The “good clean tradition of politics has been weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type”. This is not, as you might think, the reaction of a member of the Washington political establishment to President Trump, but that of a member of the British political establishment to Churchill becoming prime minister in 1940.
The contrast with Neville Chamberlain’s business-like chairing of the Cabinet and its committees was often made, and never to the new prime minister’s advantage. He was arrogant, autocratic, impatient and erratic – and that was just according to his wife, who wrote to him a few months later to warn him of the effects all of this was having on his colleagues.
