Britain’s Guilty Men and Women
In July 1940, three journalists published a short, anonymous polemical attack on the failures of British statecraft that forever shaped Britain’s understanding of the Second World War. Guilty Men, by the pseudonymous Cato, accused 15 of Britain’s senior political figures during the interwar years of leading a once prosperous and secure empire “to the edge of national annihilation.” The war may have broken out in 1939, Cato charged, but the genesis of Britain’s misfortunes could be dated to 1929, when the world economy imploded and a monstrous regime of little men took over in London.
Something similar has happened again. And once again, it is time these culprits quit the stage.
Today, Britain is very much not on the edge of national annihilation, whatever the hyperbolic coverage of the past few weeks might suggest. But it is in the grip of chaotic mismanagement that has left the country poorer and weaker, having lost its fourth prime minister in six turbulent years since the Brexit referendum and with an economy pushed close to its breaking point. The next prime minister, whoever that may be, will face an extraordinary set of challenges largely of their Conservative Party’s own making. But when did this era of the small people begin? What was its genesis?
All such start dates are unsatisfactory—calamities are always seeded by events that came before. Some will argue it was
