Today’s Guilty Men

Alarm over UK defence capability in the 2020s

The Dunkirk evacuation ended on 4 June 1940. A month later Victor Gollancz published Guilty Men — a searing indictment of British political decision-making in the run-up to the Second World War, authored by a cross-party team of journalists including Labour’s Michael Foot.

Though boycotted by major bookstores, it sold 200,000 copies, burning the memory of elite culpability into the consciousness of the generation that fought the war. (My copy, dated September 1940, is the 21st impression).

The book is best known as a critique of appeasement. In fact, it is far more clearly a critique of drift, inaction and incompetence by a political class that had actually decided to rearm, and to resist Hitler, but showed no understanding of how it could be done, and no willingness to meet the economic costs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Guilty Men while reading the latest report from the Defence Select Committee. It examines the decisions of the Johnson government in light of the Afghan debacle and the Ukraine war….

The Select Committee report is not helped by the fact that the defence and security elite, from whom much of the evidence was drawn, specialises in euphemism and understatement. So does the committee system itself. And everything is…