Armies do not always do what they are told. In any case Churchill lost the election - and all the evidence is that the soldiers overwhelmingly voted Labour. I suppose it is possible to imagine some scenario in which he refused to hold the election and tried to hold on to power and declared war on Russia, and attempted to make allies of the remnants of the German Armed Forces ...But I can't actually see Churchill going for that one himself, let alone the mass of the people or the British armed forces.

As I said, there are revisionist historians who think that there was never any real danger of Britain being defeated in 1940. I don't find them convincing. I somehow doubt that what kept people fighting at the time was confidence in victory, but rather determination and hope, and a refusal to accept defeat. And that's what I hear in Churchill's speeches.

As for the British Empire, it had its period of expansion, and its period of retrenchment and its period of adjustment and its period of dissolving. But if it hadn't had its period of expansion it wouldn't have been there in the first place. "Britain was a consistently expansionist imperial power when the opportunity was there." And when the opportunity wasn't there it wasn't expansionist, and ultimately it ceased to be an imperial power. It seems to me that that is what happens to Empires generally.