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Churchill’s majestic, if often misleading, volumes were offered to a public whose images were already set in stone. The leftish journalists had blazed the trail. Everyone knew who the villains of the thirties were, and why they could never be forgiven. Since the heroes of Guilty Men, apart from Churchill, were really the ordinary British people, seen as citizens no less than as subjects, the book fostered a natural sense of a people’s war which should be followed by a people’s peace. Successive polls of historians designed to assess the rating of twentieth-century British Prime Ministers always saw Neville Chamberlain close to bottom of the poll, his considerable achievements in promoting economic recovery in the thirties set aside even by scholars. If the purpose of popular tracts is to create a demonology, Guilty Men was an outstanding success.

      Like any popularized version of historical fact, its simplistic analysis has since been seriously undermined. As the pre-1939 public records became available, revisionist scholars such as David Edgerton showed that the rearmament record of Baldwin and his colleagues over warships and aircraft production was far more commendable than the Express Newspapers journalists allowed. They have even been given credit for encouraging a mood of national defiance after Munich. Chamberlain, of course, has had many defenders. So have Hoare, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood and his predecessor John Simon. Even Thomas Inskip’s entry in the new version of the Dictionary of National Biography in 2004 concluded that he was far from hopeless; in coordinating defence he showed the, perhaps unheroic, qualities of ‘weighing evidence and drawing unemotional conclusions’. Halifax has been the subject of a sympathetic biography (1991) by Andrew Roberts – though oddly the Foreign Secretary makes no appearance at all in the pages of Foot and his colleagues. But of course Guilty Men was concerned not with timeless verities but with transforming the public mood. This it did with great brilliance and brio. It would not have done so if its arguments were historically worthless. The combined learning of subsequent scholars like Donald Cameron Watt, Alastair Parker, Richard Overy and Martin Gilbert suggests that the verdict on Britain’s political leadership in the thirties still strongly favours the journalistic critics rather than the academic dissenters. Parker’s brilliant Chamberlain and Appeasement (1997) fatally undermines the counter-revisionists and lists all Chamberlain’s calamitous miscalculations. Watt’s definitive How the War Came (1989) is a shattering indictment of Chamberlain and his ministers. Guilty Men, a rough-and-tumble polemic of no scholarly quality at all, has been proved right in its instincts, and the British public knew it to be so.

      From the start the book sold by the tens of thousands – over 200,000 by the end of the year, and 220,000 in all. It went through no fewer than seven reprints during July 1940 alone. Gollancz and Foot’s nervousness about gambling on so daring a book at such a tense time was shown to be baseless.⁴ Many technical obstacles in marketing were successfully overcome, notably the wilful refusal of W. H. Smith’s and Wyman’s bookshops to have it on their shelves (a far more serious problem then than it would later have been). Other shops showed great caution in confessing that the dread work was actually in stock. Most unusually for him, Gollancz had to distribute it on a ‘sale or return’ basis. Thousands of copies were sold not in shops at all but on street kerbs. Foot and friends pushed barrowloads of the book for a quick sale in London’s West End. Their sales pitches in Soho and Leicester Square caused some excitement among prostitutes and their clients, who thought it was an instruction manual on sex. Sales swept on and on; Guilty Men went through more than thirty impressions in six months, and received plenty of reviews. In an excellent diversion, the anonymous book was actually reviewed by Michael Foot himself in the Standard, where he inevitably found points for disagreement. No one had any idea who the author might be: journalistic licence seems to have been more restrained in those days, though of course the book had been produced in unusually secretive circumstances, and without secretarial help. Some wondered whether the former First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper, who had famously resigned from the government after Munich, might be responsible, but the prose style would surely quash such an idea. Only slightly more plausible was the suggested authorship of Randolph Churchill. Not until a good deal later, via sources still unclear, did the truth sneak out.

      Guilty Men was the work of a trio, but it has always been Michael Foot with whom it has been identified. As Frank Owen and particularly Peter Howard retreated from the public eye, Foot’s continued prominence, and continued identification with its message, meant that man and book were inextricably linked for ever. Crises in the Falklands, Croatia or Bosnia, involving alleged surrender in foreign affairs, made the connection all the firmer. The book did not make him rich; unfortunately the authors lost serious money because Pinker, their agent, appears to have run away with some of the proceeds. But Foot gained something more precious – what Gibbon called ‘everlasting fame’. It was a mixed blessing in some ways, as it was hard to have a satisfactory career after peaking so young. It also meant that Foot was typecast as a partisan polemicist, a caustic critic rather than a constructive politician. This diminished his public image. It could also make him seem a dated figure, stuck in a time-warp. Analogies with the bad old days of the thirties would continue to come all too easily to him, to the point of self-parody. Even during the 1983 general election campaign he was still returning to the themes and personalities of Guilty Men.

      As a publicist and commentator Foot would henceforth stand on a pedestal all his own. His work chimed in with a sense of 1940 as a climactic moment for the national identity. He was a socialist, but also manifestly a patriotic one, admired across the spectrum. At the age of twenty-seven, or at least when his identity was known, he became at a stroke almost the most celebrated journalist of his day, quite as famous as Brailsford, Lowes Dickinson or others of the anti-war writers he had so admired in his youth. In a wider sense, his identification with the thesis of Guilty Men moved him on to a new level of authority. Popular contempt for appeasing dictators became a theme endlessly fanned in the media over the next sixty years through the obsessive interest of the British in the Second World War – on stage, screen and television. Heroic young men fighting the Battle of Britain, escaping from Colditz, blowing up the Mohne and Eder dams, would follow the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. ‘The Dambusters March’ rivalled ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as an alternative national anthem. There were endless uncritical historical sagas on Churchill, as well as several magisterial biographies. Popular polls found Churchill to be the greatest Briton of all time, leaving Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin trailing in his wake.

      But in a way Foot had already pointed the way for him, like a socialists’ John the Baptist. His timeless journalism had become an essential part of the triumph over Nazism. The message stuck, and in unlikely places. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush, on whose study desk a bust of Churchill reportedly stood, repeatedly cited the perils of appeasement of dictators, as shown by British policy in the thirties (when, incidentally, the United States was made almost inert by its policy of isolation). Bush urged that Saddam Hussein be resisted as uncompromisingly as Hitler had been. Tony Blair, whose own rhetoric became increasingly Churchillian as he neared a pre-planned war (presented as a response to an alleged threat to national security from non-existent weapons), took the same line. Yet one of their mentors in their subconscious (or those of their speechwriters or spinners) was none other than the aged socialist peacemonger and Hampstead sage, himself a fierce opponent of the Iraq war, who addressed the massive anti-war march in London on 15 February 2003 to that effect. Since Saddam Hussein was manifestly no Hitler, and he had no Mein Kampf on display, perhaps Foot’s grasp of logic and of the historical facts was more robust than theirs. At any rate, as his old friend A. J. P. Taylor would have said, here was one of history’s ‘curious twists’.

      After the publication of Guilty Men, Foot’s work for Beaverbrook on the Standard continued to flourish. In May 1941 he took over the influential ‘Londoner’s Diary’ column. Then, in April 1942, still well short of his thirtieth birthday, he actually became the newspaper’s editor when Frank Owen was called up to serve in the RAF. Beaverbrook himself had not known at all about the authorship of Guilty Men: it was technically in breach of contract for Foot and the others to write their book while employed by him. But when he did discover the truth, he showed no particular concern. Indeed, he was cheerfully to tell Halifax, who had asked about his personal finances, that he lived comfortably

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