In his book, Mr Cowling describes the relationship between British party politics and the conduct of British foreign policy between Hitler's arrival in office in 1933 and Chamberlain's resignation in May 1940. He sets British policy in the context of European, Imperial, League, national and isolational sentiments and takes account of the strategic and financial limitations within which decisions were made. He shows how far prime ministers, foreign secretaries and the cabinet responded to parliamentary criticism, and argues that, from mid-1936 onwards, foreign policy and the prospects of the party system were so intimately connected that neither can be understood in isolation from the other.
