This piece is obviously in answer to some of the recent comparisons of Marjorie Taylor Greene to Neville Chamberlain, a comparison, the writer points out, that doesn’t stand up. But not for the reasons I imagined. I’m a conventional middle-aged white bloke in being a bit of a history buff, and in my buffdom, I’ve read plenty of history with Chamberlain in what you might call an unsupporting role.
But this piece made me rethink all that. (Didn’t change my mind about MTG, though).
Worth reading if you’d like to refocus your view of the interwar years just a little.
Neville Chamberlain was an honorable and decent man, a patriot and a statesman who led the United Kingdom during the first months of World War II before serving honorably in Winston Churchill’s war cabinet for the few months he had left to live before dying of cancer. He retired, as it were, at the end of September 1940, and he was dead by November 9, having labored through the excruciating pain of intestinal cancer as the Blitz raged overhead. When Churchill, acting on behalf of the king, offered the dying Chamberlain the Order of the Garter, Chamberlain declined. “I prefer to die plain ‘Mr. Chamberlain,’ like my father before me, unadorned by any title,” he said.
It goes on to say, truthfully if harshly, that all that remains of Neville Chamberlain is his worst mistake.
But he did what he thought was right, received very little thanks for it in the end, and never stopped working for his country until the last few weeks of his life, when he was physically unable to continue. He died, as he wished, plain Mr. Chamberlain.