Mehdi Hasan: Churchill ... never knowingly underquoted

Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and a former news and current affairs editor at Channel 4. 

The debate over electoral reform is rather tedious. Those endless references to Australia, the BNP and MPs' expenses are the perfect cure for insomnia. But what I find intriguing – if frustrating – is the ghostly presence of Winston Churchill. The prime minister, who passed away 46 years ago, is now piously and repeatedly invoked by opponents of thealternative vote, who have discovered that Churchill once described AV as a system determined by "the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates". Take that, Clegg!

In a speech on AV earlier this month, David Cameron proudly cited these words from his Tory predecessor before adding: "Thank you, Winston – I couldn't have put it better myself." On Monday, at his joint event with Cameron in defence of first-past-the-post, Labour's John Reid became the latest No-to-AV figure to refer to Winnie's warnings about electoral reform.

This growing army of Churchill-worshippers, however, is guilty of selective quotation. The former prime minister may have described AV as "the stupidest, the least scientific and the most unreal" of all voting systems, but he also held a rather dim view of first-past-the-post. In 1911, Churchill wrote that "the present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any party, nor to any section of the community . . . All they secure is fluke representation, freak representation, capricious representation."

But there is a bigger issue at stake here. Why should we care what Churchill's view of AV was?..