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A fact from Ian Harvey (politician) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 9 January 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:
There's a famous story that, on hearing of Harvey's arrest, Winston Churchill remarked "On the coldest night of the year? Makes you proud to be British!"
However, the earliest source I can find is D. R. Thorpe: "Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan" (2011), note 18 to pages 374-375. cagliost (talk) 08:40, 14 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it is famous story. If it's going in the article then the reader needs to be given a gentle nudge that it might be just a good story (or maybe somebody else said it, and it like many other witty sayings it came to be misattributed to Churchill - a well-documented phenomenon which somebody called "Churchill Drift" - I've seen an anthology of Churchill sayings with an entire long section devoted to things he supposedly said but didn't). I think we'd need to find a writer who traces it back to a reliable primary source, eg. the diaries or memoirs of somebody who was there, before firmly attributing it to him.Paulturtle (talk) 20:10, 24 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's also mentioned in a footnote by D.R.Thorpe in the diaries of Kenneth Rose, again without attribution to a primary source. So quite possibly apocryphal.Paulturtle (talk) 00:36, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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