Publishers believe that Churchill sells books. This presumably accounts for the subtitle of Kit Kowol’s excellent monograph on Conservative politics during the Second World War, which, in fact, says little about the man who was prime minister from May 1940 until July 1945. Readers, however, will have no reason to think that they have been short-changed. In many ways, the absence of Churchill is one of the book’s strengths. It feels as if one is being shown around a familiar building from which the furniture has been removed: one sees features of the architecture that were previously obscured. 

Kowol’s central argument about wartime conservatism is simply that such a thing existed. Most historians of Britain in the Second World War can be divided into two groups. One examines the conduct of the war, which means a heavy emphasis on Churchill and his entourage rather than domestic politics. The other focuses on the home front. This groups gives more weight to civilians than soldiers and presents Labour ministers as controlling domestic policy and laying the foundations of the welfare state, behind the backs of the Tories.

But Kowol points out that the Conservatives had won the great majority of seats in the 1935 general election, the last to be held before the war, and were, therefore, dominant in the wartime government. He does not see the creation of the coalition in May 1940 as the end