Seventy-five years after the Munich Agreement signed with Hitler, the name of Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister at the time, is still synonymous with weakness and appeasement. Is this fair, asks historian Robert Self.
During his 21-hour filibuster denouncing President Barack Obama's healthcare law, popularly known as Obamacare, last week, Ted Cruz, the conservative Republican senator for Texas, claimed that Neville Chamberlain had once told the British people, "Accept the Nazis. Yes, they'll dominate the continent of Europe but that's not our problem."
Admittedly Cruz's speech was notable more for its near record-breaking length than its historical understanding, but 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.