Barbara Leaming: Churchill the warrior would have relished web of intrigue

At a glance, the answer seems to be no. Churchill's verbal and performance styles would seem to have been too literary and mannered. His stately set-piece speeches, with their jewelled language and flights of oratory, required too many hours, days and weeks to craft. Even in the first half of the 20th century, Churchill the orator struck observers as a bit of a dinosaur, a throwback to the Victorian epoch of his youth.

But the signature speeches were only one facet of Churchill's political style. While writing my new book about the dramatic last 10 years of his political life, I have had a chance to observe close-up how the titan's mind worked when he was in intense conflict with others.

Watching him joust with friend and foe alike at a time when most of them hoped the aged Churchill would finally consent to hand over the Conservative leadership to a younger man, I have had reason to wonder whether Winston and the web might have been a very good fit indeed.

Churchill, the political warrior, employed certain tricks and turns repeatedly. He relished taking an opponent's remarks out of context and shamelessly using them for his own purposes. He liked to ignore the negatives in an antagonist's statements and to highlight, however misleadingly, the positives.

He was a dazzling counter-puncher, always quick to strike back and to claim – for the moment anyway – the last word. The Churchill I saw in action between 1945 and 1955 was a master of the art of spin, who relentlessly scoured unfolding events for anything he could use to make his unyielding case for a return to the summit with the Soviets.

He did it all brilliantly, but one cannot help thinking how much more effective he might have been, not to mention how much fun he would have had, in an era of non-stop information, when there would have been so much more material to draw on, and so many more opportunities to speak out.

Today's web-world also would have suited Churchill's preferred method of decision-making.

In 1954, and in the midst of a nerve-jangling game of chicken between himself and the Marquess of Salisbury that threatened to bring down the Conservative government, Churchill characterised his modus operandi in both peace and war in a fascinating letter to Salisbury. Churchill explained that rather than make decisions well in advance, he always preferred to wait until the last possible moment. Then he would enjoy what he saw as the crucial advantage of knowing the "factual circumstances of the day or even of the hour".

Not only did one thing affect many others, he explained, but also their proportions shifted in the "ever-changing scene". Instead of basing his actions on pre-conceived ideas, Churchill liked to respond to events. He prized flexibility and lightning moves.

I suspect that far from daunting Churchill, our round-the-clock news cycle might have done much to assuage his painful frustration with fleeting time. In the period I wrote about, Churchill was an "old man in a hurry". In truth, he had been hurrying all his life.

The biographical origin of his abiding impatience seems to have been the early belief that he would die young like his father. As a young man, Winston was convinced that he must fulfil his destiny in the brief time on earth that he had been allotted.

Long after he had passed the point when he had fully expected to die, he continued to dwell on the shortness of time. In the 1930s, he focused on the need to stop Hitler before it was too late; after the war, on getting to the negotiating table with the Soviets and hammering out a viable settlement before East and West committed nuclear suicide.

In his fraught final political decade, and as his 80th birthday drew near, Churchill was conscious of a further time-lock: the fact that, unavoidably now, he must soon expire and that if he was going to secure a lasting peace he had not a second to waste.

In today's media climate, Churchill almost certainly could never have got away with covering up the major stroke he suffered in 1953 when three Press barons, who were his friends, agreed to keep his true condition out of the news. And surely in the internet age, his habit of acting before the Cabinet could advise a counter view would have sparked off even more damaging internecine warfare than it did in the 1950s.

Still, it is tempting to picture the old man late at night, clad in a Chinese silk dressing gown, propped up against a mountain of pillows, alone with a computer in front of him, fighting to save the world — and without having to leave his bed.

To order a copy of Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-55 from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepost bookshop.co.uk. P&P is 2.75.

Barbara Leaming is an award-winning biographer and author of Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945-1955, published by Harper Press, price 20.