Between them, the six case-studies in this book have generated a wealth of material on the Cabinet and foreign policy, and each of them could easily have been replicated six times over – such is the level of business conducted by a major power in a period of stress, and the consequent size of the archives available to scholars. The law of diminishing marginal returns, however, means that conclusions become apparent well before every seam has been mined, and this is the basis on which the case-study method is justified. The intention here has been, by focusing on a limited period, to provide a crosssection through the British foreign policy process at its highest level, and from an analytical perspective. It is now possible to summarise the themes which have been emerging in the course of the empirical investigation represented by these cases.

The main focus has been on the nature of Cabinet government in the context of foreign policy, a subject which has so far not attracted detailed attention. The related but rather varied kinds of problem which we have seen the British government tackling between 1938 and 1941 have not produced direct support for either of the two main schools of thought on the operations of the Cabinet in general, which James Barber has called ‘the Presidential school’ and ‘the chairmanship school’. Although any great debate such as this tends to harden into a series of over-simplifications, the argument about whether the Prime Minister dominates or merely orchestrates the Cabinet is still one of the main issues in the study of British politics.