At this stage, France and Britain wanted to keep Italy out of the war, but Halifax wanted to use Mussolini as a mediator to secure a peace that would, while giving Hitler almost complete control of continental Europe, ensure the autonomy and security of Great Britain and its empire. In his biography of Churchill, Roy Jenkins says this would have been the equivalent of a second Munich twenty months after the first. In Jenkins' opinion, Halifax thought of himself as a realist but, in reality, his views chimed with his profound Christian pessimism. The key factor was that this negative outlook deprived him of Churchill's indomitable courage. Jenkins says Halifax was probably content to have England left alone, in the same way as Spain or Switzerland or Sweden. He could not understand that such a prospect was repugnant to Churchill and so conflict between the two was inevitable.