From time to time I have argued here, to the distress of some of my more idealistic readers, that there are two moralities, that of the private man operating in his personal capacity, and that of 'the prince' (in the Machiavellian sense) operating as the leader of a nation. I was wrong. There is one. Only the former exists. The latter does not, or should not. The reason is simple but bears repetition in an unduly soft and synthetically sentimental society such as ours today. A prince must only allow the interests of his nation and his people to guide his conduct of their affairs. This might, but not always or even often, entail acts such as lying, or cheating, or worse, on his part that, as a private man, he might abhor but as a prince he must execute without hesitation because he is not his own man. He is the representative of many men who may or may not share his scruples but will suffer or flourish depending on his actions. In order to decide where the national interest lies it is necessary for him to analyse carefully and employ shrewd judgement. That this process is not an exact science can be construed by reading any half-decent history book. However, what cannot be gainsaid is that right or wrong, morality as such plays little or no part in the decision.
I am moved to return to this topic by the opening chapter of Ian Kershaw's superb book, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World. This deals with the three days in May 1940 when six very different men decided the future of our country and, indeed, the whole world. Two of them, Churchill and Sinclair, were half-American although the other half of Sinclair was Scottish. Two of them were from Yorkshire; Lord Halifax was a lofty, in all senses of the word, toff, and Arthur Greenwood was a hard-drinking, former red-brick university lecturer and Labour party apparatchik. Attlee was a lawyer and LSE lecturer, described by his contemporaries as a nonentity who had somehow become leader of the Labour party. Finally, as a true representative of middle-class, middle-England there was Neville Chamberlain, whose failed policies in dealing with Hitler had led to his resignation as PM. Five of them constituted the newly-formed war cabinet with Sinclair, as leader of the Liberal party and Minister for Air, called in as occasion demanded. During three days in May 1940, these six men wrestled with a decision that would alter irrevocably the future of the globe.
Certain facts are worth emphasising, not least because Churchill took pains to suppress some of them in his memoires. Chamberlain, a decent man, was at a loss to know how to deal with a megalomaniac like Hitler, a type of leader not seen since the days of Napoleon. He was constrained in what he could do by the Great British Public who had suffered the tragedy of WWI followed by the rigours of the depression and thus had no desire for re-armament during the 1930s. (As I have remarked before, in a democracy you get the government you deserve!) At Munich he had no cards to play. The result, with half of Czechoslovakia surrendered, shocked part, but only part, of the British people into reality. It took the ruthless annexation of the other half in 1939 to make the majority open their eyes to the peril into which they had sleep-walked. Attlee and Greenwood had both been critics of what was called 'appeasement' despite much of their party refusing to countenance re-armament.
Finally, we come to what we would call today, the 'big cats', Halifax and Churchill. Here I stand guilty of error. I have, in the past portrayed Halifax as the master of real-politik and Churchill as the idealist. Kershaw makes my misunderstanding embarrassingly clear. Both these men were proposing policies based on different judgements of what constituted the national self-interest. Halifax would have given away large swathes of British territory and consigned Europe to German hegemony in order to ease Britain out of a war which he thought we would lose. Churchill believed that it was better to fight and lose than not to fight at all, and this has sometimes been construed as Churchillian romanticism. Kershaw makes clear that, on the contrary, it was based on a hard-headed real-politik in which Churchill saw clearly that any sort of deal with Hitler was simply defeat by another name. He realised that Hitler's price would be the reduction of Britain to a vassal state, not least by his almost certain insistence that the Royal Navy be handed over to Germany. Thus, it was better politics to fight on. If we lost, then we would be no worse off than surrendering then and there, however, an unknowable future might bring forth all sorts of possibilities.
Over three days the wrangling went on, whilst the British army stood helpless and apparently lost on the beaches of Dunkirk. Surprisingly, the Chiefs of Staff produced a rather 'bullish' outlook for the future so long as the RAF could hold the skies above England. Churchill enjoyed the backing of the two Labour men but his position within the war cabinet remained weak. He had only just become prime minister. The Labour party loathed him, the liberals were still smarting from his second 'ratting' and the Tories, or a good part of them, didn't trust him an inch. Thus, the inclination of the man he had replaced, Chamberlain, was crucial. To begin with he supported Halifax's efforts to cut a deal via the 'good' offices of Mussolini, but gradually over the three days he swung round to Churchill's view. By May 28th the final decision was taken - to fight on - and history took one turn instead of another.
But what a three days of tension, fear, pressure, drama and soul-searching they were! I cannot think of any similar period in our entire history that comes anywhere near compare with those three days in May 1940 when our nation trembled on the brink of disaster. Read Kershaw's book! If the other chapters are anywhere near as enthralling as the first, it will be time and money well spent.
Finally, here's one in the eye for all those silly Lefties who put it about that the Russians saved our skin in the war. It was us saved their skin by continuing the fight.
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