NOTES & THEORIES: Live fast, die old and leave a good-looking

With the shortcomings " moral, oratorical, practical, symbolic " of our present crop of national leaders very much in mind, it is interesting to reflect on that famous photograph of our most revered warrior chieftain. He stands pin-striped and pugnacious, bow-tied beneath a dark Homburg. I dare say he has enjoyed a glass or two of his favourite Pol Roger champagne (and it was his habit to start the day with a whisky and soda in bed: 'I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me,' he once said). Clamped in his jaw is one of the eight to 10 Romeo y Julieta cigars he smoked every day (a habit he picked up on furlough in Cuba in 1895, later maintaining a store of 3,000 or so at his house in Kent). Additionally, a nice touch, this, he is holding a Thompson M1928 sub-machinegun.

I find myself in the subterranean gloom of the new Churchill Museum, an addition to the Cabinet War Rooms (a colony of the Imperial War Museum) far below The Foreign Office. This is the first time an English museum has been devoted to a politician. A week after the anniversary of VE Day, a week after the General Election with its deadly toxic fall-out of spent personalities, it is an instructive " even moving " place for the student of memorials and symbolism. The English have a squeamishness about shrines and memorials, happily addressed by the fine, strict modernist museum by Dinah Casson and Roger Mann: all rusted steel, sans serif, crisp edges and polished concrete. Churchill has been given the special treatment he deserves, but there is something uneasy about the project. Conventional shrines seem to us superstitious, even cloyingly sentimental. You think of Giuseppe Sacconi's saccharine Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome, an appalling architectural atrocity, quite inaccessible to English taste.

Or you think of Lenin's tomb. Somewhat creepily, in a Politburo meeting, Stalin advanced the idea of having the Hero of the Proletariat embalmed... some months before Lenin actually died. When he did, in January 1924, he was immediately laid in state in the Hall of Pillars in the House of Trade Unions. Meanwhile, frozen soil in Krasnaya Ploschad was dynamited to make way for a memorial. Lenin disdained personality cults, but his elegant puritanical vision of a Soviet Union did not suit the demonstrative tribal fantasies of the succeeding leaders of the Workers' Paradise. Meanwhile, as a temporary Mausoleum was constructed in wood, the white-coated embalmers had to maintain Lenin's corpse in a de-luxe condition fit for future exhibition. Like Churchill, he was soaked in alcohol, while hydrogen peroxide was used to contain stains and blemishes, ready for public display when the granite tomb was opened in 1929 " an occasion that was, incidentally, declared to be the Year of the Great Watershed with its cheerful initiative of forced industrialisation.

England's own greatest memorial is to another hero of industrialisation, Victoria's Consort, Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg Gotha, whose prodigal efforts to reform taste left us with the entire museums district of South Kensington. The Memorial in Kensington Gardens is on the site of the Crystal Palace which housed Albert's 1851 Great Exhibition. Ten years later a distressed Victoria was asked how she wanted her dead husband memorialised and, before Freud had offered the world his insights into the omnipresence of sexual symbolism, she sobbed that only a monolith 500 feet tall could represent his stature in her eyes. No quarry in the empire could furnish such a mighty shaft, so a competition was held. Proposals for an Albert Fountain were rejected in favour of Gilbert Scott's design. Typically Victorian, it looks forward and back: a modern structural iron frame is disguised by gothic dressing vaguely based on the Eleanor Crosses erected by Edward to commemorate her last journey from Lincoln to Charing Cross.

And it was another German in London, the current ambassador, who unconsciously raised a doubt about Churchill hero worship, claiming the English are disagreeably fixated by our Great Patriotic War. Churchill's rhetoric is, of course, the magnificent soundtrack of 1940 to 1945 but, to provide a contemporary version of appeasement, we must concede that some of the rhetoric was delusory. German historians do not, for instance, recognise such a thing as the Battle of Britain, at least not as a precise episode with a beginning and an end. Richard Overy, Professor of Modern History at King's College, London, has said that 'The RAF did not repel invasion for the apparently simple reason that the Germans were never coming'. Early in 1940 the RAF had about the same number of fighter aircraft as the Luftwaffe. Late in 1940 it had more. That stuff about the 'few' was what Peter Mandelson later called a 'presentational device'. The Battle of Britain with its start and finish dates was established not in the skies of Kent, but by an Air Ministry pamphlet published in March, 1941.

Still, Churchill provided the romance and the myth, the legendary dimension, necessary for motivation. And the English enjoy the Second World War so much because, to use " as we inevitably do " a phrase of Churchill's, it was our finest hour, while it was Germany's direst. A sense of common purpose, gloriously and poetically realised, briefly united a country normally fragmented by ruinous social and cultural divisions. The Germans, meanwhile, needed to escape their shame. While they were awfully good at Blitzkrieg, they proved to be even better at Wirtschaftswunder. Germany's finest hour was the Fifties and Sixties when its industrial ingenuity triumphed after its military ambitions failed. The wonderful democratic BMW Neue Klasse saloon cars of 1961 are a finer memorial to Germany than the BMW801TS engine that powered the deadly Focke-Wulf 190F. In contrast, a De Havilland Mosquito makes us feel prouder than an Austin Allegro.