And there were the policy mistakes: some—like Gallipoli, opposition to Indian reform, and the decision to return Britain to the gold standard—epic. “Winston was often right,” said his friend F. E. Smith. “But when he was wrong: well, my God.”

Churchill’s greatness was peculiar in character in that it only became “fine and true” in a particular set of circumstances, and on the afternoon of September 2, the man who would later be called the “most remarkable human being to ever inhabit Downing Street” sensed that those circumstances had yet to form. In the name of national unity, Churchill would put away his ambitions for the time being and accept the cabinet post that Chamberlain had secretly offered him the day before, first lord of the Admiralty.

A little before 6:00 p.m., when the Speaker of the House announced that Chamberlain’s speech would be postponed for a second time, from 6:00 p.m. until 7:30, Henry Channon, the Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea, Essex, was crossing the House floor on his way to his office. Passing a mirror near the smoking room, Channon paused, examined himself, and was pleased at the face staring back at him. “Quite handsome!” he congratulated himself. Politics by its nature attracts egotists, but the egotism of Henry Channon, husband of Honor Guinness, the brewing heiress and member of the most glamorous social circles in London, was singular. In post–World War One Paris, the Chicago-born Channon had been a Truman Capote–like figure: a young man of fawn-like beauty, ambiguous sexuality, and the social ambitions of a Hapsburg duchess. Jean Cocteau once told Channon that his eyes “looked like they had been set by Cartier,” and Proust called his essays on Parisian life charming. In 1925, tiring of Parisian decadence, Channon had moved to London and reinvented himself as an English gentleman. Now he was parliamentary secretary to Rab Butler, the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, and had transferred his affections from Jean Cocteau to Neville Chamberlain.

Shortly after Channon reached his office, Butler called. The cabinet had just risen and the meeting had been “stormy.” Over the past twenty-four hours, the mood in the cabinet had stiffened considerably. At the afternoon cabinet on the second, the air minister, Kingsley Wood, heretofore prone to appeasement, expressed dismay about the previous evening’s warning note to Germany and cautioned that further postponements in issuing an ultimatum would have a bad “moral effect.” Leslie Hore-Belisha, the war minister, said that Britain should demand a complete German withdrawal from Poland that night, and John Simon, the chancellor of the Exchequer, dismissed the Italian proposal as worthless. Even if Hitler agreed to attend a conference, said Simon, he would never make any meaningful concessions. A few hours later, the prime minister would get an even rougher handling in the House of Commons.

Channon blamed the House’s reaction on the long interval between the afternoon cabinet, which ended at about 5:00 p.m., and Chamberlain’s arrival in the Commons at 7:30. In the interim, “the nervous House, chafing under delay and genuinely distressed . . . [had continued] to quench their thirst in the Smoking Room and when they returned to hear the PM . . . many of them were full of Dutch Courage . . . and ready to fight . . . the whole world.”

Channon was right. Aroused by the gravity of the hour, the House wanted to hear “Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them.” Instead, members got an irresolute old man sickened by the thought of sending another generation of young men to war. Speeches are rarely memorable for the things left unsaid, but this one was. Chamberlain made no mention of a British ultimatum or of the British ambassador in Berlin requesting his passport; he made no mention of British honor or of Polish valor, of “sunlit uplands” and “better days to come.” There was just the tired, uninflected voice of a disappointed politician explaining the current state of negotiations. As the prime minister sat down, row after row of hard faces glared at him from the backbenches.

Arthur Greenwood, an unprepossessing North Country man, rose to speak for the Labour Party. A former teacher, Greenwood had a reputation as a drinker, and he possessed no outstanding talents other than the ability to be in the right place at the right time. That talent had won him the assistant leadership position in the Labour Party; it had put him, and not the party leader, Clement Attlee, who was recovering from prostate surgery, in the House on this historic evening; and it had put Leo Amery, a vocal Chamberlain critic, in the Conservative backbenches. Having spent most of the afternoon in the smoking room bar, Greenwood began unsteadily, “I am speaking under very difficult circumstances.”

“Speak for England, Arthur!” Amery shouted.

Greenwood steadied himself, the drink left his voice, and, as Amery requested, the former schoolteacher spoke for England in the simple, unaffected language of a North Country man.