This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
John Charmley, who died last month at the age of 69, was amongst the most significant British historians of the past 50 years and certainly one of the more consequential conservative academics of his era. A specialist in political and diplomatic history, Charmley leaves a substantial intellectual legacy. He was no stranger to controversy, either.
Educated at Oxford, John was long associated with the University of East Anglia, where he was a professor, but later did several years as pro-vice chancellor at St Mary’s University, Twickenham prior to retiring in 2021. Charmley had a larger-than-life personality, with a particular love of bow ties. Politically, he was a supporter of Margaret Thatcher. In my own dealings with John, I found him kind, encouraging and very generous.
During his career Charmley wrote eight impressive books, but his intellectual significance rests on a pair of works dealing first with Neville Chamberlain, then with Winston Churchill. These took serious issue with dominant interpretations of our history — he delighted in debunking reassuring narratives of both the left and the right. Charmley was the classic “revisionist”, but few others had as much impact.
He was chiefly interested in the effect of outstanding individuals on the course of history. John was an exceptional biographer, and even those books that were not formal biographies always had a strong biographical flavour. Charmley wrote about foreign policy and diplomatic strategy in order to understand the interplay between individuals and the world around them. Contingency was always to the fore here; decisions mattered, and people possessed agency. Temperament, instinct and worldview counted for much as well.
Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (1989) made the definitive case for a sympathetic interpretation of appeasement. The book’s goal was not a small one. It sought to salvage Chamberlain, the most tarnished political reputation of the past century.
Charmley challenged the popular and hegemonic narrative of 1930s foreign policy — that Chamberlain and the other appeasers were fools and cowards at best, criminals at worst — which had been established by the notorious journalistic polemic Guilty Men (1940) and then the first volume of Churchill’s war memoirs, The Gathering Storm (1948). Whilst the opening of the archives made it possible — even necessary — to interpret appeasement in a somewhat less critical light, none were as persuasive as Charmley had been.
He depicted Chamberlain as sensible in pursuing a peaceful settlement of European geopolitical grievances in hope of avoiding another cataclysmic conflict. Chamberlain knew that another general war would signal the strategic and financial eclipse of British world power; he understood that there was profound public aversion to a rerun of the conflict fought between 1914 and 1918, and he recognised that a fresh struggle would be even more lethal than the Great War had been.
Despite the loathsome nature of Hitler’s regime, then, a serious effort to resolve diplomatic conflicts was the right course of action. This would entail bargaining with some unpleasant individuals, but what other option was there? At the same time, whilst hoping for the best, Chamberlain would prepare for the worst by driving forward a huge rearmament scheme. Appeasement might preserve peace, but, if it failed on that front, it would still buy time.
Charmley was suspicious of Churchillian narratives of the period, not least the notion that Britain was militarily strong enough to confront Hitler earlier or that a “grand alliance” with other states might have deterred Germany (Stalin wanted effective control of eastern Europe as the price of such an arrangement). This was the stuff of fantasy. Charmley judged Chamberlain did his best in a difficult situation.
Chamberlain was portrayed here not as a weak man but a strong one in control of his situation and working to bring foreign and defence policy into alignment. If British and French military commanders had held up their end and proven remotely competent in 1940, perhaps history would remember Chamberlain’s strategy quite differently. Much battlefield blame belonged with the brass hats.
But Charmley also argued that Chamberlain’s real error was to insist on intervening, diplomatically, in the Czech crisis in 1938. This put Britain and Germany on course for conflict and effectively moralised international politics by creating “duties” for Britain to uphold. Isolation was a wiser policy, Charmley felt, not least because it could have propelled Germany and the Soviet Union into collision earlier.
Then the Prime Minister unwisely issued a guarantee to Poland in early 1939 to “save face” at home ahead of a general election. Contrary to the standard view that Chamberlain had been insufficiently vigorous in his diplomacy, Charmley maintained that he had been insufficiently restrained. Britain imprudently went to war in order to save Stalin the job of confronting Hitler himself.
This interpretation was controversial, to say the least (Alan Clark wrote a positive review for the Spectator, but the Cabinet Office felt that “it was inconsistent with his position as a Minister of the Crown”, and so it was never published). Charmley took the view, correctly, that the Second World War had been a disaster for Britain.
His approach was similar to that of Peterhouse’s Maurice Cowling, whose earlier The Impact of Hitler (1975) had explored the political intrigues behind how Britain found itself waging this “liberal war”. Unlike Cowling’s prose, Charmley’s book remains a delight to read. Years later, he quipped that Chamberlain and the Lost Peace was “the English-language version” of The Impact of Hitler.
Yet Charmley’s next target was even more ambitious. In the biography Churchill: The End of Glory (1993), Charmley went elephant-hunting. Across almost 800 pages of tiny but magnificently written text, he charted the life and career of the most famous democratic politician of them all. Rather than salvaging a reputation, this time Charmley sought to blow one up. There was no reverence here. He argued that Churchill’s war leadership played a central role in the decline of British power and that to ignore brutal facts and to concentrate instead on the mythology of the Finest Hour is just romantic nonsense.
