Neville Chamberlain

In the early autumn of 1940, stricken with incurable cancer, Neville Chamberlain reflected upon the likely judgement of history upon his career. 'Few men', he concluded, 'can have known such a tremendous reverse of fortune in so short a time.' A little over two years before, following his dramatic flights to visit Hitler, Chamberlain had been lauded as the man who saved the world from the very brink of war. But the outbreak of that war in September 1939, the collapse of his own government in May 1940, and the military perils that soon followed set in motion a process that would leave him the most reviled, discredited Prime Minister of the twentieth century, the leading exponent of a disastrous and humiliating foreign policy, and the most culpable of the 'Guilty Men'. Despite a mass of revisionist history over the last 30 years, the popular reputation of Neville Chamberlain remains that of a man taken in by Hitler, a man who really believed that he had won 'peace for our time'. Yet whatever the ultimate verdict on the policy of appeasement, Chamberlain's reputation deserves to be based on his career as a whole.Despite an enduring image as a right-wing Conservative, his most constructive work was carried out in the field of social reform. He was also seen at the time as a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer, who steered Britain out of the worst effects of the Depression, and a formidable party political manager. David Dutton traces the evolution of Chamberlain's reputation, among contemporaries and those who have lived since, in the popular mind and in the changing evaluation of academic history, and gives his own appraisal of one of the most conspicuous political careers of the twentieth century.