Horizon

I own a copy of this, but unfortunately at the moment it's sitting at the bottom of an unmarked box in a pile of other boxes in someone else's basement.

It's really a lot of fun. Colville is in one of those jobs that alternates between frenzy and boredom, so he has a lot going on around him, but still has time to write down the office gossip. Which in this case consists of both witticisms and top-secret policy decisions. I may quote more if things stay quiet around here.

Incidentally, do you know much about the "Declaration of Union" issued by the British a couple of days before the French asked for armistice? I vaguely remember Shirer mocking it in Collapse of the Third Republic, but Colville seems to set great store by it.

It was a proposal that would have had vast constitutional significance had anyone but Churchill and perhaps his immediate coterie taken it particularly seriously, which they didn't. Certainly the French appeared to have regarded it as something of a joke and an unecessary distraction from the more serious business of losing.

Colville talks as if it was a union of France and Great Britain under the English Crown. He's got romantic visions of adding the fleur-de-lys to the royal standard again.

Made me wonder if the French saw it as opportunistic poaching, of if German propaganda later portrayed it that way.

I could be wrong but I was under the impression that the offer wasn't revealed until after the war. I think it would have made Churchill look a bit of a fool in 1940, whereas after 1945 with his reputation safely established it was just one of those romantic if slightly silly gestures that people could humor.