The audit of the Great War showed up widespread human weaknesses in British industry. Too many British capitalists in their boardrooms were simply se… - Correlli Barnett

That idealism was of course shared by the whole Cabinet, including its chapel-bred working-class members. All their adult lives the vision of New Jerusalem had inspired them to struggle through the sloughs of committee work and along the stony paths of electioneering. However, in the expectation of coming to power in a rich imperial Britain, they had always assumed that they would build New Jerusalem by the simple method of redistributing wealth from the rentier class to the working masses. Now, in Government, they found themselves in a plight to which a lifetime's assumptions were quite inappropriate, for instead of redistributing wealth they were faced with the urgent and immensely more difficult task of creating it. Their problem in adjusting their minds to this sordid need was shared by the small-'l' liberal Establishment as a whole, especially in the opinion-forming intelligentsia, as Lord Annan acknowledges in his book Our Age: "Unfortunately we were more concerned with how wealth should be shared than produced."

Meeting Simon could only impress Hitler the more vividly with English feebleness. Here, in Simon, Hitler met for the first time a Foreign Secretary of England, the greatest of all imperial powers, the nation which had thwarted the ambitions of Kaiser Wilhelm II – this sanctimonious and deferential old gentleman of mild and episcopal appearance. In a situation which called for a breezy, brutal arrogance of a Palmerston, the chilling dignity of a Castlereagh, or the blunt, plain-speaking and dominant will of a Wellington, Simon could only make a sorry attempt at ingratiation.

British policy was therefore the child of their insemination of the politicians – politicians like Baldwin and MacDonald, the Chamberlains, Simon and Henderson, Halifax, Eden. It was as if the encumbents of quiet early-nineteenth-century rectories and nonconformist minister's houses had been miraculously transported into the great offices of State of a hundred years later. Instead of the suspicious minds of pre-Victorian statesmen, there was trustfulness; instead of a worldly scepticism, a childlike innocence and optimism. And instead of a toughness, even a ruthlessness, in the pursuit of English interests, there was a yielding readiness to appease the wrath of other nations. For the very bedrock of the national character had been crumbled since the eighteenth century. Whereas the pre-Victorian Englishman had been renowned for his quarrelsome temper and his willingness to back his argument with his fists – or his feet – now the modern British, like the elderly, shrank from conflict or unpleasantness of any kind. In Lord Vansittart's words: "Right or Left, everybody was for a quiet life."