What if Winston Churchill had been voted out of politics in 1938?
How the fate of Europe may have once rested on 30 Epping Constituency Conservative Party members.
Novelists, historians - just about everyone, in fact - have been fascinated by one of the biggest What Ifs of all: what if Hitler had beaten Britain in World War II and invaded or forced a capitulation. The counter-factual history that I am about to tell is slightly less dramatic and rather more plausible, but not perhaps dissimilar in the utter gravity of its outcome. In short, much of this counter-factual history pivots around the implications and consequences of the famous Munich Conference of 1938, when Britain’s then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s Edourard Daladier made a deal with the fascists of Germany and Italy (namely, Hitler and Mussolini), that Sudetenland, a region of the then-named Czechoslovakia, was to be annexed to Germany, incorporating more than 3 million people into the country. Munich was a major, and epochal example of Chamberlain’s approach to Nazi Germany, namely the policy of appeasement. Chamberlain hoped to avoid war by yielding to Hitler’s demands, whilst his antithesis, Winston Churchill, was unyielding in the face of Nazi provocations and pressure. I focus here on a pivot point of Churchill’s fortunes when, in the wake of Munich, he was temporarily very badly indeed in the wilderness vis-a-vis the Conservative Party, a moment when he could quite easily have been kicked out of Parliament, fatally weakening the possibility of his finest hour in May and Summer 1940, leading to an alternative Prime Minister, and likely a peace with Germany the terms of which would have been pretty strongly in Germany’s favour. In what follows, I try not to speculate about the long-term consequences of Britain suing for peace after Dunkirk. I focus instead on how we could so easily have got to the point where suing for peace is what would have happened.