Free WC02 - Never Surrender by Michael Dobbs

party, which was more than two-thirds of the House, there came nothing but embarrassment. No one stood to cheer, few hailed him, most had suddenly found something of captivating interest amongst their papers or in the conversation of their neighbours.
    Moments later, it was Neville Chamberlain's turn to enter and walk the same path, squeezing past the outstretched legs of others until he had found his place on the green leather bench beside Churchill. And as they saw him, his colleagues offered an outpouring of sympathy so vehement that they hoped it might wash away any mark of their guilt. He had last left this Chamber as a condemned man, and already he was a saint.
    The House was like an excitable and over-bred greyhound; at every mention of Chamberlain they leapt up and barked their loyalty, while as Churchill spoke they crouched in anxiety, their tails between their legs, as he treated them to one of the most brutal and honest expositions ever offered by a Prime Minister at a time of great crisis. Many, it seemed, simply did not understand.
    "Can you believe it?" Channon was still protesting some hours later as he stood on the lawn at the rear of the Travellers' Club. It was early evening; the weather was still glorious. "What on earth did all that mean? "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat"," he growled in mock imitation.
    "Not the sort of stuff to get the common man jumping for joy, that's for sure," Butler agreed across a glass of sherry.
    "Extraordinary performance," Colville added.
    "D'you think he was drunk?"
    "Always so difficult to tell."
    "Not something you drafted then, Jock?" Channon enquired. The stare he received in response was so stony he felt forced to leave in search of the bar steward.
    "Truly, Jock, I fear for us all," Butler muttered. "Winston will say anything if the words take his fancy. We shall be swept away on a flood of oral incontinence."
    The words still rang in his ears. He was a diplomat by trade and an intellectual by training, a man who took pleasure in toying with every side of an argument in the manner that a cat plays with a ball of wool. Yet Churchill was a man stripped of any trace of either sophistication or the values Butler held so dear in public life; his speech had been nothing short of vulgar.
    "You ask, What is our policy?" Churchill had declared. "I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy," he had told them. "You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival .. ."
    Butler was far from certain that he would want to survive in a world of crude simplicities of the sort embraced by Churchill. "I feel violated," he muttered, his lips wobbling.
    His misery was interrupted as Channon returned in the company of the American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy. They were followed by a club steward carrying a tray with three small sherries and an enormous glass of bourbon.
    "So, what are you Three Musketeers up to?" the American demanded.
    If diplomacy was seen by many as a carefully orchestrated minuet, Joe Kennedy could always be relied upon to arrive wearing hobnail boots. He had worn them throughout a career that had carried him through the boardrooms of major banks and into the bedrooms of Hollywood starlets, and he had kept them ever more tightly laced as he had kicked his way into the smoke-filled back rooms of the US Democratic Party where he showed as little loyalty to his President as he did to his wife. He was a man with a roving eye and a slipping tie, and in the two years since his arrival at the Court of St. James's he had come to hate Winston Churchill.
    "Not drinking to Winston and his war, I hope," Kennedy