When Winston Churchill became British prime minister in 1940 (on the very day Hitler invaded France, Belgium and Holland) there were severe pressures on him to exclude from his Cabinet the “guilty men” of Munich. He wisely resisted the hue and cry and formed a successful coalition of all parties, including many who had been quite wrong about Munich, Hitler, and much else.

In his memoirs Churchill explained: “‘If the present,” I said a few weeks later, ‘tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future.”