31. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 226.

32. “In October 1942, Sir Orme Sargent wrote Halifax about the way the events of 25 to 28 May ought to be portrayed in Sir Llewellyn Woodward’s official history of the war. Halifax, who as early as February 1941 had shown disquiet about this, replied with a staggering lack of candour. He asserted, ‘There was certainly never the idea in mind of HMG then or at any time of asking Mussolini to mediate terms between them and Germany,’ and went on to imply that it had been solely neutrality from Italy and never mediation with Germany that had been the subject of the Bastianini conversation and subsequent Cabinet discussions.… Halifax insinuated that the most Britain had been willing to offer Italy was a seat on the board of the company which administered the Suez Canal. ‘The holy Fox’ could hear the hounds baying for his reputation, but he could lay only the faintest of false trails.

“He was not alone. Churchill wrote in Their Finest Hour how, ‘Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda.… We were much too busy to waste time upon such academic, unreal issues’ In fact, future generations might find it just as noteworthy that there were five meetings [in reality, nine], some of which went on for as long as four hours, solely on that very subject” (ibid., 227-28).