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No history of British appeasement is complete without some reference to Sir Horace Wilson's role as Neville Chamberlain's confidential adviser, and in particular to Wilson's meetings with Hitler as the prime minister's emissary immediately prior to the Munich conference in September 1938. Yet there has been no serious study of Wilson himself in relation to appeasement since Martin Gilbert published a short article in History Today in 1982.1 To date, archival work on Wilson's career has been confined to his years at the Ministry of Labour and the Board of Trade.2 This neglect would have surprised Wilson's contemporaries. In the spring of 1939 Wilson was appointed permanent secretary of the Treasury and head of the Civil Service, regarded by one Labour critic as a more powerful position than that held by 'almost anybody since Cardinal Wolsey'.3 Wilson's rise was remarkable for someone from a modest social background who had entered the Civil Service as a boy clerk and whose university degree was a B.Sc. (Econ) taken by part-time study at the London School of Economics. R. A. Butler, who as parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office knew Wilson well, described him in the summer of 1939 as 'the Burleigh of the present age'.4 Unlike Burleigh, who was able to win the confidence of two very different Tudor queens, Mary and Elizabeth, Wilson was regarded by Chamberlain's successor, Winston Churchill, as an appeaser who should be excluded from influence on foreign policy. Churchill had no difficulty in accepting the Labour party's demand that Wilson should be removed from 10 Downing Street as a condition of forming a coalition government in May 1940. Indeed, he considered sacking Wilson, but was persuaded by Kingsley Wood, the chancellor of the exchequer, that such an action would be contrary to the convention that ministers, not civil servants, were responsible for policy, and Wilson was allowed to remain at the Treasury until he reached the normal age of retirement in 1942.5
According to the left-wing journalists who wrote the polemic, Guilty men (1940), Wilson established an ascendancy over Chamberlain that would take its place in history, providing the policy, philosophy, and ideology that dominated the prime minister's...