The President and the Prime Minister

My friend Ivan flags me to an interesting Guardian piece (Lynn Olson) re: which Prime Minister does W remind you of? (link):

George Bush's favourite role model is, famously, Jesus, but Winston Churchill is close behind. The US president - who was yesterday again comparing the struggle in Iraq with the allies' efforts in the second world war - admires the wartime prime minister so much that he keeps what he calls "a stern-looking bust" of Churchill in the Oval Office. "He watches my every move," Bush jokes. These days, Churchill would probably not care for much of what he sees.

I thought a great deal about Churchill while working on my book Troublesome Young Men, a history of the small group of Conservative MPs who defied Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940, and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be limited to second world war buffs, so was pleasantly surprised to hear the president has been reading my book. He hasn't let me know what he thinks, but it's a safe bet that he's identifying with the portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. I think Bush's hero would be bemused; parallels do leap out - but between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.

Like Bush, and unlike Churchill, Chamberlain came to office with almost no understanding of foreign affairs or experience in dealing with international leaders. None the less, he was convinced that he alone could bring Hitler and Mussolini to heel. He surrounded himself with like-minded advisers, and refused to heed anyone who told him otherwise. In the months leading up to war, Chamberlain and his men saw little need to build a strong coalition of European allies to confront Nazi Germany - ignoring appeals from Churchill and others to fashion a "grand alliance". ...

Interesting, but my recollection is that Churchill himself was remarkably restrained about the supposed follies of his predecessor. The one Churchill really hated, if memory serves, was Chamberlain's predecessor, Stanley Baldwin--he of the soothing, bedtime-story manner who succeeded in reassuring Britains that they should forget about the problems and all go for a nice walk in the country. On this view, Chamberlain probably needed to stall for time to let Britain get just a little bit ready (the pendant is that Joseph Goebbels, the #2/#3/#4 Nazi, apparently always believed that the Germans would have had a better chance of winning had Hitler started the war earlier).