Mr Churchill, a campaigner for more resources for the armed forces, had battled the disease for two years. Son of Sir Winston’s only son Randolph, he worked as a foreign correspondent in the 1960s, then served as MP for the Manchester constituencies of Stretford and Davyhulme between 1970 and 1997.
He never achieved high political office but was an outspoken backbencher. In 1993 he was reprimanded by then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, for criticising what he called the “relentless flow” of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.
Churchill was born in October 1940 at Chequers, the prime minister's official country residence, shortly after Royal Air Force pilots prevailed in the Battle of Britain. During it, Hitler's Luftwaffe was prevented from destroying Britain's air defenses or forcing the country to negotiate an armistice.
He was the son of Randolph Churchill and Pamela Digby, who scandalized London society with her affairs and who, in later life, as Pamela Harriman, became U.S. ambassador to France. The parents divorced in 1945.
"I never knew my parents together, so their split meant nothing to me," Churchill said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2008. "But it did mean I got a great deal of grandparental sunlight."
He recalled staying at Chartwell, his grandfather's home southeast of London, and finding the old man "wreathed in cigar smoke with a whisky and soda already on his table" in the morning. The drink, he added, was very weak.
"Each afternoon, we'd spend a couple of hours together, laying bricks. If anyone had asked me what my grandfather did, I'd have said: He's a bricklayer,'" Churchill recalled.
RIP.
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