Lord Woolton put it best: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the result of the failure of an enterprise.’ By that, the Tory grandee meant that in the spring of 1940 Winston Churchill managed to use Britain’s grotesque military cock-up in Norway, for which he was responsible, to supplant Neville Chamberlain.
Churchill sidelined Chamberlain’s most likely successor, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax. He overcame Tory backbench distrust. He even got Labour on side, though its leaders had long considered him the class enemy incarnate.
What Churchill pulled off, shifting blame for his Norwegian shambles on to his boss in order to replace him, and getting his foes to bend the knee, was a piece of brazen opportunism so virtuosic it would have made Machiavelli blush. Or applaud.
Few Britons today could place Narvik on a map. But, in the spring of 1940, this tiny Norwegian coastal settlement became significant for exporting the iron ore for which the rival British and German war machines were insatiable.
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