The only son of future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, Randolph was brought up to regard himself as his father's political heir, although their relations became strained in later years.

[c][1] His father Winston Churchill was already a leading Liberal Cabinet Minister, and Randolph was christened in the House of Commons crypt on 26 October 1911, with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and Conservative politician F. E. Smith among his godparents.

[10][11] He remembered that he and Diana returned from ice-skating in Holland Park on 22 June 1922 to find the house guarded and being searched by "tough-looking men" following the assassination of Field Marshal Henry Wilson.

[22] From his teenage years he was encouraged to attend his father's dinner parties with leading politicians of the day, drink and have his say, and he later recorded that he would simply have laughed at anyone who had suggested that he would not go straight into politics and perhaps even become prime minister by his mid-twenties like William Pitt the Younger.

"[22] In April 1928 Winston forwarded a satisfactory school report to Clementine, who was in Florence, commenting that Randolph was "developing fast" and would be fit for politics, the bar or journalism and was "far more advanced than I was at his age".

[24] In what would turn out to be his final report on leaving Eton, Robert Birley, one of his history teachers, wrote of his native intelligence and writing ability, but added that he found it too easy to get by on little work or with a journalist's knack of spinning a single idea into an essay.

At San Simeon (the mansion of press baron Randolph Hearst) he lost his virginity to the Austrian-born actress Tilly Losch,[30] an erstwhile lover of his close friend Tom Mitford.

Randolph later claimed that he had benefited from the experience, but at the time his lifestyle earned him a magisterial letter of rebuke from his father (29 December 1929), warning him that he was "not acquiring any habits of industry or concentration" and that he would withdraw him from Oxford if he did not focus on his studies.

[44][45][46] At Lady Diana Cooper's fortieth birthday party in Venice that year a woman was deliberately burned on her hand with a cigarette by a thwarted lover, and Randolph sprang to her defence.

In an attempt to assert his own political standing he announced in January 1935 that he was a candidate in the Wavertree by-election in Liverpool; on 6 February 1935, an Independent Conservative on a platform of rearmament and opposition to Indian Home Rule.

[56] The day after the Wavertree by-election the Secretary of State for India Samuel Hoare wrote to Viceroy Lord Willingdon “that little brute Randolph has done a lot of mischief … The fact that he kept our man out will undoubtedly do both Winston and him a good deal of harm in the party.

It shows that there is a great deal of inflammable material about and it makes me nervous of future explosions.”[57] In March 1935, again with financial backing from Lady Houston,[54] he sponsored an Independent Conservative candidate, Richard Findlay, also a member of the British Union of Fascists, to stand in a by-election in Norwood.

This attracted no backing from MPs or the press, and Findlay lost[58] to the official Conservative candidate, Duncan Sandys, who in September that year became Randolph's brother-in-law, marrying his sister Diana.

[66] The diarist "Chips" Channon speculated (15 April) that if Winston Churchill were to return to office under the new Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain the outcome might be "an explosion of foolishness after a short time", war with Germany or even "a seat for Randolph".

"[69] At a dinner at Blenheim for Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill's 18th birthday in July 1939 a drunk Randolph had to be removed after behaving badly to a woman who spurned his advances and starting a row with another man over Winston's reputation.

He sent Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, along with Lieutenant Randolph Churchill, aboard HMS Kelly (which was based at Plymouth at the time) to Cherbourg to bring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor back to England from their exile.

In the summer of 1940, Winston Churchill's secretary, Jock Colville, wrote (Fringes of Power p. 207) "I thought Randolph one of the most objectionable people I had ever met: noisy, self-assertive, whining and frankly unpleasant.

"[79] The polemic against appeasement Guilty Men (July 1940), in fact written anonymously by Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard, was wrongly attributed to Randolph Churchill.

Declining his offer of an outright gift (it is unclear whether submitting to his sexual advances was a condition), she sold her wedding presents, including jewellery; took a job in Beaverbrook's ministry, arranging accommodation for workers being redeployed around the country; sublet her home and moved into a cheap room on the top floor of The Dorchester (very risky during the Blitz).

They had a stormy three-month courtship, during which at one point in June, high on a mixture of Benzedrine and wine, she ran toward the River Thames and threatened suicide, calling the police and accusing Randolph of indecent assault when he tried to prevent her.

[124] In the days after the 1951 general election, while his father was forming a government, Randolph amused himself by ringing up Conservative MPs who hurried to the phone on being told that "Mr Churchill" wished to speak to them urgently, assuming that they were about to be offered a ministerial position.

He was assisted by Alan Brien to write the life of Lord Derby; while researching it in 1953, Randolph and June lived at Oving House near Aylesbury, which got him away from White's Club and his gambling friends.

[139] On one occasion he reduced Queen's Restaurant in Sloane Square to silence by shouting at June over dinner that she was "a paltry little middle-class bitch always anxious to please and failing owing to her dismal manners".

He particularly disliked the Apartheid state of South Africa, and on entering the country he was detained in customs for insisting on giving his thumbprint in ink (as a black person was expected to do) rather than signing the relevant entry form, until it was confirmed that he was entitled to do so.

[159] Jonathan Aitken and Michael Wolff were eyewitnesses to Bobby Bevan bringing Natalie over for the evening and waiting patiently downstairs while she and Randolph enjoyed a Cinq à sept.[168] His divorce from his wife June became final in 1961.

[170] In the early 1960s, after they had spoken together at an Oxford Union debate the previous evening, Randolph invited Aitken to drive him back to London and join him for lunch with his parents at 28 Hyde Park Gate.

[171] Winston Churchill's secretary Anthony Montague Browne recorded an incident on board Aristotle Onassis's yacht in June 1963, in which Randolph "erupted like Stromboli", shouting abuse at his aged father, whom he accused of having connived for political reasons with his then wife's affair with Averell Harriman during the war, and calling a female diner who attempted to intervene "a gabby doll".

The former Cabinet minister Iain Macleod wrote a review in The Spectator strongly critical of Randolph's book, and alleging that Macmillan had manipulated the process of "soundings" to ensure that Butler was not chosen as his successor.

"[194] He is buried with his parents (his mother outliving him by almost a decade) and all four of his siblings (Marigold was previously interred in Kensal Green Cemetery in London) at St Martin's Church, Bladon near Woodstock, Oxfordshire.

Broadcast in 2016, it starred Michael Gambon, and depicted Winston Churchill during the summer of 1953 when he suffered a severe stroke, precipitating therapy and resignation; the character of Randolph was played by the English actor Matthew Macfadyen.