The Great Debate

She was, beyond a doubt, the greatest British political leader since Winston Churchill and, like him, she was cordially hated by many grandees of the party she led.

The entire British establishment, from the royal family down, often wished she would just go away. In the end, a Cabinet cabal proved too much for her and drove her into exile.

Britain hates talent, at least in its rulers. Maggie Roberts wasn’t just talented – she was the incarnation of everything the 20th century British establishment loathed.

She was female, a trained scientist, aggressively middle class, personally assertive, openly nationalist, got on well with Jews and was utterly opposed to the mix of tepid socialism and stale one-nation Toryism that constituted the middle ground of British politics during the disastrous generation following World War Two.

Modern Britain’s greatest leaders are deeply disliked, often as much by their own party as their opponents. If Churchill’s fellow Tories had been able to pick a successor to Neville Chamberlain in 1940, as Europe crumbled around them, they would have picked the peace-minded Lord Halifax over Churchill. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair were similarly hated – even as they dominated British political life.

- Terry Charman is Senior Historian at the Imperial  War Museum in London. He studied Modern History and Politics at the University of Reading and while there interviewed Adolf Hitler's architect Albert Speer. He specializes in the political, diplomatic, social and cultural aspects of the World Wars, and wrote "The German Home Front 1939-1945" and "Outbreak 1939: The World Goes To War". He is curator of the exhibition Outbreak 1939 at the museum. The opinions expressed are his own. -

In September 1939, in marked contrast to August 1914, Britain went to war in a sombre mood of resigned acceptance of the inevitable. There was no Union Jack waving “hurrah” patriotism as there had been twenty-five years before. After Adolf Hitler had torn up the Munich Agreement in March 1939 and invaded the Czech lands, the British people recognized that appeasement had failed and that the German leader’s aggressive plans would have  to be stopped, and if necessary by force of arms.

On September 3, 1939,  when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced on the radio that Britain was at war with Germany, for many  the news came as a relief from the tension of the past few weeks and months. An anonymous diarist noted: “Even horrible certainty seems better to me than uncertainty.”