In November 1937, Viscount Halifax, the British foreign secretary, had an audience with Adolf Hitler at the Berghof, the Nazi dictator’s lair in the Bavarian Alps. Halifax thought it a success. He wrote to his fellow appeaser and prime minister, Neville Chamberlain: “Unless I am wholly deceived… Hitler was sincere when he said he did not want war.” He was, of course, deceived. Wholly.

This was not really the fault of Hitler who barely concealed the murderous character of his regime and his monstrous ambitions. His spear carriers were called “Legions of Death” and their caps were decorated with skulls. The deception of Halifax, Chamberlain and their many fellow travellers was of the self-induced kind.

Appeasement, the fatal delusion that Nazi Germany could be contained by buying it off with concessions, was the most momentous British mistake of the 20th century. In the memorable phrase of Lord Hugh Cecil, it was like “scratching a crocodile’s head in the hope of making it purr”. All involved had their reputations blighted to the grave and beyond. It vindicated the anti-appeasement minority, notably Winston Churchill, who had grasped that the real choice was between “war now or war later”. The alleged lessons have been invoked in many subsequent crises, from the Korean war to the Syrian conflict. Memories of appeasement inform and misinform Brexit arguments. The story has relevance in our own age as dictatorships once again confront the democracies.

So it is timely to take a fresh look at what happened in the 1930s. The tale is a complex one, with many moving parts and personalities. To this tricky challenge, Tim Bouverie rises superbly. His narrative is well constructed and fluently written. He excels at capturing the atmosphere and conveying the debates in the dining clubs, drawing rooms and society playgrounds of interwar Britain. He addresses the issues with clarity of expression and judgment. There are convincing sketches of the principals along with a seasoning of entertainment from a cast of eccentric and gruesome secondary characters in the plot. The author is unsparing about the guilty parties while always careful to put them in context.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Neville Chamberlain holds a press conference at Heston Airport on 17 September after a meeting with Hitler. Photograph: Daily Herald Archive/SSPL via Getty Images

Some elements of the British politico-social elite were worse than appeasers. There were Nazi apologists and sympathisers among the aristocracy. The aptly named Unity Valkyrie Mitford liked to shock people by greeting them with a raised arm and a cry of “Heil Hitler!” What the author calls the “noxious glamour” of Nazism seduced students at St Andrews University who passed the motion: “This House approves of the Nazi Party, and congratulates it on its splendid work in the reformation of Germany.” Much of the British press disgraced itself. The Daily Mail drooled over Nazism. The editor of the Times was a fanatical appeaser. The editor of the Observer admired Mussolini.

The fault was not just on the British right. After the propaganda triumph of the Berlin Olympics, David Lloyd George, the Liberal who led Britain in the first world war, gushed that Hitler was “the greatest German of the age”. At least until the Spanish civil war, Labour was largely pacifist and succumbed to fantastical notions such as the idea that the major powers could be induced to pool their air forces into an international police constabulary under the control of the hopeless League of Nations.

There were plenty of people in the British ruling class who were appalled by Hitler and apprehended that he was a menace. Yet most of them trembled before the threat rather than take the necessary actions. One anxiety was that Britain had few allies. America had turned isolationist. To much of the British political class, Stalin’s Soviet Union was even more dangerous than Nazism. France lurched through multiple domestic political crises. Efforts to build common fronts against Hitler foundered on mistrust between the British and the French.

Britons later forgot that appeasement was highly popular with most of them right up to the invasion of Poland

Another paralysing fear was of public opinion. Stanley Baldwin, Chamberlain’s predecessor as Tory prime minister, later made a notorious admission that he had not been honest with the British people about the need to rebuild the armed forces for fear that it would cost him the 1935 election because voters were “pacific”. A country deeply scarred by the 1914-18 conflict with the Germans had no appetite for another one. There was particular terror of the carnage that could be inflicted on civilian populations by aerial bombing.

It became convenient for Britons to later forget that appeasement was highly popular with most of them right up to the point when Hitler’s invasion of Poland revealed the magnitude of the error. Chamberlain was widely proclaimed a masterful statesman when he came back from Munich in 1938 with his infamous piece of paper promising “peace for our time”. In a flagrant abuse of his constitutional position, George VI invited the prime minister on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace to receive the cheers of the crowds thronging the Mall. They sang Rule Britannia and For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.

The betrayal of Czechoslovakia is usually regarded as the nadir of appeasement. I rather agree with the author that the turning point came two years earlier when Hitler violated the Treaty of Locarno and tested the resolve of the democracies by remilitarising the Rhineland. He was only in the early stages of building his war machine and his generals were highly nervous of his brinkmanship. Britain, with the world’s most powerful navy, and France, with Europe’s largest army, were well equipped to call his bluff in 1936. History might have taken a very different course had they done so.

The author considers the “breathing space” defence of appeasement and rightly dismisses it. Delaying the reckoning gave Britain more time to rearm, but it did the same favour for the Germans. As late as the Czech crisis, Hitler might have been stopped. By autumn 1939, his forces were much more formidable and the strategic position of Britain and France was much worse because they had sacrificed the Czechs and the Germans now had a non-aggression pact with Stalin.

This gripping book is additionally valuable because it illuminates some eternal truths. Bad leaders hide behind public opinion; great ones lead it. Wishful thinking is terrible decision-making. Nasty things tend to happen when Britain has no reliable alliances. And remembering the enormous popularity of Chamberlain in 1938, we might also note that voters can be just as guilty of self-deception as politicians.

• Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War by Tim Bouverie is published by Bodley Head (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.