John Charmley

John Charmley (born 1955) is a British diplomatic historian and a professor of modern history at the University of East Anglia, where he has been head of the School of History since 2001. Specialising in modern diplomatic and political history, Charmley's historical work has proved to be controversial, most notably his works on Churchill.
After acting as President of the Norfolk and Norwich Branch of the Historical Association for the past decade, a role which he still occupies, John has recently taken over the role of editor-in-chief for the Historical Association's international journal, History.

Views

Charmley's scholarship on Churchill is to some extent the reverse of the standard academic opinion. He finds Churchill's early years powerful and compelling, but believes that Churchill's alternative to appeasement was unrealistic and his actions as Prime Minister in World War II ought to be subject to the same sort of objective criticism as those of any other politician; this latter view seems to have struck Churchill's admirers as being quite outrageous - at least to judge from their hyperventilated reactions.

Charmley also believed that the strong government control of Britain that Churchill shepherded in also laid the groundwork for British socialism and Labour Party victories, events which he also considers undesirable. Charmley sums up his feelings in Churchill: The End of Glory with:

Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence and for an 'anti-Socialist' vision of Britain. By July 1945 the first of these was on the skids, the second was dependent solely upon America and the third had just vanished in a Labour election victory.

Criticism

Charmley's scholarship has been acknowledged by some scholars, but many have found his views on Britain and World War II controversial. His views on Churchill have proved consistently irritating to those (especially in the USA) who persist in regarding Churchill as a kind of secular saint. There has been perhaps excessive concentration on two of the more controversial inferences in his Churchill: The End of Glory. His statement that the decision to fight on in the summer of 1940 created much controversy with some asserting (with perhaps more heat than accuracy) that he was advocating a negotiated peace with Hitler. The following quotation gives some indication of the reaction to this idea.

Every serious military account of the Second World War shows that Germany came within a hair of taking Russia out even as it was. With no enemy at his back, tying up materiel and divisions in the West; without Britain's campaign in Africa; without the Americans and British succoring Stalin by sea; without Roosevelt's courting war with Germany in the Atlantic, Hitler would have thrown everything he had into Russia. The siege of Leningrad, the attack on Moscow, the battle of Stalingrad would almost certainly have gone the other way, if not in 1941 then certainly by 1942.

The difficulty with this line of criticism is that it takes Charmley's argument much further than he has ever done. What Charmley suggests is a political explanation for the great speeches which Churchill gave during that summer. He argues that there was in fact a great deal of support in the British political establishment for the idea of at least considering whether to open negotiations with Hitler but that Churchill's speeches effectively undercut his opponents by appealing to the wider British public. Churchill's presentation of Britain as an embattled citadel struck a chord with the popular imagination and helped to establish the reputation which he has enjoyed ever since.

Charmley's Churchill is a flawed figure whose defects were on the same gigantic scale as his merits. To an older generation of scholars Charmley's work seemed to come almost under the category of heresy. A flavour of this can be had from the fulminations of the amateur military historian Correlli Barnett who regards Charmley's views as "absurd...that instead of going to war Britain could, and should, have lived with Wilhelmine Germany's domination of western Europe. This is glibly clever but actually preposterous as his claim...that Britain could and should have unilaterally withdrawn into neutrality in 1940-41". The fact that at no point does Charmley argue what Barnett asserts was no bar to his asserting it all the same.

F.M.Leventhal, in a review of Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, suggested that whilst Charmley's work portrayed a courageous leader with "a deep and humane desire to leave no stone unturned to avoid war", nonetheless, Chamberlain's inability to recognize Hitler's ambition meant that '[p]erhaps that is why Winston Churchill's reputation remains largely untarnished, while Chamberlain's, Charmley's initiative notwithstanding, cannot be resuscitated'.

Later Work

Latterly, Charmley's research has moved back into the 19th Century where he has argued that Britain's entry into World War I was not the natural culmination of a particular tradition of British foreign policy but was, in fact, the result of misjudgements by Sir Edward Grey and other politicians; a view which some critics have found as controversial as his opinions about Churchill.

In 2005 he published a biographical study of the activities of the wife of the Russian ambassador to London during the Regency period, Princess Lieven, which argued the case for taking her seriously as a "female politician".

In 2008 he published A History of the Conservative Party since 1830. The book argues that historians have concentrated too much on Disraeli and Churchill and have ignored the alternative Conservative tradition represented by the earls of Derby. Having been an election agent on three occasions for Conservative MP's his work here is informed by the experience of the practitioner as well as the theories of the observer.
Since 2001 Professor Charmley has been head of the School of History at the University of East Anglia, where he is also currently the acting administrative head of the School of Music and Associate Dean for Enterprise and Engagement. In 2011 he became editor-in-chief of the journal, History.

Books

• John Charmley, Duff Cooper (Weidenfeld, 1986). ISBN 0297788574.
• John Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (Weidenfeld, 1987). ISBN 0297792059.
• John Charmley, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (Hodder and Stroughton, 1989). ISBN 9780929587332.
• John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (Hodder and Stroughton, 1993). ISBN 9781566632478.
• John Charmley, Churchill's Grand Alliance 1940-1957 (Hodder and Stoughton, 1995). ISBN 9780151275816.
• John Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics 1900-1996 (MacMillan, 1996). ISBN 0333722833.
• John Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power 1874-1914 (Hodder and Stroughton, 1999). ISBN 9780340657911.
• John Charmley, Chamberlain, Churchill and the End of Empire. In: The Decline of Empires. (Wein, 2001). ISBN 370280384X.
• John Charmley, Palmerston: Artful old dodger or babe of grace? In: The Makers of British Foreigh Policy from Pitt to Thatcher. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). ISBN 0333915798.
• John Charmley, What if Halifax had become Prime Minister in 1940? In: Prime Minister Portillo and Other Things that Never Happened: A Collection of Political Counterfactuals. (Portico's, 2003). ISBN 1842750690.
• John Charmley, From Splendid Isolation to Finest Hour: Britain as a Global Power, 1900-1950. In: The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2005). ISBN 0714656798.
• John Charmley, The Princess and the Politicians: Sex, Intrigue and Diplomacy, 1812-40 (Viking, 2005). ISBN 0670889644.
• John Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics since 1830. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). ISBN 9780333929735.
• John Charmley, Unravelling Silk: Princess Lieven, Metternich and Castlereagh. In: A Living Anachronism? European Diplomacy and the Habsburg Monarchy. (Bohlau: Vienna, 2010). pp. 15–29. ISBN 978320578510.
• John Charmley, Neville Chamberlain and the Consequences of the Churchillian Hegemony. In: Origins of the Second World War: An International Perspective. (Continuum, 2011). p. 448. ISBN 9781441164438.