We have no chance of avoiding defeat.” Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and the Sunday Pictorial, also favored a quick end to the war and was willing to say so in public. “When the moment comes, I intend to campaign for your recall as PM,” Rothermere told Lloyd George in late April. Lord Beaverbrook, another propeace press magnet, also promised to support the former prime minister in his papers. By early May, a majority of the Watching Committee believed that Lloyd George would succeed Chamberlain. And Nancy Astor, an influential Virginia-born MP, considered the old Welshman’s return to Downing Street probable enough to arrange a sit-down to see if Lloyd George still had the “root of the matter” in him.

A sharp-tongued, fading Southern beauty, Lady Astor had a titled, wealthy husband—Waldorf Astor; a history as an appeaser for which she had repented; and a history as an anti-Semite, for which she had half repented. For her saucy Scarlett O’Hara–like manner, Lady Astor had repented not at all. “You’re the kind of woman my mother warned me about,” one alarmed young man had said when she offered to give him a personal tour of Parliament. Lady Astor also had many influential friends, and on May 7, the first day of the Whitsun debate, she invited several of them to a luncheon at 4 St. James Place to vet Lloyd George. The guest of honor arrived a few minutes late—and, as always, perfectly turned out. His mane of snow-white hair was combed into a Prince Valiant bob; his suit and tie were impeccably matched. Lady Astor, who was famously blunt, asked her guest point-blank if he wanted to return to Downing Street—and Lloyd George, who was famously evasive, provided his vetters with an hour of incisive, witty, amusing, and occasionally nasty word portraits of Chamberlain, Churchill, Reynaud, Clemenceau, and Lord Liverpool. The interview “brought all his evasive techniques into play,” said one exasperated vetter, Tom Jones, a prominent civil servant and educator. Jones left the luncheon feeling that the guest of honor desired high office but “preferred to await his country’s summons a little longer and . . . he expected to receive it as the peril grew.” Jones was not far off the mark. Lloyd George had already decided what conditions he would and would not accept if he were offered Downing Street again; in the latter category was a mandate for victory. “I could not produce a decisive victory as I did last time,” he told his aide, A. J. Sylvester. “We have made so many mistakes that we are not in nearly so good a position.”

The Whitsun debate was one of the most anticipated events of the spring. By 9:00 a.m. on May 7, six hours before the start of the debate, Parliament Square was already half full, and each arriving bus and car seemed to deposit a new group of spectators. Some of the early arrivals had brought along a newspaper to read; others passed the time in conversation or closed their eyes and turned their faces toward the morning sun. May had brought spectacularly good weather. Something about the slant of the light that spring, people said. Later in the month, when the news from France grew grave and the sky remained a flawless robin’s-egg blue, people would feel mocked by the beauty of the days. Not then, though, after the bitter winter of 1940—the corridors of light that flooded through the tired, war-weary May streets seemed like a miracle.

The early arrivals included a sprinkling of pensioners, off-duty civil servants and policemen, a handful of surplus women (in their fifties now and close to becoming Great War artifacts), a few soldiers too fresh-faced and unmarked to have served in Norway, a few Old Contemptibles, a smattering of housewives, some stockbrokers from the City, and pro- and antiwar advocates, easily distinguishable from one another by their dress. The former appeared smart in freshly pressed Irish linens; the latter affected the disheveled, proletarian look favored by radical academics and the members of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club.

The prime minister was scheduled to open the debate with a speech on the Norwegian campaign, and Churchill to close it the next evening with a defense of the government. But when the first group of MPs arrived in the House of Commons around noon, almost everything else about the debate remained unsettled, including who the other speakers would be and whether the debate would end with a vote of confidence. Clement Davies was still pressing Attlee and Greenwood to introduce a confidence motion, but the matter of victory or defeat would turn on how many Conservative backbenchers voted with the government, and on that point Attlee felt Chamberlain had reason to feel confident.