Churchill’s Biographer Accuses National Portrait Gallery of ‘Barefaced Lie’
16th June 2026
A biographer of Winston Churchill has accused the National Portrait Gallery of a “barefaced lie” over its claim that the wartime prime minister deliberately starved Indians.
Lord Roberts of Belgravia wrote to the gallery’s board on Monday to demand an explanation after The Telegraph exposed its claims that Churchill “wilfully” inflicted mass starvation on India during the Bengal famine of 1943.
The taxpayer-funded attraction recently installed a 40-minute-long film by Helen Cammock, an artist, whose voice-over narration claims that Churchill used mass starvation as a weapon of war.
The letter, signed by more than 50 peers, including Churchill’s grandson Lord Soames, has described the film as an “ideologically motivated rant”.
Proglodytes lie. It’s what they do.