![]() The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. ![]() The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. ![]() Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. Lord Halifax, kept at the Foreign Office in the interest of Conservative Party unity, became an isolated figure within a war cabinet where even Neville Chamberlain, deposed premier and arch appeaser, now recognised Churchill’s determination to carry on the fight. With the “miracle” of Dunkirk, the Royal Navy controlling home waters, the RAF’s defensive and offensive potential by no means shattered, and the full resources of the empire complementing the British war effort, survival was conceivable, if scarcely possible. A meeting of ministers did take place, albeit not on the scale depicted in Darkest Hour but by then the balance of power within the five-man war cabinet had swayed in Churchill’s favour. In a fictional scene, the prime minister’s spine is stiffened by consulting defiant passengers on the Tube and calling on the full cabinet to rally behind him. But any such initiative was overtaken by events at home and, crucially, across the Channel, enabling Churchill after the war to foster a popular belief that he never wavered in his determination to “go it alone”. To its credit, Darkest Hour acknowledges that Churchill, when faced with Lord Halifax, a foreign secretary who saw negotiation via Mussolini as a necessity, did reluctantly sanction clandestine talks. However, this is a movie that purports an authentic telling of how Churchill and his freshly formed coalition government responded to the prospect of an imminent German invasion. The film looks terrific and has an air of authenticity. Top-flight performances from Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill and Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, Clementine, have generated a keen interest in Darkest Hour, director Joe Wright’s depiction of Britain tottering on the edge of defeat to Nazi Germany in May 1940.
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