The supreme act of trust

The Real Special Relationship: The True Story of How the British and US Secret Services Work Together Michael Smith (Simon & Schuster, £25)

STAY close to America,’ was Boris Johnson’s advice to his successor at his last Prime Minister’s questions. Whatever your opinion of Mr Johnson, you can’t fault his strategic instinct. It’s that which informed his hero, Winston Churchill, when he took office in 1940 and in a sea of incipient defeatism gave his ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech. Its peroration revealed the grand strategy: we would fight alone ‘until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old’.

Churchill was confident that America would step forth; the question was when. In the end, it would not be for 18