Why the rise of Britain’s great wartime

SIX MINUTES IN MAY: HOW CHURCHILL UNEXPECTEDLY BECAME PRIME MINISTER by Nicholas Shakespeare (Harvill Secker, £20)

WHEN the House of Commons met on Tuesday May 7, 1940, to debate the recent military debacle in Norway, the Tory Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain seemed unassailable: his government enjoyed a majority of 213 and the Labour opposition seemed reluctant to divide the House at a moment of national emergency. There was, moreover, no clear alternative to Chamberlain as premier.

By the end of the two-day debate — 48 hours that, in the words of future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, “altered the history of Britain and the Empire, and perhaps of the world” — Chamberlain was a dead man walking and the only remaining question was who would succeed him? The obvious, compromise choice — acceptable to all parties — was the urbane Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Yet it was the brilliant but erratic Winston Churchill who, on May 10 1940 (the day Hitler invaded Belgium and the Low Countries), was asked by King George VI to form a new coalition.

Here, in Churchill’s words, lay the “hinge of fate”. Had he not become Prime Minister, the Allied cause would almost certainly have foundered. Yet, as Nicholas Shakespeare convincingly argues in this riveting study, Churchill’s elevation was far from inevitable in the days prior to the Norway debate — not least because he himself, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had initiated and directed the disastrous Norway campaign (shades of Gallipoli in 1915). So how did he pull it off?

A big factor was his rival Halifax’s refusal to accept the premiership on several grounds: because he was a member of the House of Lords and the Prime Minister needed to dominate the lower chamber; because he felt that Churchill would be a better war leader and, if he failed, Halifax could then take sole charge; and possibly because, speculates Shakespeare, he didn’t want to jeopardize his “emotional entanglement” with Baba Metcalfe, another man’s wife. In other words Churchill — and by extension the nation — got lucky

The author covers the Norway campaign and subsequent debate — a timespan of just over a month — in forensic, if never less than gripping, detail. But the real delight of this book is its convincing, and often revelatory, portraits of the main protagonists.

Churchill is shown to be an even more incompetent military strategist than previously assumed. “His decisions were invariably wrong,” claimed one admiral, “and caused us