Halifax at the War Cabinet — 25 May 18:00
, Lord Halifax, 59, has been British Foreign Secretary since 1938. From the Yorkshire aristocracy, former Viceroy of India from 1926 to 1931, he was one of the principal architects of 's appeasement policy and signed the Munich Agreement. On 10 May 1940, King had initially thought of him for the post of Prime Minister; Halifax had declined in favour of , arguing that a Prime Minister sitting in the Lords could not govern in wartime.
On the morning of 25 May 1940, the Italian ambassador in London, , passes a message to Halifax: Mussolini might mediate with Hitler, on condition that London and Paris agree to discuss "Mediterranean questions". The Allies' military position is critical: Lord Gort is encircled in Belgium with the British Expeditionary Force, Boulogne fell the previous day, 24 May, and Calais is hemmed in. No large-scale evacuation has yet begun. Hitler signed his Halt-Befehl that same day, 24 May at 12:30, but London is unaware of it.
At 18:00, the War Cabinet of five — Churchill, Chamberlain, Halifax, the Labour MP and the Labour MP — meets in the Cabinet Room. Halifax there raises the fundamental question: should Britain examine the Italian mediation?
Should Halifax push for the Italian mediation to be examined?
Halifax applies B. For four days (25-28 May), he presses Churchill to examine mediation. Nine meetings of the War Cabinet — the most tense moment of the whole war on the British side. Halifax contemplates resignation on the morning of 27 May. The crisis is defused by Churchill on 28 May with his speech to the twenty-five ministers. Halifax gives way. He remains Foreign Secretary until December 1940, then is appointed ambassador to Washington, where he dies in 1959. , in The Holy Fox (Weidenfeld, 1991), defends Halifax as "an honourable man asking a rational question" — a view today largely shared among historians. The War Cabinet crisis of May 1940 remains one of the major turning points of the war — it is in those five days that the doctrine of total British defiance crystallises.
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