Search

T Though today he is hailed as one of Britain's greatest leaders, throughout his career, Winston Churchill was an outsider, accumulating a reputation for bad judgement and untrustworthiness. Only risk-takers and fellow outsiders would back him – but these strong and often feuding personalities proved to be vital to his decision-making in war and peace alike. Winston's Bandits provides, for the first time, a detailed account of his greatest friendships. These friends were Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, a press baron who craved power but only on his own terms; Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, an ascetic and quarrelsome scientist who believed in Churchill's intellectual genius; Brendan Bracken, an Irishman from a humble background who reinvented himself as a major force in financial publishing and gave Churchill unconditional support; the young Bob Boothby, who would earn notoriety for adventurous sexual conduct and dubious financial dealings; Randolph Churchill, who was often a disappointment and burden to his father; and Duncan Sandys, who reaped the full benefits of being Churchill's son-in-law in his political career. Together, they were Winston's bandits. This remarkable book explores how Churchill's relationships with these forceful and intriguing sparring partners provide the key to understanding his greatest triumphs and disasters.

The abdication crisis of 1936 demolished the wall of silent deference that had protected the British royal family from press comment and intrusion since the days of Queen Victoria. King Edward VIII was a child of the burgeoning age of media and the first celebrity monarch, but the immense personal popularity created by his charm and good looks was not enough to save him when he came into conflict with a government that embodied the conservative ethos of the time. Nor did the support of powerful media barons. In the United States William Randolph Hearst, who inspired Citizen Kane, dreamed of giving Britain an American Queen and maneuvered with Wallis Simpson to place her on the throne. In Britain the Anglo- Canadian newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook hoped to use the confrontation between the King and the government to force the prime minister, his bitter enemy Stanley Baldwin, out of power. Edward was blocked from broadcasting his case directly to the public, which was the source of deep resentment to him. The government treated the couple's media initiatives as declarations of war and was prepared to respond savagely. The British press remained tactfully silent almost until the end of the crisis, but behind the scenes, a cold war was being fought. For the rest of his life, Edward fought to air his grievances against the ill-treatment to which he thought that he had been subjected. He believed that he had been forced to abdicate by a coalition of reactionaries grouped behind the Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward resented bitterly the ostracism to which he and Wallis were subjected by his brother and sister-in-law, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, especially the refusal to grant his wife royal status. With sometimes farcical results, Edward tried to find authors who put over his side of the story. Beaverbrook supported Edward but tried to bend Edward's quest to fit his own agenda. The establishment did its utmost to restrain Edward and maintain a discreet silence over the crisis, but gradually members of the royal court abandoned reticence and fought back. The abdication challenged the British monarchy as an institution. A large part of the legacy is today's no-holds-barred media environment where the royal family's issues are fought in a ruthless glare of worldwide attention.

When the RAF rearmed to meet the growing threat from Nazi Germany's remorseless expansion in the late 1930s, it faced immense challenges. It had to manage a huge increase in size as well as mastering rapid advances in aviation technology. To protect Britain from attack, the RAF's commanders had to choose the right strategy and the right balance in its forces. The choices had to be made in peacetime with no guidance from combat experience. These visions then had to be translated into practical reality. A shifting cast of government ministers, civil servants and industrialists with their own financial, political and military agendas brought further dynamics into play. The RAF's readiness for war was crucial to Britain's ability to respond to Nazi aggression before war broke out and when it did, the RAF's rearmament was put to the acid test of battle. Adrian Phillips uses the penetrating grasp of how top level decisions are made that he honed in his inside accounts of the abdication crisis and appeasement, to dissect the process which shaped the RAF of 1940. He looks beyond the familiar legends of the Battle of Britain and explores in depth the successes and failures of a vital element in British preparations for war.

In Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler Adrian Phillips presents a radical new view of the British policy of appeasement in the late 1930s. No one doubts that appeasement failed, but Phillips shows that it caused active harm – even sabotaging Britain's preparations for war. He goes far further than previous historians in identifying the individuals responsible for a catalogue of miscalculations, deviousness and moral surrender that made the Second World War inevitable, and highlights the alternative policies that might have prevented it. Phillips outlines how Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his chief advisor, Sir Horace Wilson, formed a fatally inept two-man foreign-policy machine that was immune to any objective examination, criticism or assessment – ruthlessly manipulating the media to support appeasement while batting aside policies advocated by Winston Churchill, the most vocal opponent of appeasement. Churchill understood that Hitler was the implacable enemy of peace – and Britain – but Chamberlain and Wilson were terrified that any display of firmness would provoke him. For the first time, Phillips brings to light how Wilson and Churchill had been enemies since an incident early in their careers, and how, eventually, opposing Churchill became an end in itself. Featuring new revelations about the personalities involved and the shameful manipulations and betrayals that went into appeasement, including an attempt to buy Hitler off with a ruthless colonialist deal in Africa, Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler shines a compelling and original light on one of the darkest hours in British diplomatic history.

Appeasement failed in all its goals. The kindest thing that can be said of it is that postponed World War II by one year. Its real effect was to convince Hitler and Mussolini that Britain was weak and afraid of confrontation, encouraging them to ever-greater acts of aggression.Chamberlain and Wilson blindly pursued bilateral friendship between Britain and the dictators and ferociously resisted alternative policies such as working with France, the Soviet Union, or the U.S. to face down the dictators. They resisted all-out rearmament which would have put the economy on a war footing. These were all the policies advocated by Winston Churchill, the most dangerous opponent of appeasement.Neither Chamberlain nor Wilson had any experience of day-to-day practical diplomacy. Both thought that the dictators would apply the same standards of rationality and clarity to the policies of Italy and Germany that applied in Britain. They could not grasp that Fascist demagogues operated in an entirely different way to democratic politicians. The catastrophe of the Chamberlain/Wilson appeasement policy offers a vital lesson in how blind conviction in one policy as the only alternative can be fatally damaging.

The previously untold story of the hidden politics that went on behind the scenes during the handling of the Royal abdication crisis of 1936. The King Who Had to Go describes the harsh realities of how the machinery of government responds when even the King steps out of line. It reveals the pitiless and insidious battles in Westminster and Whitehall that settled the fate of the King and Mrs Simpson. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had to fight against ministers and civil servants who were determined to pressure the King into giving up Mrs Simpson and, when that failed, into abdicating. Dubious police reports on Mrs Simpson's sex life poisoned the government's view of her and were used to blacken her reputation. Threats to sabotage her divorce were deployed to edge the King towards abdication. Covert intelligence operations convinced the hardliners that the badly coordinated and hopeless attempts of the King's allies, particularly Winston Churchill, to keep him on the throne amounted to a sinister anti-constitutional conspiracy. The book also shows how the King doomed his chances of keeping the throne by wildly unrealistic goals and ill-thought -out schemes. As each side was overwhelmed by desperation and distrust, Baldwin somehow held the balance and steered the crisis to as smooth a conclusion as possible.

Not since the 19th century has the future of the countryside been such a focus of political and public attention, nor of profound uncertainty and anguished debate. A watershed has now been reached, and in this time of unprecedented change, new tools are needed for planning and managing the countryside. Increasingly the'drivers'of countryside management and conservation are European and international. They aim to provide comprehensive new frameworks for the whole countryside, and encourage community-driven planning and protection. There have been numerous responses at the country and local levels within the UK. In this book, a broad range of scholars and practitioners review the international drivers affecting countryside policy and practice, and - through a variety of case studies - they assess the value of country and local responses. The result is a powerful and coherent volume that provides a fully up-to-date review and analysis of the pressures on the countryside, the policies for the future and the keys to successful implementation. Countryside Planning is essential reading for planners, local authorities and rural organizations, conservationists and environmental groups, as well as academics and students in planning, rural studies, environmental studies and geography.