Requiem for a Lightweight

"Why did he do it?" The question reverberated last week from the leathery fastnesses of St. James's clubs to the House of Commons smoking room. With mordant relish, Britons were discussing a new biography of Neville Chamberlain, in which the Man of Munich is pictured not as a vain, gullible appeaser but as a bold, imaginative statesman who took the only gamble open to him. What gave the debate an irresistible piquancy was that Chamberlain's apologist is Iain Macleod, 48, chairman of the Conservative Party, leader of the House of Commons and an odds-on candidate to succeed Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister.

A Faraway Country. Macleod's case for the defense rests largely on the argument that the Munich pact was a wise if bitter expedient necessitated by the fact that Britain and the Commonwealth were "not ready for war." Growled the Times (which supported Munich): "The reply must be to ask why they were not." For though Chamberlain himself had realized the urgent need for rearmament four years before Munich, and later described Hitler as a "lunatic," he could close his eyes to all unpleasant evidence. He left the first meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1938 radiating confidence that "here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word."

Far from sharing Biographer Macleod's belief that Munich was a shrewd play for time. Chamberlain actually seemed convinced that it was a great, enduring master stroke that, as he boasted, would assure "peace with honor, peace for our time." Too often, Author Macleod's biography soft-pedals Chamberlain's naivete and glosses over his smugness and arrogance, such as his unfeeling verdict on Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia: "A quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing."

Nonetheless, argues Macleod, "it is not at Munich but at the locust years, 1934 and 1935, that the finger of criticism should be pointed." For despite Chamberlain's "most valiant" championship of rearmament in the mid-'30's, so little was done that by September 1938. Britain was almost completely defenseless against air attack, had only a token quantity of modern antiaircraft guns and one operational Spitfire squadron. "After Munich," says Iain Macleod, "the last strong hopes of peace were not allowed to hold back our accelerating preparations against war."

As Macleod explains it, there was another Neville Chamberlain who "seemed utterly different from the public image which all but his friends seemed to accept." As a humanitarian industrialist, the progressive Lord Mayor of Birmingham and a dedicated Minister of Health who was damned as a "Tory socialist," Chamberlain had worked tirelessly in the '205 and '305 for the "noble and fascinating ideal" of fashioning a better life for Britain's workingman. This is the side of Chamberlain that particularly appeals to his biographer (who never met him). Far more than any other postwar Tory--like Chamberlain, he hates being called a Conservative--Iain Macleod has fulfilled his hero's aim of giving the party a heart and conscience. But as eminent Oxford Historian Robert Blake pointed out last week: "When national security is at stake, one does not judge a statesman by his successes in slum clearance."

Ill-Timed Apologia. Literary and historical critics aside, some politicians believe that, by the obscure barometer of Tory careermanship, Iain Macleod's political prospects have taken a dip as a result of the book. Politicos fault him for publishing an apologia for appeasement at a time when the voice of appeasement is again being heard in Britain. A more damaging criticism is that, instead of rehabilitating a hero, he has merely disinterred a ghost whose miasmal presence still haunts the Conservative Party.

After Sir Harold Nicolson, Labor-lining author and onetime Foreign Office staffer, had accused the Tories of "cruelty, indifference, selfishness," Iain Macleod retorted in the Observer last week: "I don't know why people like him don't realize that if ever their picture of the Tory Party had any truth in it, it's now hopelessly out of date." Once an "upper-class" party, it has undergone "a strengthening of the center." Said Macleod: "Those who want to be empirical and rational, see the virtue of avoiding extremes, and want to discuss everything in moderate temper in the hope of coming to common ground, are becoming more and more influential. We are the only party that looks at things as they really are."

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