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It has been the misfortune of Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, to be remembered not for his very considerable achievements as a senior Conservative politician and diplomat, but as an architect of the policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
A church-going, fox-hunting aristocrat, nicknamed ‘Holy Fox’ by Churchill for his political guile, Halifax’s career in public life spanned the period from the end of the First to the conclusion of the Second World War. As Viceroy of India (1926–31), his deal with Gandhi ended the Civil Disobedience campaign before it could force the British to quit. His meeting with Hitler in 1937 was a milestone in appeasement, yet just days before the 1938 Munich conference, Halifax repudiated the policy and demanded the ‘destruction of Nazism’. By May 1940, it was he, rather than Winston Churchill, who was the choice for Britain’s war leader.
Andrew Roberts has drawn on remarkable private documents to present Lord Halifax as an enigmatic, influential and much-maligned politician – above all, as a man whose self-knowledge, moral decency and patriotism led him to put the needs of his country before the glittering prize of the highest political office.