Guilty Men

The book shaped popular thinking about appeasement for twenty years; it effectively destroyed the reputation of former Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, and contributed to the defeat of the Conservative Party at the 1945 general election.

[5] Guilty Men was written by three journalists: Michael Foot (a future leader of the Labour Party), Frank Owen (a former Liberal MP), and Peter Howard (a Conservative).

They believed that Britain had suffered a succession of bad leaders who, with junior ministers, advisers and officials, had conducted a disastrous foreign policy towards Germany and had failed to prepare the country for war.

[8] Guilty Men was published in early July 1940, shortly after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, the Dunkirk evacuation had shown Britain's military unpreparedness, and the Fall of France left the country with few allies.

[11] The fact that all bar one of the 15 "guilty men" named were either Conservatives or Liberals caused controversy – no mention was made, for example, of the Labour Party (UK) cabinet member and mid-1930s leader George Lansbury, a pacifist who advocated Unilateral disarmament in the face of fascist rearmament.

The idea of appeasement as error and cowardice was challenged by historian A. J. P. Taylor in his book The Origins of the Second World War (1960), in which he argued that, in the circumstances, it might be seen as a rational policy.