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By Root 291 0

“How the foreigners gape at this performance when they visit the Gallery!” he wrote in his 1935 Daily Mail article. “What a sign it is that here the people own the Government, and not the Government the people.” Churchill continued, of the House of Commons, that “in its scenes, in its sensations, in its turbulences, in its generosity, and above all in its native tolerance and decency … it is the august symbol and instrument of all that liberates and dignifies our island.” Nevertheless, it would be folly to neglect the national defence. As he expressed it: “Ah! But guard these treasured privileges which are the envy of men of thought and culture in every quarter of the globe. Do not through folly or slothfulness let the citadel, not only of the British but of human rights and justice, be delivered defenceless to barbarian violence.”

Churchill’s article was a cry of pain—and also a cry of hope.

Writing again in the Daily Mail on 6 June 1935, less than two months later, when it seemed certain that an election would be held before the end of the year, Churchill pointed out that if the new Prime Minister were to form a Government “which offended the House of Commons, he and his colleagues could be dismissed in an afternoon, and someone else would have to try again to meet the wishes of the Assembly.” If the House of Commons were to give its support to a Government “which the electorate did not like, this government could be swept away after the next general election.” Therefore, public opinion, “expressed through all its hydra-heads, is master, and all the plans of the King’s new Prime Minister must be attuned to the omnipresent, dominant influence. Here is our guarantee, here is our safeguard; it is all we have; but so far it has not failed.”

The General Election was held on 14 November 1935. It was won, with a substantial majority, by the National Government, which insisted Nazi Germany posed no threat to Britain that could not be met my modest increases in defence spending and a continual search for agreement with the German dictator. Churchill disagreed emphatically with this view. As he saw it, and expressed it forcefully in debate, one essential strength of parliamentary democracy lay in the ability of elected representatives to challenge the mould of official self-deception and misinformation.

In his war memoirs, Churchill set down a strong condemnation of what he regarded as the failure of the 1935 Parliament to address the issue of defence with the vigour it demanded. He blamed all three political parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal. Their collective conduct was, he wrote, “deeply blameworthy before history.” History was not an abstraction for Churchill but a pointer to good or evil that could be anticipated. Yet the public did not always respond. “Unteachable from infancy to tomb, that is the first and main characteristic of mankind,” he had written to a friend in 1927, after reading a history of the origins of the First World War.

As Hitler increased his military and air armament and imposed his racial anti-Jewish laws—laws that turned Jews into second-class citizens and outcasts within German society—several senior officials in the British Foreign Office discussed the failure of the Baldwin Government to explain to the public the profound conflict between the British and the Nazi ideologies. These officials, including the Permanent UnderSecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Robert Vansittart, feared that the desire for appeasement was leading to a lack of recognition of the deep divide between the democratic and the totalitarian systems. They approached Churchill and asked him if he would articulate these differences in a public speech that he was to give in Paris.

Churchill agreed, but when he sent the daft of his speech to the editor of The Times, the deputy editor, Robert Barrington-Ward, replied with a classic appeasement argument that The Times would “certainly be against any premature abandonment of the hope, supported by many authoritative pronouncements on the German side, that Germany