Thought experiment - if you're Chamberlain, and want to postpone the war with Germany for a few more years while you build an army - what exactly do you say in a speech? "We're currently too weak to fight, but we'll get there" is not the sort of thing that I would expect to result in postponing war.
And it's plausible that anything short of Churchillian intransigence would have lost that war. Even a "smarter" craftiness could have failed.