the times | Saturday January 1 2022 29
Comment
History should be kinder to Chamberlain
Munich bought Britain vital time to rearm and, contrary to Churchill’s claims, his predecessor deserves our respect
after the war. The Gathering Storm,
the first of his six-volume history,
painted his predecessor as obstinate
and vain, unable to see Hitler for
what he really was and to defend the
world accordingly by establishing the
European alliances that would have
deterred him.
This was politics more than fact,
intended to demonstrate that
Churchill had been the man of the
hour and Chamberlain the necessary
failure who had preceded him: not so
much “what if” history as “I told you
so” history. Churchill was a towering
statesman but a cynical historian.
Chamberlain’s reputation has
never recovered, though historians
have periodically come to his
defence, notably AJP Taylor who
described Munich as “a triumph for
all that was best and most
enlightened in British life”.
Modern scholarship has given a
second chance to some of the most
established ogres of history. Field
Marshal Douglas Haig is no longer
simply seen as the donkey leadinglions to slaughter in the First World
War. Andrew Roberts has recently
defended George III from the charge
of being a tyrant, a warmonger
and a fool.
Chamberlain’s reputation rests on
one event, the outcome of which he
did not, and perhaps could not,
foresee. The same is true of Tony
Blair, whose signal failure was not to
seek peace but taking the country to
war: a lack of appeasement.
The verdict on Chamberlain is
neither the heroic one he confidently
predicted for himself, nor the
infamous one imposed on him by
Churchill, but a subtle and more
human judgment: a complex man of
good intentions, burdened by the
past, struggling with the present
and denied the 20-20 hindsight of
the future.
He did not bring peace in our time
but he bought enough peace, for
enough time, to build up the forces
capable of confronting Hitler.HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGESthat other countries would act in the
same way”. He brought in
conscription, doubled the size of the
Territorial Army, ordered more
bombers and created the Ministry of
Supply, to co-ordinate the provision
of equipment for all three branches
of the armed forces. The Britain that
faced Germany in September 1939
was far better prepared for war than
it had been a year earlier.
Like all important historical
figures, Chamberlain was judged less
by the actions he took in the context
of the time than the politics that
followed. Both left and right attacked
him with ferocity when it became
clear that the policy of appeasement
had failed. July 1940 saw the
publication of Guilty Men, co-written
by Michael Foot under the
pseudonym “Cato”, which accused
Chamberlain of failing to prepare
Britain for the conflict.
But it was Winston Churchill who
did most to disparage Chamberlainor the aspiration of a man genuinely
trying to do what was right for his
country, and what was ardently
desired by the people who had
elected him.
Back in Britain, Chamberlain was
hailed as a hero. The streets were so
packed with cheering crowds that it
took the prime minister an hour and
a half to travel the nine miles from
Heston aerodrome to Buckingham
Palace, where the King applauded
his “magnificent efforts”.
Wellwishers showered him with
gifts, including hundreds of
umbrellas, his political trademark.
Back at Downing Street he came to
the window and declared to the
throng below: “Peace for our time.”
Eleven months later, Germany
invaded Poland.
In the meantime, Chamberlain had
continued a policy of cautious
rearmament, declaring it “would be
madness for the country to stop
rearming until we were convincedN
eville Chamberlain, one of
the most vilified figures in
British history, died
convinced that history
would smile on him.
As prime minister, Chamberlain
had famously tried and failed to
make a lasting peace with Hitler,
but he remained certain that at the
Munich conference in 1938 he
had won the country vital months
in which to rearm and face
down fascism.
In 1940, just days before his death
and six months after leaving office,
he wrote: “So far as my personal
reputation is concerned, I am not in
the least disturbed about it. Without
Munich the war would have been
lost and the Empire destroyed in
- I should not fear the historian’s
verdict.”
He could not have been more
wrong, for the historians’ verdict on
Chamberlain has been, for the most
part, brutally damning: an arrogant
but weak politician who had sought
a pact with the Devil, failed to stand
up to the Führer and made a series
of dire political and military
misjudgments. “Appeasement”
means to strive for peace; the
postwar pummelling of
Chamberlain made it an insult, the
mark of the coward.
The truth is more nuanced than
that one-dimensional judgment, and
a lot more interesting. At a time
when historical reputations are being
reassessed worldwide, Chamberlain
is also being examined anew, most
recently in a film adapted from
Robert Harris’s novel Munich, in
which Jeremy Irons plays the prime
minister as a man of integrity and
noble ideals, determined to try to
prevent another war. Munich: The
Edge of War is a work of fiction and
imagination but it is closer to reality
than the denigration Chamberlain
has suffered for most of the past
80 years.
