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Good morning. It’s a sign of his enduring legacy that Winston Churchill still makes the news. “Churchill – hero or villain?” John McDonnell was asked. “Tonypandy 1910 – villain” came his reply, launching a Twitter storm. Churchill’s decision, when Home Secretary in 1910, to deploy the military alongside police against striking miners drew stern criticism at the time and continued to haunt him. On Wednesday the journalist Daniel Finkelstein wrote in an article that he owed his life to Churchill, since his Jewish family would never have survived until 1945 without him. But Finkelstein was not blind to Churchill’s failures of judgement. He cited his opposition to independence for India, for example, or his belief that some races were superior to others. To describe Churchill simply as a hero or a villain seems to miss the point. According to Finkelstein his crowning achievement was to preserve a culture in which robust discussion among free people about what matters most provides the best context for human civilisation to flourish. The debates over Brexit seem to have tested our capacity to do this well, feeding our tendency to see everyone as heroes or villains. It warps our view of the world. The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock once wrote “Too much has been said of the heroes of history – the strong and the troublesome; too little of the amiable, the kindly, the tolerant.” We need subtler categories to characterise humanity. Among those used by the Christian Church are the terms saints and sinners. They are not mutually exclusive. Not all sinners are saints, certainly. But all saints are sinners. Admission of error, penitence and a willingness to change: these are the features of a virtuous life. Without them, how does anyone move on? We learned this week that John Henry Newman, one of the great figures of Victorian England, is to be made a saint. He already has a place in the Anglican Calendar even though his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845 rocked the Church of England at the time. A spare, ascetic character, Newman was capable of deep and affectionate friendships, while his pen could produce biting satire. In his own age he was seen as a hero to many but a villain to some. Perhaps his greatest contribution to us now is the way in which he understood life and faith to be dynamic and always developing. “To live is to change”, Newman said, “and to be perfect is to have changed often.”