LAURENCE REES: And the single most mistaken decision of the war?

JULIET GARDINER: It wasn’t a decision that lost the war, but I think a very important thing about the war on the home front particularly is that this was a democracy, and the whole point of fighting a war was that ok, you were fighting against Nazi Germany and you were fighting against Japan; you weren’t fighting for Poland, let’s face it, you were fighting to keep the balance of power, and a democracy was fighting a totalitarian regime.

And so I think one of the worst decisions of the war was the internment of enemy aliens. I think that was a very bad decision of the war and I think it was one that made a great deal of people uncomfortable. And actually even the internment of Oswald Mosley, I can understand why that was done, you know, in terms of morale; he was an obnoxious person and what he was saying could be portrayed as being on the side of the Germans in the war, but it was a very dubious legal decision. These are the sort of panicky things that - a bit like we saw after 9/11 - a mature democracy ought not to fall victim to.