There is, however, one essay in Johnson’s book which stands apart from all the rest, where he is not just historically all at sea but seems to be playing a very devious game in trying to fuzz over Churchill’s position on the post-war unification of Europe. He completely ignores the rivalry between the two key competing forces in those years. On one hand there was the “intergovernmental” path represented by the Council of Europe, the creation of which Churchill presided over at a huge conference in The Hague in 1948 (Johnson doesn’t even mention it). But opposed to this was the drive, masterminded by Jean Monnet, to give Europe a “supranational” government, designed, by way of a “Common Market”, to lead eventually to the European Union.