This guy, captured on film demonstrating exactly why he was useless, for posterity.
Hindsight is very nice but at the time that picture was taken nobody had actually experienced the kind of war we were about to have and it was genuinely believed that in the first night of the blitz alone half a million civilians would die.
In the year that he delayed our entry into the war we built our Spitfires and our Anderson shelters and evacuated our children from the cities. We built the factories that would supply our forces. The preparations we made for war in that year were immense, and that lead time in terms of both strategy and production were invaluable. And it was our building and manufacturing strategies as much as our fighting that won.
In that year Hitler also started his invasions so it became clear what his actions would be rather than what his rhetoric was. And that was very important, with some people, not least the Daily Mail (still owned by the same family incidently) openly backing Hitler up to the point where he started to play his hand we wouldn’t have gone into the war with the universally held moral superiority that we needed. That kind of moral superiority that we don’t have in Afganistan or Iraq for instance. As it was though our men would cross the channel carrying just six bullets but know they were doing the right thing.
So, some people think he won the war for us. And that picture up there, thats a picture or a man with a piece of paper in his hand and terminal cancer. He was dead within a couple of months of leaving office.