Churchill’s policies fatally weakened Britain and its empire; he was repeatedly outmanoeuvred by the Americans, who established a position of international pre-eminence at British expense; and he refused to even think much of the future, with disastrous results at home and abroad.
Charmley felt that, for Britain, the results of victory in 1945 were not worth the sacrifices that had been made. Britain went to war to stop the appalling regime in Berlin from dominating half of Europe, yet in 1945 an equally appalling regime in Moscow dominated half of Europe, with almost half a century more to come. Charmley judged the end of the British Empire to be damaging for British power and imperial subjects alike. As he put it, “the British Empire vanishing has had a very deleterious effect on the Third World.”
Meanwhile Churchill’s indifference to domestic politics after 1940 meant he failed to detect the rise of Labour. The result was the landslide Labour victory in 1945, with, in Charmley’s view, horrendous long-term effects for the country. He derided wrapping this cataclysm in a comfort blanket, as the British had done for decades, and exposed the myths of “victory” for what they were.
Nobody had treated Churchill quite like this. The book is cynical, relentless and very funny. There are jokes and gossip on every page. Charmley’s work is a triumph of the biographical art, the work of a major political historian in command of his material and nothing less than an epic account of the decline of British power. Churchill still emerges as a Great Man of history, but certainly not the hero of mythology.
Yet Charmley’s argument unleashed an avalanche of abuse. It is rare for a serious academic book to draw such attention. The End of Glory caused such a stir that the publisher was reprinting it before the book had even gone on sale. Few scholars ever cut through like this. His challenge to treasured Churchillian tropes and the “Authorised Version” of 20th century history angered both the political left and right.
Public figures on each side of the Atlantic exploded. To even question Churchill’s war leadership was to be, in some bizarre way, worryingly pro-Hitler. This was codswallop. Charmley had debunked myths about the war, modern British identity and the rise of American power. This is what “revisionist” history should look like: ambitious, argumentative and bold.
There were other important books. In Churchill’s Grand Alliance (1995), Charmley examined the Anglo-American strategic relationship from the outbreak of war through to Suez and argued that Churchill’s naïveté had permitted the Americans to turn Britain into a client state and hoover up much of her global influence and wealth.
With Splendid Isolation? (1999), Charmley probed British foreign policy between 1874 and 1914. Here he argued, contrary to the standard narrative that the consistent goal of British strategy was to resist any effort by a continental power to dominate Europe, that in fact there was a different, conservative tradition of foreign policy as well.
Diplomatic adjustments (“appeasement”) were made frequently as problems arose, and Britain had usually done best when staying out of continental political crises wherever possible. The most effective British leaders were those such as Lord Salisbury, ruthlessly focused on the national interest rather than “the balance of power” in Europe. Sometimes British interests necessitated attention to European crises; quite often they did not.
Jeremy Black has made similar arguments about the conservative tradition in foreign policy in the 18th century. Charmley’s big point was that the First World War was a disaster comparable to the Second and that Britain should have stayed out of it whilst foreigners beat one another senseless.
The Germans had won against the French in 1870; “the skies had not fallen in and civilisation had not ended; nor would it have done in 1914 if the Germans had once more defeated the French”. The Liberal government of 1906, afraid of Britain being “isolated”, carried the can for involvement in a conflict that did not necessarily pose a risk to the interests of an island nation (and empire). There is much to be said for this argument, whose case is visible in Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War (1999), too.
Indeed, Britain’s real enemies in the decades prior to 1914 had been Russia and France, two expansive empires with possessions that butted up against British interests across the world. Friction was the norm across coterminous frontiers in Asia and Africa. If there was going to be a major war involving Britain, it would probably pitch London against Paris and Moscow. And so anxious British policymakers took the opportunity to escape from those dangerous imperial rivalries by aligning with France and Russia against the latter’s continental adversary in the form of the German Reich. Tensions globally were to be defused by locating a common enemy closer to home.
This was remarkable because Germany was less obviously a danger to Britain than Russia and France. If the Germans genuinely were such a threat — because of the expansion of their navy — surely there was a case for just attempting what Nelson had done to the Danish at Copenhagen and annihilating their fleet with an unexpected attack? It remains unclear how the strategy pursued by the Liberals, of alignment with France and Russia and commitment to industrial-scale land warfare, served the British national interest.
John Charmley’s provocative oeuvre discloses a conservative temperament at work. He enjoyed his views upsetting people, and gossiping about past politicians was a source of immense pleasure.
Yet his books are more than that. They constitute serious, powerful statements of a doctrine of pessimism and prudence in statecraft. (His work also reminds us that conservative historians are often the ones least likely to be warmongers.) Charmley’s books will be studied, and absorbed, for decades to come.
