David Mckie Elsewhere: Same Story, Different War

In the throw-out bin outside a second-hand bookshop the other day, I found a battered copy of a book called the Penguin Hansard - volume 1, from Chamberlain to Churchill. It was published in 1940 to enable people who did not have access to Hansard and wanted something fuller than press accounts to follow the debates in the Commons in the early months of the war.

The meat of it is an edited record of the two-day debate in May on the failed attempt to save Norway after Hitler's invasion. To deny the Germans the use of shipping channels, the allies had mined Norwegian waters. Hitler swiftly moved in to seize the Norwegian ports. Britain's attempt to capture some of them back was frustrated, mainly by the Germans' superior air power, and ended in an ignominious withdrawal.

Yet the May debate wasn't just about Norway. It was rather, as the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, put it, the culmination of many discontents about Chamberlain's handling of the war. This was the moment where many MPs, including a substantial number of Tories, decided enough was enough. Labour, against government protests, took the debate to a vote. It was only on a motion for the adjournment, but everyone knew what it meant. Two hundred MPs voted against the government, cutting Chamberlain's majority to 80. Six days later, he went.

You cannot now read the debates of May 1940 without picking up parallels with recent contention over the war with Iraq. As ever in such situations, opposing the government was equated by some with lining up with the enemy and betraying our lads at the front. Chamberlain affronted many MPs, old supporters included, by saying at the outset that the chiefs of staff had warned him against the staging of any public debate.

One or two backbench blimps sought to dismiss the failure of the Norway campaign as no more than a minor setback, hardly worth parliament's time. One denounced the spinelessness of the Norwegians. But Chamberlain's remaining defenders had another favourite target: the press and the broadcasters. "Certain people and writers in the press," raged brigadier-general Sir Henry Page Croft, Conservative member for Bournemouth, "have enrolled themselves definitely under Dr Goebbels in what can only be described as a defeatist campaign." The BBC tended to come off worse than the newspapers since, as Lady Astor, Conservative member for Plymouth Sutton, put it: the people mistrusted the newspapers but trusted the BBC.

But a much more telling indictment came from the other side, and especially from the Liberal leader, Sir Archibald Sinclair. One of the most serious consequences of the Norway fiasco, he said, was the damage it had done to the credit of the press and the BBC, which had built up a mood of optimism which the facts could never have justified. Far from betraying the nation by creating alarm and despondency about Britain's predicament, the media in this analysis had betrayed it by lulling it into a dangerous state of complacency. Other members thought they knew why this had happened. The BBC had too readily picked up reports from unreliable sources. But it had also gullibly swallowed official British communiques. The media, some suspected, had also fallen for stories peddled off the record by ministers. In other words, they had been the victims of spin.

To understand what was happening here, one needs the help of Asa Briggs's masterly History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, where he demonstrates that many listeners, dissatisfied with the service that they were getting from an information-starved BBC, were tuning in to German radio stations which, amid all their propaganda, were repeatedly breaking stories which the BBC would only later get round to confirming. The most bizarre was the resignation of a government minister, which the Germans reported a whole day before the BBC. The BBC, Briggs explains, had been told by ministers that it mustn't report the resignation until the next morning's newspapers had been given their chance to do so.

Some of the charges thrown at the BBC during the war with Iraq, and not just by Conservative blimps, reflected a thirst not so much for the imposition of censorship, as for some form of self-censorship on the part of our national broadcaster - almost for the corporation to see itself, as some had explicitly demanded 60 years earlier, as part of the war effort.

The last speech in the Penguin Hansard has Churchill, in his first Commons speech as premier on May 13, affirming his commitment to telling things as they are. This postscript is a powerful reminder, too, that a successful leader in war needs to mobilise not just the manpower and the munitions, but the language as well.