By 1940, several loop-the-loops later in Churchill’s rollercoaster career, he was hoping this new idea would somehow prevent the surrender of France even if it were to be militarily defeated. If ‘two become one’, as the Spice Girls put it (in a song that weirdly turns out not to be about the proposed Anglo-French merger at all but just about having sex), then both Britain and France would have to be defeated before either of them could be. That was what Churchill reckoned.
