On Darkest Hour’s historicity, Lord Soames said: “It’s pretty accurate [when compared to that] remarkable book by George Lukas called Five Days in London, which is about the making of the government of 1940. Obviously, it takes artistic license, because it’s a film, but it is true that you had Dunkirk, you had this extraordinary row within the War Cabinet between Lord Halifax, Chamberlain and my grandfather – about whether or not they should make one last ditch attempt against Mussolini and therefore Hitler. It does take great flights of fancy, like going onto the Underground and going missing and all that. But that is done to make a point.”
The scene in question sees Churchill board a train to ask regular working people how they felt about the war, what action the government should take and if they were afraid. He added: “[That moment] is an allegory because the idea of my grandfather on the Underground is absolutely preposterous. He’d never been on a bus in his life, but he certainly understood what people were thinking on the bus and Underground.”
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