Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell has attracted a storm of criticism after describing Sir Winston Churchill as a “villain”.

Responding to a question posed by Politico, Mr McDonnell cited Sir Winston’s decision to send in the Lancashire Fusiliers to help police quell a Welsh miners’ strike in Tonypandy in November 1910 while serving as home secretary as the reason for his judgement.

One miner was killed and 580 people injured, 80 Metropolitan Police officers among them, in the incident in the Rhonda Valley. Critics of his order argue it was an excessive use of force against the workers, who were merely exercising their democratic rights by engaging in industrial action.

As prime minister three decades later, Churchill led the fight against Nazi Germany, holding his nerve and delivering some of the most stirring rhetoric ever uttered by an Englishman as the Allied Forces overcame Adolf Hitler to salvage Europe from totalitarianism.

Churchill biographer and ex-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was among those to denounce Mr McDonnell’s stance on a man voted the greatest Briton of all time in a 2002 poll by the BBC. He said: “Winston Churchill saved this country and the whole of Europe from a barbaric fascist and racist tyranny and our debt to him is incalculable.”

Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Show all 30 1 /30 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill leaving London for his country home, Chartwell in Kent in 1964 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Sir Winston Churchill with his daughter Mary and son-in-law Christopher Soames (right) in 1964 PA Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill (Seated left to right) Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal; Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill; Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, (standing left to right) the Secretary to the Chiefs of Staffs Committee, Major General L C Hollis; and the Chief of Staff to the Minister of Defence, General Sir Hastings Ismay at an unknown location Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill flashes the V-sign on 19 June 1963 AFP PHOTO Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill feeds the deer in Richmond Park, accompanied by his private secretary Anthony Montague Brown and personal detective Edmund Murray on 25 March 1963 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston and Lady Churchill leaving their Hyde Park Gate home for an Ascot race meeting on 16 June 1961 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Jacob Epstein with Winston Churchill in 1958. The pair lived on the same London street Evening Standard/Getty Images Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Prime Minister Winston Churchill kisses Queen Elizabeth II's hand as she leaves 10 Downing Street in London, after a dinner on 4 April 1955 Getty Images Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill at the christening of his granddaughter, Charlotte Soames at Westerham Parish Church, Kent on 6 November 1954. Left to right: godparents Fitzroy MacLean and Diana Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill, Lady Clementine Churchill, Christopher Soames and his wife Mary Churchill. The children are Nicholas, Jeremy and Emma Soames with his grandson Nicholas Soames Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill French President Paul Ramadier awards the medaille Militaire to former British prime minister Winston Churchill on 12 May 1947 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill outside the German Reichstag during a tour of the ruined city of Berlin on 16 July 1945 PA Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill The prime minister of the wartime Coalition government Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill during a speech 0n 2 July 1945. The July 1945 general election resulted in a resounding victory for the Labour Party Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (L) walking with General Bernard Law Montgomery near the Rhine river in Germany during an advance by Allied troops on 23 March 1945 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Marshal Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill together at the Livedia Palace in Yalta, where they were both present for the conference on 7 February 1945 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill with his daughter Mary and General Sir Frederick Pile (GOC Anti-Aircraft Command) watch anti-aircraft guns in action against V1 flying bombs on 30 June 1944 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill and General Sir Bernard Montgomery with his dog in 1944 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Prime Minister Winston Churchill Prime US President Franklin D. Roosevelt seated in the garden of the villa in Morocco where they met for a war conference surrounded by British and American war correspondants, on 23 January 1943 PA Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, on board a naval auxiliary patrol vessel during a visit to the London docks on 25 September 1940 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill strolls in the grounds of his country home, Chartwell Manor on 31 October 1939 Topical Press Agency/Getty Images Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill, recently appointed Hon Air Commodore to 615 Auxiliary Air Force Squadron, climbing out of a Gloster Gauntlet II aircraft during a visit to the Squadron at Kenley, Surrey on 16 April 1939 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill balancing a top hat on his walking stick watched by his daughter Mary, outside the Mansion House in London Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill British statesman Winston Churchill attends the Anglo-Irish Conference in Downing Street on 11 October 1921 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill The platform party is attentive to Winston Churchill as he delivers his address opening a new YMCA hostel for munitions workers at Enfield, Middlesex, on 20 September, 1915 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill won his first parliamentary seat in 1899 Getty Images Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill 2nd Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the 4th Queen's Own Hussars in 1895 Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill dressed in the uniform of Harrow School Rifle Corps Save Photo Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill between the ages of 13 and 17 at the time he attended the Harrow School Save Photo Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill in his school years Save Photo Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill The former Jennie Jerome, Lady Randolph Churchill, born in New York, with her sons John (left) and Winston, in 1885 Time Life/Getty Winston Churchill: Life in pictures Winston Churchill Winston Churchill as a young boy, aged 7, in Dublin, Ireland

“If John McDonnell had the slightest knowledge of history he would be aware that Churchill also had an extraordinary record as a social reformer who cared deeply for working people and their lives. JM should be utterly ashamed of his remarks and withdraw them forthwith,” Mr Johnson wrote on Twitter.

Churchill's grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames agreed, telling The Daily Telegraph: “Frankly, it’s a very foolish and stupid thing to say, surely said to gain publicity.

“I think my grandfather’s reputation can withstand a publicity-seeking assault from a third-rate, Poundland Lenin. I don’t think it will shake the world.”

While no one seriously disputes the heroism of Sir Winston Churchill or the value of his rousing leadership in the face of Britain’s “darkest hour”, criticisms of his character are commonly raised in the 21st century, notably last January in response to Gary Oldman’s Oscar win for playing him in the Joe Wright biopic Darkest Hour.

Every inch a son of British imperial adventurism, Churchill was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst and, as a young man in 1895, joined the British Army as an officer, where he naively sought excitement in “jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”, as he phrased it.

He took part in raids on the Swat Valley in what is now Pakistan, telling himself the actions against a people fighting for a land they considered their own was justified because his opponents harboured a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill”. In Sudan, he boasted he had personally killed three “savages”.

Serving in South Africa during the Boer War, he advocated the use of concentration camps in the belief they produced “the minimum of suffering”. As many as 14,000 of the 115,000 black South Africans held in British camps died during a conflict he had engaged in on the promise of “great fun galloping about”.

In middle age, he deployed the infamous Black and Tans in the Irish War of Independence in 1919, a force comprised of temporary police constables who developed a reputation for carrying out brutal acts of violence.

As colonial secretary in 1921, he advocated extreme measures against the Kurds rebelling against British rule in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), writing in a government memo: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes... [It] would spread a lively terror.”

His policies as prime minister were often controversial. He refused to supply aid to Bengal during a deadly famine in 1943 (although Britain was itself enduring wartime adversity at the time) and suspended civil liberties in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s.

In that conflict, 11,000 Kenyans were killed and 100,000 held in British detention camps. Many of them were tortured, US president Barack Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama thought to be among them.

Those inclined to make the case against Churchill can find any number of overtly racist statements attributed to him.

He dismissed Kenya’s Kikuyu people as “brutish children”, India as populated by “a beastly people with a beastly religion”, Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung” and denied that a wrong had been done to the indigenous communities of North America and Australia because “a stronger race, a higher-grade race... has come in and taken their place.”

He even suggested Mahatma Gandhi “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back”.

Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events

Though Churchill’s attitudes and decision-making could be hateful or extreme – even by the standards of his own time – he was, ultimately, just a man, fallible, complex, contradictory and open to inherited prejudices.