It Is Time He Got The Credit

Peter Hitchens knows that he is unsackable:

The more people go on about the awfulness of Neville Chamberlain, the less I trust their judgment. They generally know nothing about him and use him as a cheap and easy codeword for weakness and failure. But are they so much better?

Poor Mr Chamberlain had many failings. But President Donald Trump has failings too, and when he went on about Chamberlain on Easter Monday, he was rather asking for trouble. And lo, the bellicose President has now himself backed down from a big fight, granting Iran the freedom to charge tolls to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

You could say Mr Trump is the Neville Chamberlain of the Gulf, appeasing the Iranian ayatollahs rather than fulfilling his promise to destroy them. If he had been around in 1938, Trump might well have praised Chamberlain, perhaps fawning over his ‘deal’ with Hitler. Many others did. 

For Mr Trump’s decision to prefer a ceasefire to terrible war is classic appeasement. Iran seized control of the Strait for the first time, after Mr Trump launched his war against them a month ago. And now the ayatollahs are going to keep that control. Mr Trump has weakened himself through heedless use of force, and has become the very thing he sneers at.

He shouldn’t be too upset. He is in good company. Most major world leaders have done some appeasing in their time, usually for the simple reason that a fight would have been worse.

Winston Churchill helped Franklin Roosevelt hand over Eastern Europe to Stalin, at Yalta in 1945, in the biggest act of appeasement in history. And the peoples of Western Europe have generally been pretty glad about that, as it gave them 50 years of peace and prosperity. 

The President’s latest sneer at Prime Minister Keir Starmer was mainly innuendo. He said the UK had ‘a long way to go’, adding, ‘We won’t want another Neville Chamberlain, do we agree? We don’t want Neville Chamberlain.’

Well, there are some of us who are rather glad Sir Keir has stood up to Mr Trump on this issue. Why should Britain be dragged into his mad war? In my view, Sir Keir should have flatly refused the US any use of airbases in Britain. Instead, he appeased the White House (yes, he did) by pretending that the monster B-52s lurching into the air above Fairford in Gloucestershire, laden with Iran-bound bombs and missiles, are acting defensively.

Reassessing Appeasement and Chamberlain’s Legacy 

There’s a lot of appeasement about, isn’t there? Everybody’s doing it. Perhaps it is time Neville Chamberlain, his wing-collar and umbrella, came back into fashion.

If the unfortunate Mr Chamberlain had hired competent spin-doctors, he would probably now be known as the man who gave Britain radar and the Spitfire, on the eve of war with Germany. For he was.

He might also be known as the man who, once ejected from Downing Street, gave vital support to Churchill during the 1940 crisis, when most of the Tory Party distrusted and disliked his successor, and many also wanted to make a deal with Hitler. In the crucial days after Dunkirk, when major figures such as Lord Halifax were arguing for a negotiated peace with the Third Reich, Chamberlain (after an initial wobble) sided with Churchill in favour of standing firm. This may well have been crucial.

But surely, the chorus will cry, he let us down badly at Munich, by handing over the Sudetenland to Hitler, and abandoning democratic Czechoslovakia to its fate? To which I answer, what would you have done? At that time, we had a broomstick army and a biplane air force. France, bled white by the 1914-18 war, didn’t much want a fight. Prague, the Czech capital, was indefensible thanks to Hitler’s recent takeover of Austria.

What would have happened if we had gone to war? Even Churchill, who described the Munich deal as ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’, couldn’t come up with much of an alternative. Like the political Left, he thought we should have sought the help of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But the Russians at that time had no land border with Czechoslovakia. And Romania and Poland, the only two practical corridors, would not have dreamed of letting the Red Army on to their territory. They feared that, if Soviet soldiers arrived, they would never leave.

They were right to be cautious. As Britain and France found out a year later, Stalin would only help against Hitler if he was given a free hand in the Baltic states and Romania.

Churchill may have thought we should ‘stand firm’ and to rearm more. But the truth was that in 1938 there was no appetite at all in Britain for another war. It is forgotten now, and the film seems to have been lost, but giant crowds streamed to Buckingham Palace in the pouring rain, to cheer Chamberlain on his return from Munich with his supposed ‘peace for our time’.

Public Support for Chamberlain and Royal Endorsement 

They went to the Palace because King George VI had invited Chamberlain and his wife to join him on the balcony there, lit up by one of the very few anti-aircraft searchlights then in existence in Britain. There they enjoyed a four-minute ovation from the enormous, soaking-wet crowd.

The King, like many of his subjects, was a keen appeaser at the time, and in summer 1939 he would tell the Canadian premier Mackenzie King, during a visit to North America, that he ‘would never wish to appoint Churchill to any office’, unless it was unavoidable.

So much of what we now believe is hindsight. We pat ourselves on the back for opposing appeasement most of us would have supported at the time.

Much of the anti-Chamberlain myth, swallowed whole by President Trump, was created by the British Left, the sort of people he despises. They had their own misdeeds to hide.

Chamberlain, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1931, had somehow to find the money for the major programme of rearmament that began soon after the rise of Hitler. This was not popular among the Left. The Labour Party, at its Southport conference in October 1933, months after Hitler came to power, pledged to ‘take no part in war’.

In the same month Labour’s John Wilmot won the Fulham East by-election on an anti-rearmament platform. And the Party kept up that view. In July 1934, Labour’s future Premier, Clement Attlee, opposed the expansion of the RAF. He said: ‘We deny the need for increased air armaments.’

Another Big Beast of inter-war Labour, Herbert Morrison (Peter Mandelson’s grandfather), complained in a speech in Whitechapel in November 1935 that Neville Chamberlain was ‘ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction’.

Media and Political Opposition to Defence Spending 

In the same year, the Labour movement’s semi-official newspaper, the Daily Herald (ancestor of today’s Sun) condemned increased defence spending, set out in a government White Paper, as ‘an affront to Germany’.

In 1936, after Hitler had marched into the Rhineland, Attlee was still moaning about a supposed ‘ruinous arms race inevitably leading to war’.

It was certainly straining a rusty and wheezing economy, badly short of skilled workers. Chamberlain, as Chancellor and then as Premier, supervised a 1936-39 naval building programme including six battleships, six aircraft carriers, 25 cruisers, 49 destroyers and 22 submarines. Imagine! Sums spent on all three services in that period were the equivalent of many billions now.

Chamberlain, a dove by nature, would certainly have preferred to spend the money on hospitals, schools and housing. But instead he prepared for the war he knew was coming. It is time he got the credit.