"The central figure is beyond question that of Mr. (now Lord) Baldwin... He was Prime Minister when the German rearmament reached dimensions which clearly necessitated a national effort in response. He shut his eyes to the evidence before him. He procrastinated when the evidence could no longer be ignored. He feared opposition from the electorate, but he neither tested the will of the people by a declaration of policy nor attempted to guide it by informing them of the danger which confronted them. He vacated his office with the nation unprepared—unprepared even to prepare... It was only, however, the fateful period in history which began in January 1933 that revealed most fully these defects, of an intermittent will to action and a disinclination to work at distasteful tasks, and made them a great national disaster. He lulled the growing anxiety of the nation by a pledge of air parity with the nearest Power within striking distance. He did nothing to implement it. In one of the most extraordinary confessions a Prime Minister has ever made he has admitted that he refrained from ever proposing the policy which he thought the safety of the country required because he believed it would be unwelcome to the people—the public whom he had not only not instructed but had led into a fool's paradise. Not absence of vision, nor incapacity to judge the needs of a situation, or even to act when the will was there—but a recurrent lethargy of the will was his undoing—and ours."