Chamberlain deserves fairer reputation than ‘Hitler’s fool’
He didn’t win the war, but it was he who ensured that it wasn’t lost in those fateful summer weeks
ACCORDING to Enoch Powell all political careers end in failure unless they are cut off in their prime. That’s particularly true for prime ministers, who rarely choose to end their careers at all, least of all when they’re at their peak.
It was certainly true of Neville Chamberlain. He knew he was regarded at the end as a failure and he resented it.
In the brief period between being forced out office and his death he was condemned by the public, burned in effigy and vilified by the press.
He reflected bitterly that all those who had showered praise on him when he returned from Munich and his meeting with Hitler were now devoid of sympathy for him or his personal tragedy. What had gone wrong?
Neville venerated his father, the great Joe Chamberlain, ‘Radical Joe’. Like Joe he was an outstanding Lord Mayor of Birmingham, working tirelessly to improve the life of the ordinary man and woman.
In Parliament he carried on this hard, unglamorous work, revolutionising British society.
He built a million houses and established countless slum clearance schemes.
He closed the poor houses, reformed local government, created a modern health service and established a proper system of benefits.
He drew a line under the Dickensian world of the Victorian age and laid the foundations on which the Labour government of 1945 would build.
There would have been no welfare state without him.
If he had been cut down in his prime in 1937 he would have been remembered with awe and admiration. The war was the problem. All he had done before 1937 was wiped out because of his attempt to avoid war.
He seemed destined to be seen as a weak dupe, Hitler’s fool: as one historian put it ‘‘a pathetic old man, one of the great losers of history’’.
Chamberlain’s primary desire was certainly to save a generation from another war.
And yet as he worked for peace he prepared for war. The deal with Hitler he brought back to Hendon
Aerodrome gained time.
The aircraft that won the Battle of Britain in 1940 were not built on Churchill’s watch – he’d only been in power for a couple of months. They were built on Chamberlain’s orders.
He didn’t win the war, but it was he who ensured that it wasn’t lost in those fateful summer weeks.
On his gravestone are the words ‘‘Write me as one who loves his fellow men’’, and in his own way he did love them. He devoted himself to working for their practical welfare in peace and in war.
If we don’t remember that we are unfair to him. That may not matter much. But we also misunderstand our own history, and that is a dangerous weakness.
Walter Reid’s biography, Neville
Chamberlain: The Passionate Radical, is published by Birlinn
and is available now