BBC News Magazine on the reputation of British PM Neville Chamberlain:
…this derogatory reference reflects the continuing potency of a well-established conventional wisdom assiduously propagated by Chamberlain’s detractors after his fall from the premiership in May 1940. As Churchill is once supposed to have quipped, “Poor Neville will come badly out of history. I know, I will write that history”.
In his influential account The Gathering Storm, published in 1948, Churchill characterised Chamberlain as “an upright, competent, well meaning man” fatally handicapped by a deluded self-confidence which compounded an already debilitating lack of both vision and diplomatic experience. For many years, this seductive version of events remained unchallenged and unchallengeable.
[…]
The Munich agreement, which later came to symbolise the evils of appeasement, was signed 75 years ago, in the early hours of 30 September. At Munich, Britain and France acquiesced in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the transfer of its Sudeten region to Germany in face of Hitler’s increasingly bellicose threats of military action. Chamberlain’s hopes that this humiliating sacrifice would satisfy Hitler’s last major territorial demand and thus avert another catastrophic war were dashed within four months.
After this monumental failure of policy Chamberlain’s name became an abusive synonym for vacillation, weakness, immoral great-power diplomacy and, above all, the craven appeasement of bullies — whatever the price in national honour. Despite his many achievements in domestic policy, therefore, ultimately Chamberlain’s reputation remains indelibly stained by Munich and the failure of his very personal brand of diplomacy.
As he confessed in the Commons at the outbreak of war, “Everything I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.”
