Today’s Guilty Men
Alarm over UK defence capability in the 2020s
10 min readJul 30, 2022
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).
