It was not the strategic brilliance that was to secure Britain victory in the second world war, nor the superiority of material or morality. These were all crucial factors, of course - but would have counted for nothing if we had caved at the outset.
For one startling, secret moment that decision hung in the balance. Ultimately, it was only the courage, humanity - and political nous - of the new Prime Minister Winston Churchill that saved the nation.
Sentimental to a fault, blinkered, too fond of whisky and often cornered by his own rhetorical daring, Churchill may have been entirely the wrong man to make such a decision. But he was also perfect in a way that the cold calculation of Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax could never reconcile.
It was this duel - head versus heart - that was the substance of deliberations between May 26-28, 1940, and dramatised by Ben Brown.
For those familiar with the doughty bulldog, Warren Clarke's mesmirising encapsulation displays his contradictions beautifully - the incurable optimist and the man dogged by doubt. The man of outrageous temper and tender friendship. The man of broad-strokes and scalpel-sharp analysis.
He needed either the superbly effete Lord Halifax (Jeremy Clyde) and the hollow-eyed Neville Chamberlain (Robert Demeger) to support his position. But it was not his bullying or eloquence that won the day but his deeply personal understanding of the anatomy of failure.
He called on Chamberlain's memories of his bitter Munich humiliation to persuade him to change his mind and divide him from intractable Halifax.
If Brown's mechanical script never fully rises to the (surely Shakespearean) occasion, it is the smoke-filled rooms and pragmatic debate that gives the play its wonderful authenticity.
One can only emerge from the theatre into the memorials of Whitehall moist-eyed, proud and grateful.
– From November 7
