For Labour supporters, MacDonald was synonymous with the word “betrayal”. They felt he had sold out to financial interests, and the blandishments of King George V, and introduced a programme of austerity that deepened the recession of the 1930s. He seemed unable to grapple with the scope and depth of the problems he faced.
Neville Chamberlain (1937-40) has his defenders. Like many men of his generation, he was understandably scarred by the experience of World War I and genuinely wanted peace. His advocates argue that by giving in to Hitler’s demands and postponing war as long as possible, he gave the country more time to prepare and rearm.
The counter argument is that each capitulation simply encouraged Hitler to ask for more. It was remarked that Chamberlain had never met anyone like Hitler in Birmingham, where he came from. His experience was in municipal and domestic politics and his grasp of the imperatives of foreign policy in the late 1930s was limited, although that didn’t stop him intervening. When he came back from the Munich talks with Hitler, he was a national hero, in tune with the pacifist mood of the country. However, opinion quickly changed and he was castigated as one of the “guilty men” of appeasement."
In “Appeasement,” Tim Bouverie notes that Rumbold’s April 1933 dispatch caused a momentary stir in the Foreign Office. But the ambassador’s warning, like later admonitions from Winston Churchill and others, made no dent in the British government’s unflagging commitment to come to terms with Hitler, no matter the consequences.
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Throughout his minutely detailed survey, Bouverie rightly rejects the arguments of revisionist historians who claim that Britain’s lack of military preparedness, as well as the strength of pacifist public opinion, justified its determination to offer repeated concessions to Hitler. In fact, from the early 1930s, British leaders, fearful of further damaging their Depression-afflicted economy, fought to keep military spending to a minimum. They then used the country’s military deficiencies as an excuse to turn a blind eye to Germany’s increasing aggression and explosive rearmament, a flagrant violation of the 1919 Versailles Treaty. ......
In April 1940, however, Germany invaded Norway and Denmark, and Chamberlain’s campaign of secrecy and misinformation finally rebounded on him. Caught off guard by the surprise attacks, the British government scrambled to dispatch troops to aid the Norwegians. Barely two weeks later, Chamberlain made a stunning admission to Parliament and the nation: The badly armed and equipped British forces had been routed by the enemy and were being evacuated from Norway.
For more than a year, the British public had shown increasing signs of hostility toward Germany and disaffection with the prime minister’s inertia. When news broke of Britain’s humiliating defeat in Norway, that simmering discontent boiled over into fear and fury.
Capitalizing on the public mood, the Tory anti-appeasement rebels began an all-out effort to get rid of Chamberlain. On May 7 and 8, 1940, the House of Commons, in perhaps the most consequential debate in parliamentary history, engaged in a passionate examination of the prime minister’s conduct of the war. Before the debate, almost no one believed that Chamberlain could be ousted. Yet in the vote of confidence that followed, more than 80 M.P.s deserted him. Even though Chamberlain actually won the vote, such a large Tory defection was widely considered a resounding defeat.
On May 10, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister. That same day, Hitler launched his blitzkrieg of Western Europe. In the nick of time, the House of Commons had reasserted itself as a guardian of democracy and taken the first critical step toward victory in the war.
With their action, the M.P.s underscored the truth of a comment made earlier by one of them: “No government can change men’s souls. The souls of men change governments.”
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