In July 1940, one month after the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, three Beaverbrook journalists published a polemic, denouncing the 15 politicians they deemed responsible for the debacle. Among the ‘Guilty Men’ was the former Foreign Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Home Secretary and Air Minister, Sir Samuel Hoare.

Sam Hoare was not popular. In fact, he was distinctly unpopular. Although hardworking, capable and bright, he was also covetous, conniving and craven – ‘the last in a long line of maiden aunts’, in Lord Birkenhead’s memorable phrase. As Secretary of State for India, he had earned Churchill’s undying enmity for providing some measure of self-government for viceregal India. His reward was the Foreign Office. But he was forced to resign in December 1935, when his scheme to end the Italo-Abyssinian war, concocted with the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, became public. It would have rewarded Mussolini with around two thirds of the East African country.

Appointed to the Home Office by Neville Chamberlain, Hoare then became one of the leading proponents of the appeasement of Hitler, justifying the accusation of ‘Cato’ (the collective pseudonym for the authors of Guilty Men) that Hoare ‘passed from experience to experience, like Boccaccio’s virgin, without discernible effect upon his condition’.

The fall of Chamberlain brought his ministerial career to an end. On 17 May 1940, Churchill offered him the Madrid Embassy. As almost everyone appreciated, this was little more than a crude attempt to get him out of the country. ‘I’d sooner send him to a penal settlement’, recorded the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan. ‘He’ll be the Quisling of England when Germany conquers us and I am dead.’ And yet, as even Churchill was later forced to admit, there was a serendipitous irony about this otherwise cynical appointment. If there was anywhere in the world where an ‘appeaser’ was required, any country where ‘Slippery Sam’ might be an asset, it was Francoist Spain.

The strategic importance of Spain was obvious to all. Situated betwixt the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, she was the geographic hinge upon which the entrance to the ‘Great Sea’ and the trade routes of the South Atlantic depended. If Spain were to join the Axis and succeed in capturing Gibraltar – the last of Britain’s Continental possessions – then the door to the Mediterranean would be closed. German U-boats operating from Spanish ports could wreak havoc on Britain’s Atlantic convoys while, from Spain, the Germans would be able to penetrate French North and West Africa. A friendly Spain was desirable but a neutral Spain was ‘vital’, the military theorist Basil Liddell Hart had advised the British Government in 1938, while, in June 1945, a nostalgic Hermann Göring told the British diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick that Hitler’s greatest mistake had been his failure ‘to march through Spain… capture Gibraltar and spill into Africa’.

To most observers, Hoare’s mission appeared doomed from the start. Charged with maintaining Spanish neutrality or, at the least, delaying Spanish belligerency, the 66-year-old MP for Chelsea was being sent as emissary to a regime overtly sympathetic to the Axis. The Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, owed his victory in the Spanish Civil War to German and Italian aeroplanes, tanks and guns, as well as some 80,000 troops, pilots and military instructors masquerading as ‘volunteers’. By the end of the three-year conflict, the Nationalists had accrued debts of around $500 million to the Axis and, in March 1939, Franco signed the Hispanic-German Treaty of Friendship and joined the Anti-Comintern Pact.

That the Spanish dictator disdained the democracies and hoped for a German victory was not in doubt; nor was his desire to detach Britain’s limpet-like hold on the Rock of Gibraltar and sweep the French out of Morocco. There were an estimated 80,000 German nationals in Spain at the start of the war (several hundred of whom were spies), while Ramón Serrano Suñer, the Caudillo’s brother-in-law, Minister of the Interior and chief spokesman of the Falange – the quasi-fascist party of state, conglomerated by Franco in 1937 – was known to favour intimate co-operation with the Axis.

Into this cauldron of intrigue, resentment and ideological antipathy descended Sam Hoare. His timing could not have been worse. Landing in Madrid shortly after 3pm on 1 June 1940, he took command of the British Embassy just as the British Expeditionary Force was being evacuated from Dunkirk. The atmosphere in the Spanish capital, he informed London, was febrile. Falangists, soldiers and spies filled the streets, the Germans and Italians were ‘entrenched in every department’, and there was a sense of ‘impending crisis on all sides’.

The new ambassador was a jumble of nerves. Terrified of being kidnapped or shot, he carried an automatic pistol with him wherever he went. The fear of a German invasion haunted him. Anxious to preserve the means of escape, he tried (unsuccessfully) to keep the aeroplane that had conveyed him and Lady Maud from England and, according to gossip, placed a ladder against the wall of the Embassy garden each night before going to bed.

Yet Hoare was also capable of outward displays of British phlegm. A former intelligence officer, who had served with effect in pre-revolutionary Russia and then in Italy, his vigilance regarding German attempts at infiltration and un-neutral acts by his hosts was matched by the speed and robustness of his responses. Learning of a planned parade of German troops in San Sebastián, following the arrival of the Wehrmacht at the Franco-Spanish frontier on 27 June 1940, he succeeded in forestalling the event and precipitating the dismissal of the local commander by informing the Minister of Foreign Affairs that unless the march was cancelled he would pack his bags and return to England.

Frequently, he would invent German acts of penetration, to keep the Spanish on their toes. ‘Lomax’, he would say to the Embassy’s Commercial Counsellor, ‘make an excuse to see the Minister of Finance and ask about printing the Spanish currency notes. Bring into the talk something about German soldier-visitors in northern Spain paying for their purchases in notes overprinted Ocupación’. Or: ‘Lomax, go and see the Minister of Public Works and offer to quote him for metalling the highways in northern Spain. When he asks why, tell him that you’ve seen German officers measuring up the roads and you supposed Spain must be thinking of a new road project.’

