Winston to win

Winston to win Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister Nicholas Shakespeare Harvill Secker, 490pp, ?20 Politics is distilled to its essence when the time comes for a tribe to replace its leader. (Was it only Churchill's clever pause and the failure of Halifax to seize the moment that settled the premiership?) Instead they refer to the length of the parliamentary division, measured by the egg-timer on the clerks' table, that split the Tories and pushed Chamberlain, so lately a hero, to the edge of the cliff. Halifax strolls through the Buckingham Palace gardens (he had a special key from the king) on the morning he might have become prime minister, and takes tea with Churchill in the Downing Street garden as Chamberlain tries in vain to get Clement Attlee's Labour Party to throw him a lifeline.