Hero was more a matter of luck than design
to lose ships, men, etc, unnecessarily and to have stuff in the wrong place. If you didn’t agree with him you were axed.”
Chamberlain, on the other hand, emerges as a far more complex, steely and honourable character than the weak appeaser of popular history. We learn that he had, as a young man, lived alone for six years on the Caribbean island of Andros, struggling to grow sisal for his father. This failed venture cost his father, the former Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, £50,000. Yet it taught his son “the politician’s virtues of independence, resilience and selfsufficiency… and made him refuse to admit defeat”. He was, moreover, a “brilliant mimic and a generoushearted family man” who got on remarkably well with Churchill.
Most books on this crucial period of the Second World War concentrate on the dark days of 1940 — Dunkirk and the fall of France — after Churchill became Prime Minister. This one — named after the six-minute vote that sealed Chamberlain’s fate — covers the less well known, but no less vital, month that preceded Churchill’s elevation, and reminds us that Britain’s ultimate deliverance depended upon a highly unlikely, if fortuitous, sequence of events. “Few people,” noted a contemporary, “have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the result of the failure of an enterprise.”
Churchill agreed. He had noticed, he told a Norwegian audience in the early Fifties, how human judgement is falsified. “You may do a very wise thing and it may turn out most badly. You may do a foolish thing and it may save your life.” That foolish thing was the Norwegian campaign. It saved Churchill’s political life and, in turn, helped to preserve his country’s freedom.