In September 1938 Hitler was
intent on invading Czechoslovakia
and annexing the Sudetenland.
Chamberlain had lived through one
world war, losing many friends and
colleagues, and the prospect of
another conflict with Germany
appalled him. He spoke for millions
when he said: “How horrible,
fantastic, incredible it is that we
should be digging trenches and
trying on gas-masks.”
The Munich Agreement, signed on
September 30, gave Hitler what he
wanted. But later that morning
Chamberlain also secured the
three-paragraph Anglo-German
agreement, signed by Hitler,
declaring the Munich accord to be
“symbolic of the desire of our two
peoples never to go to war again”.
“I’ve got it,” Chamberlain declared,
believing he had secured peace: a
statement that was either
dangerously naive (as most
historians have subsequently judged)Neville Chamberlain was feted as a hero when he returned to a grateful country after the Munich Agreement was signedHaig is no longer simply
seen as a donkey who
led lions to slaughter
Ben
Macintyre@benmacintyre1
As a litmus test of public opinion,
the crowd’s songbook beats any focus
group. Jonathan Swift cautioned
against mistaking the chatter in a
London coffee house for the voice of
a kingdom. He should have tried
getting tickets for an afternoon
session at the PDC World
Championship instead. Nearly every
day, rising in waves, the unmistakable
strains of KC and the Sunshine Band
are audible from the oche. “Na na na
na na na na na na na na,” they sing,
again and again, “Boris is a...”. You
can fill in that blank yourself.
That industrial-strength verdict on
the PM’s winter is all the more
remarkable, of course, for coming
from his sort of crowd: blokey, boozy,
apolitical. There’s a serious lesson to
be learnt there. Don’t take your
people for granted, or for fools.
That goes for voters as much as it
does backbenchers.As in Westminster, the once
unassailable have been laid low by the
unexpected. All bets are off now Covid
has caught up with the Dutch
maestro Michael van Gerwen, just as
Owen Paterson’s lust for cash (sorry:
selfless vigilance about the dangers of
defective ham) blew the polls wide
open last month. In these topsy-turvy
games, fine margins have mattered
more than ever. Remember, you are
mortal. Or as the lads at the Ally Pally
might put it: “You s*** bastard. Ahhh!”
The most valuable lesson, though?
Don’t believe the hype. Pink-shirted
Fallon Sherrock may have launched
a thousand profiles as the female
favourite but was dumped out early
by unfancied Steve Beaton, a
57-year-old who at his age really
ought to put the hair gel away. I hope
Liz and Keir were watching.Matt Chorley is awayThe blokey,
boozy darts
crowd takes
aim at an
unexpected
target: Boris
A
s with the Coke advert
and Noddy Holder’s first
royalty cheque of the
season, it isn’t really
Christmas until some
junior lobby hack has texted the
special adviser to the secretary of
state for paperclips to ask what their
minister is pretending to read or
watch over the holidays. This year,
like every December, all embarrassed
themselves.
Dominic Raab re-read Hemingway’s
For Whom The Bell Tolls (savour it:
nobody’s ever letting you near a war
zone again), Thérèse Coffey has been
mainlining Robert Peston’s potboiler
(get a life) and Rishi Sunak caught
up with Netflix’s Emily in Paris (stop
the focus group, I want to get off).
All choices contrived to sound
suitably edifying, zeitgeisty and, most
implausibly, human. Have these lists
ever fooled anyone?
If the past two years have taught
us anything — big “if”, that — it’s
that government can’t really take a
holiday (unless the guy who founded
Carphone Warehouse is paying for
the board and lodgings). So in 2022,
No 10 should proscribe the airport
thrillers and prescribe some genuinely
useful Christmas homework for
ministers instead: watching the darts.
Watching two doughy men in ill-
fitting shirts invariably fail to hit the
target while the Covid-riddled hordes
around them drink themselves into
oblivion might not sound like a
constructive use of government time
— but that’s quite enough about the
year Boris Johnson and his chief whip
just endured. Two weeks of watching
the action at the Ally Pally every year
have taught me more useful lessons
about life and politics than five years
reporting from Westminster ever
could have. I commend it to the house.Patrick Maguire