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I never would have believed that we should have been allowed to go on getting into this plight, month by month and year by year, and that even the Government’s own confessions of error would have produced no concentration of Parliamentary opinion and force capable of lifting our efforts to the level of emergency.

I say that unless the House resolves to find out the truth for itself it will have committed an act of abdication of duty without parallel in its long history.

Here was one of the weaknesses in parliamentary democracy: the rigidity of the party system. Throughout the 1930s, Churchill spoke strongly in Parliament against Members voting according to their party leaders, even when they were known to be personally uneasy about the party line.

Churchill saw a second weakness in parliamentary democracy during the appeasement decade: the power of political leaders to deceive the public—to win votes, to win elections, and to come to power on false policies, and to maintain power on false information, and disinformation, to the detriment of national security.

Many of Churchill’s presentations in the House of Commons exposed the gap between the situation as described by the government and the actual situation, as he was able to present it to the House. With regard to German rearmament and British defence capacity, his speeches were often based on the very statistics that the government had been given in secrecy from its own experts, but had chosen to fudge or ignore. “I have been mocked and censured as a scaremonger and even as a warmonger,” Churchill told his constituents on 20 June 1936, “by those whose complacency and inertia have brought us all nearer to war and war nearer to us all. But I have the comfort of knowing that I have spoken the truth and done my duty…. Indeed I am more proud of the long series of speeches which I have made on defence and foreign policy in the last four years than of anything I have ever been able to do, in all my forty years of public life.”

Churchill never gave up making his points in the Chamber. “The House of Commons,” he declared on 31 May 1937, “still survives as the arena of free debate.” But the fact that the House was being deceived and misinformed on a wide range of defence and security issues caused Churchill deep distress. Recalling the 25 April 1938 debate on the British naval bases in western Ireland—bases that Churchill himself had secured for Britain in the Irish Treaty of 1922, and which Neville Chamberlain transferred to the Republic of Ireland, thus denying them to Britain in any future war—Churchill later noted, in his war memoirs: “I was listened to with a patient air of scepticism. I never saw the House of Commons so completely misled.”

Realizing, and accepting the centrality of Parliament in the appeasement debate, Churchill spoke in the House at each stage and on each issue, hoping to convince more and more of his fellow Members that the appeasement policy could only lead to war from a position of weakness. Slowly, his arguments were taken seriously and began to influence an increasing number of Members. Malcolm MacDonald, Ramsay MacDonald’s son and a member of Chamberlain’s Cabinet, later told me how, during Churchill’s sustained indictment on 5 October 1938 of the Munich Agreement, his palms were wet with sweat as he realized the force of Churchill’s warnings.

Despite the many Members of Parliament who spoke against the Munich Agreement during the three-day debate, the policy did not change. Nor, when he again advocated setting up a Ministry of Supply during a debate on 17 November 1938, could Churchill overcome the pressures of the Party Whips. From his seat on the front bench, he turned round to face the serried ranks of Conservative MPs and told them: “Hon. Gentlemen above the gangway—pledged loyal, faithful supporters on all occasion of His Majesty’s Government—must not imagine that they can throw the burden wholly on the Ministers of the Crown.