More practically, Hoare gave his support to an audacious scheme, concocted by the buccaneering Naval Attaché, Captain Alan Hillgarth, and the Majorcan businessman Juan March – the richest man in Spain – to bolster the cause of Spanish non-belligerency by bribing senior members of the regime. Churchill, who knew and trusted Hillgarth, approved and within a short period vast sums were being paid to at least 30 prominent individuals, including the Minister of War, the Foreign Minister, Franco’s political secretary and even the Caudillo’s brother.

‘This country is run by the Germans and I would ask you to keep this in mind whenever you are thinking of Spanish affairs,’ Hoare advised the Foreign Office on 7 June 1940. Despite this assessment, the ambassador came swiftly to the conclusion that it was in Britain’s interests to sustain the Franco regime. ‘Supposing… the present Government were removed by a coup d’état’, he wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, in mid-June:

I believe myself that the position would be worse. I believe that it would probably mean the start of another civil war and that it would certainly mean a period of anarchy in which the Germans and Italians could find many pretexts for intervening against us.

The plan, devised by Hoare and the Ministry of Economic Warfare’s Iberian specialist, David Eccles, was to make the Franco regime dependent on British largesse. Three years of unrelenting civil war had devastated the Spanish economy. More than 225,000 tons of merchant shipping – a third of the total – had been sunk and almost half the rail network was destroyed between 1935 and 1939. Industrial production was down 31 per cent compared to 1935, agricultural production down 21 per cent. Food shortages, exacerbated by the outbreak of the international war and the British blockade, had taken the country to the brink of starvation.

Spain’s economic plight equalled Britain’s opportunity. By supplying Spain with necessities such as wheat, cotton and oil, Britain, so the Madrid Embassy argued, could ensure her neutrality. ‘Who said, “Spain is not for sale?”,’ wrote Eccles to the Foreign Office’s Roger Makins, cheerily. ‘I want to buy Spain but entirely from motives of self-interest.’

The diplomats’ principal opponent was that ‘renegade Etonian’, the Labour MP and Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton. A long-standing antagonist of dictators and fanatical in his pursuit of the blockade, Dalton saw little reason to comfort a regime so overtly hostile to Britain and which, at any moment, might enter the war against her. To Eccles and Hoare, the determination of ‘Dr Dynamo’ to starve Spain was as muddle-headed as it was exasperating. Convinced that Franco, unlike the pre-belligerent Mussolini, had not determined to enter the war, the Whitehall propensity to engage in ‘Balkan capers’ by withholding ‘a case of bananas’, as well as more essential items such as tin, copper and sugar, was a perpetual bugbear.

Fortunately, Churchill was sympathetic to the Madrid Embassy’s arguments. Although the Prime Minister baulked at Hoare’s suggestion that the British should try to appease Franco by offering to discuss the status of Gibraltar (‘The Spaniards know that if we lose they will get it anyhow and they would be great fools to believe that if we win we shall mark our admiration for their conduct by giving it to them,’ he minuted Halifax), he saw the value of doing everything possible to keep Spain out of the clutches of the Axis. Thus, from the autumn of 1940, Britain supplied Spain with wheat, petroleum, vegetable oils, sugar, steel, iron and rubber. And when British stocks ran dry, she persuaded the United States to make up the shortfall.

Meanwhile, Hoare was waging an energetic public relations campaign. In February 1941 he learned that a fire destroyed much of the old town of Santander and that the Germans were sending a relief train, loaded with wheat. Hoare descended upon the Minister for Industry and Commerce. ‘Tell the Minister’, he instructed Lomax, acting as interpreter, ‘that I’ve come about the Santander disaster.  It needs a prompt and efficient service of relief. I’ve ordered as a gift the diversion of two shiploads of wheat. Here, Lomax, show the Minister the telegram.’ The Commercial Counsellor was horrified.  These cargoes of Argentine wheat were not a gift but the object of acrimonious and ongoing negotiations with the Spanish Treasury. ‘There is one condition,’ Hoare continued briskly.  ‘My announcement must be reported in the Spanish press, in full and promptly, in tomorrow’s papers in fact. The ships are still at sea, you understand. I would not send them to your ports unless the facts are plainly stated in the press under a Government communiqué. No thanks, just the facts.’

When the Minister protested, Hoare cut him short. ‘I see that everything done by the Germans in Spain is published with headlines, like this trivial German wagon of wheat, but never a word about supplies and trade arranged by my Embassy. I must know that there will be full reports before I confirm the offer.’ The next day, every Spanish newspaper carried news of the British ‘relief ’.

A no less entertaining pursuit was his campaign to undermine the German Ambassador, the formidable Eberhard von Stohrer, by inventing clandestine contacts with him. ‘Yes, yes, yes’, he would say to Lomax, acting as interpreter with some Spanish Minister, ‘of course the German Ambassador would be forced to take that line officially but his opposition to my suggestion would be only nominal … we understand each other, you know, the embassy gardens adjoin… our wives are keen amateur gardeners.’ Or: ‘Yes, yes, yes, of course, there is excellent sport around Madrid… excellent, too, for quiet meetings with colleagues, eh? Von Stohrer’s a keen shot too.’

Of course, Hoare was not responsible for Franco’s decision not to enter the war. This was due, first and foremost, to the inability of the Germans to pay the Spanish price (both territorially and materially) and the desperate state of the Spanish economy. Yet he played a difficult hand with imagination and skill and prevented Britain from making unforced errors in a strategically vital part of the world.

Decades later, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service’s Iberian division, Kim Philby, would reflect on Hoare’s Spanish sojourn. ‘It is difficult to write nice things about Sir Samuel’, opined the exiled traitor, in one of the great instances of dialogue between the pot and the kettle. ‘But the truth compels me to admit that he rose to the occasion magnificently.’