Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party Book

For despairing students of the Conservative Party's recent troubled history--from Margaret Thatcher's downfall to the civil strife of the Major years--this sizeable book will come as both salutary reminder and, perhaps, some kind of solace. Because one of its central inferences is that the commanding heights of the Conservative Party have long been a scene of vicious internecine struggle, not least in the crucial years 1929-1939, when Neville Chamberlain went head to head for the leadership, and then the premiership, with Winston Churchill. The narrative divides naturally into two parts; indeed as the author admits his book is almost two volumes in one. The first section exhaustively details how Neville Chamberlain slipped into high office despite the junking of his brother Austen as Tory leader; it simultaneously outlines the backbench machinations of a consequently aggrieved and resentful Churchill. The second part of the book tells the better-known tale: of how, in the face of expansionist Nazi Germany, Churchill's robust policy of rearmament came to be preferred to Chamberlain's well- meaning but fatal "appeasement". Together the two sections of Burying Caesar make for a useful, enlightening, sometimes gripping saga that should more than satisfy the most gluttonous of political history buffs. --Sean ThomasRead More