Robert Harris on Boris Johnson, cancel culture and rehabilitating Chamberlain

Robert Harris has long been on a one-man crusade to reverse history’s negative verdict on the architect of appeasement. He argues that it was Neville Chamberlain’s duty to go the extra mile for peace and give Britain the moral authority to fight Hitler in the second world war. ‘There seems to be a general feeling that he couldn’t have done much else. He bought us precious time.’ Now the appearance of an acclaimed Anglo-German Netflix film Munich — The Edge of War, starring Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain, and based on Harris’s 2017 novel Munich, gives him the chance to bring his quixotic campaign to a mass audience.

Born in 1957 and growing up under the shadow of the war, Harris admits to being obsessed with the conflict, an obsession that brought him rewards and riches in 1992 when his first novel Fatherland — a dystopian vision of a united Europe ruled by the Nazis — was a runaway hit.