LAURENCE REES: But the previous 6 months of him running the admiralty had been pretty much a disaster?ĪNDREW ROBERTS: He made lots of mistakes and he was going to continue to make mistakes and he was going to make a lot of suggestions that had to be knocked down by the chiefs of staff, but the fact was that he never once overruled the chiefs of staff on a major strategy issue he’d leant his lesson from Gallipoli and from disasters that overcame him a quarter of a century earlier. And so really Winston Churchill was the best choice because of who he wasn’t, and at the same time he was somebody who really, because of the 10 years of warning about the Nazis, had a moral power that was completely lacking in pretty much any other major frontline British statesman of the day. He also wasn’t, of course, the charismatic figure that Winston Churchill was, and therefore would have found it much more difficult to have infused the nation for the fight when obviously, after Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, he desperately needed morale to be high, and Halifax couldn’t have done that. He wasn’t interested in them and he was somebody who would have left all the fighting up to the generals and wouldn’t have imposed himself in any way. LAURENCE REES: How crucial is it for Britain that Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister in May 1940?ĪNDREW ROBERTS: I think it’s very important that Churchill becomes Prime Minister in 1940, because the alternative would have been Lord Halifax who didn’t really understand military matters at all.
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