Give the man his due.

Neville Chamberlain is in the news following the publication of various documents -including his pocket diary - at an exhibition to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII. I always think Chamberlain gets a somewhat bad press. He is generally seen as at the wimp end of a spectrum of political opinion of the time, with Churchill at the other - bellicose - end. Yet this is very simplistic. Churchill did not want war any more than Chamberlain did. The horrors of the First World War were still fresh in both their minds. The difference was that while Chamberlain believed that war could be avoided, Churchill realised that it was more or less inevitable, and that the country was horribly unprepared for it. If you read the speeches he was giving in the mid 1930s, he was not advocating war, but pressing for us to arm ourselves to be able to defend ourselves if it came to it. Chamberlain's failing was to be unable to believe that anyone could think differently about war than he did, and therefore he approached his dealings with Hitler on the basis of two reasonable men trying to find a way of avoiding all-out conflict. It was Churchill who saw that as far as Hitler was concerned World War One was unfinished business. So like I say, I think Chamberlain deserves rather better treatment from history.