fumbled his words and seemed tired and embarrassed,” said Channon, who was sitting almost directly behind the prime minister. A tribute to the “magnificent gallantry” of the troops brought a brief burst of “Hear! Hear!”s, but by the time Chamberlain reached the third paragraph of his speech the House had had enough of him. His observation that “our withdrawal from Norway created a profound shock both in this House and in this country” produced angry shouts of “And abroad!” and “And all over the world!” Chamberlain navigated through the next few sentences without incident; then he made a fatal error: he retreated into self-pity. “Ministers, of course, must be expected to be blamed for everything.”

“Missed the bus! Missed the bus! Missed the bus!” the House chanted.

Chamberlain tried to talk through the taunts, which only made the taunters shout louder. The Speaker banged his gavel again: “Honorable Members are anxious to hear the prime minister.” No one believed that.

“Missed the bus! Missed the bus! Missed the bus!”

“I will not allow it!” The Speaker banged his gavel a third time.

By the time Chamberlain reached the tenth paragraph of his speech, the Egyptian ambassador had fallen asleep, Henry Channon was close to tears, and the opposition MPs had concluded that the only lessons the prime minister had learned from Norway were lessons he should have learned in 1935. Mocking cheers greeted Chamberlain’s observations on the devastating effect of airpower and on the mobility of the “vast and well-equipped German armies.” It took a while for the prime minister to realize that he was being mocked. When one MP shouted, “What about production?” he replied earnestly, “Yes, production in materiel, planes, guns, everything.” Only when another MP shouted, “We said that five years ago!” did Chamberlain finally get the joke.

Realizing the damage he had done himself, a younger Chamberlain might have ended with a promise to make major changes in the war cabinet. But, now seventy-one, the prime minister’s political instincts had so atrophied that he had no idea his stubbornness on the cabinet issue had become a metaphor for everything that was wrong with his leadership. The day after the debate, the Manchester Guardian would note that it was a sign of how out of touch Chamberlain had become that he had failed to foresee that his one concession to demands for the cabinet change—the appointment of Churchill as a kind of ersatz minister of defense—would backfire and produce a lot of noisy speculation about how the prime minister was trying to subvert a popular rival by burdening him with an impossible job. “The earlier Chamberlain would have done it much more adroitly,” the Guardian noted.

Clement Attlee spoke next, but this was not the Clement Attlee of history, the architect of the British welfare state. That Attlee was still a war and half a decade away. The Attlee of the Whitsun debate was a journeyman politician with a clerk’s mustache, a constituency in Stepney, and an unruly prostate that was threatening his leadership of the Labour Party. Behind Attlee’s back there were growing complaints about his frequent absences for convalescence. A prosaic speaker, Attlee had nothing particularly memorable to say, but his care in balancing criticism of Churchill with praise was the first indication that the House was going to try to salvage Churchill from the wreckage of Norway.

No speaker threaded this particular needle with more skill than Sir Roger Keyes, a retired admiral and the MP for North Portsmouth. “I have great admiration and affection for my right honorable friend, the first lord of the Admiralty,” Keyes said after delivering a withering critique of the Trondheim operation, without mentioning Churchill by name. However, threading the needle was not what made Keyes’s speech memorable. It was who he was, a war hero; and how he was dressed, in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet. Years later, people who had been in the House that night would still remember the uniform and the simple dignity of slight, jug-eared Keyes, who for a moment seemed to step outside himself and become a symbol of what Britain stood for in the world and what it was the House’s duty to see that it continued to stand for.

Keyes concluded his speech, to tumultuous applause, at seven thirty, and the House began to empty out for dinner. By eight, everyone was gone except Leo Amery (who was scheduled to speak next), a few sleepy diehards, and the Speaker of the House, an ally of the chief whip, David Margesson. The Speaker had scheduled Amery’s speech for the dinner hour to ensure that if he made trouble, no one but a few half-deaf octogenarians would know about it. As the Speaker waited for the House to empty out a little more, Amery contemplated the moral ambiguities of his position that evening; they were almost Shakespearean in dimension. Joe Chamberlain had given Amery his start in Birmingham politics, and that night Amery planned to publically humiliate Joe’s son Neville to help Winston Churchill, a lifelong rival and sometime enemy.

The Churchill-Amery relationship was a saga in itself. It began on a summer’s day a half century earlier, when a young Winston Churchill pushed a young Leo Amery into the swimming pool at Harrow. The rivalry that arose from that “rosebud” moment persisted through five decades, during which Amery and Churchill’s mutual antagonism always proved stronger than the things they shared: a devotion to King, Country, and Empire, and similar talents and interests. Gifted intellectually and ambitious politically, both men had served terms as first lord of the Admiralty and colonial secretary, and in the 1930s both had been banished to the political wilderness for opposing appeasement. Waiting for the Speaker’s signal, Amery could be forgiven for thinking that in a fairer world, this would be his moment, not Churchill’s.

At eight ten, the signal came; Amery rose from his seat and surveyed the House. There were barely a dozen members present, and in a chamber built for more than six hundred MPs, the twelve looked like six. Amery felt his nerve slipping. He planned to speak some hard but necessary truths about the prime minister that night, but he had to be careful. Without a chorus of supporters to give his speech a national cast, some of the things he planned to say could sound low and mean and very personal.