Sir Winston Churchill may have had 'short man syndrome', suggests Boris Johnson

The author points out that Churchill was not in the team for Harrow football, his public school's uniquely violent version of the game, nor did he play cricket, and on one occasion he ran away and hid in the woods when the other boys threw cricket balls at him. He also had a stammer as well as his famous lisp, which would inevitably have been picked on by other boys.

Churchill identified in later life his desire to show the bullies he was made of sterner stuff.

In a letter to his mother, explaining what Mr Johnson describes as his "suicidal daring" in the 1897 battle of Malakand, Churchill wrote: "Being in many ways a coward - particularly at school - there is no ambition I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation for personal courage."

Churchill showed reckless bravery over and over again in battles on four continents during his time as a soldier, though Mr Johnson suggests he had already shown his courage as a teenager, when "by an act of will he decided to defeat his cowardice and his stammer, and to be the 80-pound weakling who uses dumb-bells to acquire the body of Charles Atlas".

He cites as an example the day he was playing hare and hounds with his brother and cousin in Dorset, when they trapped him on a bridge, leaving him with no escape route. Spotting a fir tree next to the bridge, Churchill leapt onto it, fell to the ground and did not regain consciousness for three days, or leave his bed for three months. It was just one of countless episodes in which he could, and perhaps should, have lost his life, but which made him all the more prepared to take the sort of risks that made him the ultimate war leader.

"Having vanquished his own cowardice," writes Mr Johnson, "it was easy to vanquish everything else."

He suggests that the episode on the bridge in Dorset showed: "The imagination, the bravado and the ability to take a decision in a flash.

"Churchill's bravery wasn't something he just put on. It wasn't a mask he struggled with. He was made like that. The spirit of derring-do just pumped through his veins, like some higher-octane fuel than the one the rest of us run on. Nothing could stop him."

Like Hitler, Stalin and others, Churchill possessed an enormous ego, writes Mr Johnson. He suggests that Churchill regarded himself as the greatest man in the greatest empire on earth, and therefore the greatest man on earth, though he points out that other historians go further, suggesting that Churchill saw himself as the greatest man in the greatest empire in history, and therefore the "greatest man in the history of the world".

But unlike the 20th century's murderous dictators, Churchill had a "greatness of heart" that marked him out as a man of immense compassion. When his mother decided to sack his nanny, Churchill was appalled, and used his meagre income to help support her financially (he paid for her gravestone when he was only 20). He was generous to his staff, and even to strangers.

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Sir Winston Churchill may have had 'short man syndrome', suggests Boris Johnson