famous that they couldn’t be fired.