(Above: amazingly still for sale at an exorbitant price in the second hand market, here, with Michael Foot writing the preface, naturally, for the republished edition).
Excellent news, with Hal G. P. Colebatch back in print, and up to his usual standard in Epitaph for a Liar.
Oh dear, the first par, and he's broken Godwin's Law already. Not such a good start is it? But I guess when you come not to praise someone but to club them hard and bury them deep, you need any bit of four be two that's nearby and handy for the job.
And that's how Colebatch carries on, with sundry lusty swings at Foot:
... Like all the best liars, Foot based his work on a half-truth....
... What Foot was at great pains not to mention, and which no one reading his book could possibly have guessed from it ...
... A particular target for Foot's sneers was Sir Thomas Inskip ...
... Foot in the same book also sneered at the Polish Army ...
... Foot's later career, including an inglorious spell as leader of the Labour Party (Margaret Thatcher wiped the floor with him) was not marked by any great achievement. He had done his great work in 1940 ...
... Foot in the same book also sneered at the Polish Army ...
... Foot's later career, including an inglorious spell as leader of the Labour Party (Margaret Thatcher wiped the floor with him) was not marked by any great achievement. He had done his great work in 1940 ...
Now a hasty reader might have slipped over Colebatch's clever 'principal author' line, and seen thereafter only Foot's name as the author of Guilty Men, with Foot responsible for everything in it. The sneers and the savaging of conservatives.
Of course what Colebatch is at great pains not to mention, in the manner of people dedicated to half truths, is that Foot was one of three authors of the book, and it would quite spoil the broth and the party to mention that one of the other writers was Peter Howard.
Because you see Howard was a Conservative, and not just a Conservative with a capital 'C', but captain of the England national rugby union team, and a one time worker for the right wing Oswald Mosley (he of the black shirts), before joining the Conservative party and working for Lord Beaverbrook. He later ended up in the thick of the moral rearmament movement (the MRA), which made its fight against worldwide Communism its highest priority..
Here's how the Wiki describes the writing of Guilty Men:
The authors were three journalists, Michael Foot (a future Leader of the Labour Party), Frank Owen (a former Liberal MP), and Peter Howard (a Conservative). They wrote pseudonymously because their employer, Lord Beaverbrook, was active in the Conservative Party and banned his journalists from writing for other publications. Foot, Owen and Howard would meet on the roof of the Evening Standard building after the late edition had been put to bed, surveying the London skyline and considering what might happen in the imminent Battle of Britain. They believed that Britain had suffered a succession of bad leaders, who, with junior ministers, advisers and officials, had conducted a disastrous foreign policy toward Germany and had failed to prepare the country for war. They persuaded Victor Gollancz, creator of the Left Book Club, to publish the book, divided the twenty-four chapters among themselves and wrote it in four days, finishing on June 5, 1940. (here).
The other member of the triptych, Frank Owen, was indeed a Liberal MP of the Lloyd George school, and had an equally interesting and off-beat career.
Naturally a book written so quickly and with such polemical intent is full of errors, but you'd have to think that the greatest error is not to mention that three people were involved in its authorship, and instead attributing all its thoughts and errors to one Michael Foot.
There were fifteen 'guilty men' selected for abuse, with Neville Chamberlain first among them, and major book wholesalers refused to handle the work, leaving it to be sold on news-stands and street barrows, where it turned into a raging success.
Later Foot himself admitted that the work was flawed:
Overall, the collective designation of the ‘guilty men’ is less significant as an accurate assessment of Britain's political leadership in the 1930s than as a lasting force in the subsequent historiography and popular perception of the era of appeasement. The book itself has few claims to historical scholarship. Even Michael Foot later admitted to its ‘unrelenting crudity’ and conceded that it had ‘nothing to recommend it in a literary sense but red-hot topicality’ (Cato, Guilty Men, vi). Its black and white depiction of complex issues showed no understanding of the terrible dilemmas which confronted the policy makers of the 1930s, dilemmas to which there were no right answers. Appeasement may not have been a wise policy, but it has now emerged as one that is eminently understandable. (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which provides links to the so-called 'guilty men' - subscription may be required).
What of course is interesting, and again what you won't find in Colebatch, is the way that Churchill subtly used the themes established by the Cato crew, to enhance his own legend:
Endorsed in its interpretation in most key respects by the first volume of Winston Churchill's war memoirs, The Gathering Storm, published in 1948, the concept, suitably refined and embellished, went on to permeate the writings of later historians at least into the 1960s. It encouraged the quest for underlying links—most of them spurious—binding the architects of appeasement together. Thus A. L. Rowse explored the way in which the policy had been debated and developed in the common rooms of All Souls College, Oxford, while for Margaret George the unifying factor was the collective decadence of Britain's ruling class, the unworthy successors of those who had built the empire and enabled Britain to dominate the world. Nor is the notion of the ‘guilty men’ entirely buried to this day, particularly in terms of popular consciousness. For the man in the street, Neville Chamberlain remains ‘guilty’ in a sense that attaches to few other figures in British history.
In Colebatch, this part of the affair comes out this way:
There is no doubt that it played a major part in the Conservative defeat of 1945 and the subsequent installation of a socialist Labour government with all the disasters that followed. Few if any other books can claim such influence. Cleverly, while damning the old guard of pre-war Tories, it praised Churchill, thus ensuring at least some acceptance in patriotic Conservative circles.
That's right. Churchill was praised by the book, and Churchill embraced the main thrust of the book, yet the book played a major part in the defeat of Churchill in 1945, and sent him into opposition. By golly that's so clever, it's down right tricky. And not just by an ordinary defeat, but by a landslide of 145 seats.
Never mind what actually went on in the campaign of 1945, or the mood of the electorate, or even Churchill having his own Godwin's Law moment, Colebatch style, by alleging Attlee's programme would require a Gestapo-esque body for its implementation. (There's a wiki on the 1945 campaign here).
Here's one illustration of what the electorate was thinking about:
The greatest factor in Labour's dramatic win appeared to be the policy of social reform. In one opinion poll, 41% of respondents considered housing to be the most important issue that faced the country, 15% stated the Labour policy of full employment, 7% mentioned social security, 6% nationalisation and just 5% international security, which was emphasised by the Conservatives.
Blaming the book as playing a major part in the Tory defeat in '45 is really just a bit of historical nonsense, inflating the work of Cato to the high level of esteem the Cato-ites themselves had about its impact.
Indeed, if you read Colebatch all the way through, you'd have barely a clue that Winston Churchill and the Tories returned to power in 1951, meaning that Labour only had six short years in power, and that the early fifties would be remembered mainly for Churchill's futile attempt to hold on to the Empire, and refusal to preside over its dismemberment. And then of course the Conservatives increased their majority in the 1955 election so that all the disasters that followed in the second half of the fifties were on the Tory watch (and never forget that in 1959 the UK general election saw the Suez crisis forgiven and Harold Macmillan reaffirmed at the helm).
Meanwhile, eager to establish that it was the unions who ruined Britain's war effort, Colebatch trawls through tales of strikes, in the usual Tory manner, where only the need of bodies to be fed to the war machine should interrupt thoughts of high tea. And he is of course gung ho for conscription, defeated by the machinations of the Labour party, while valiantly managing to defend Baldwin and Chamberlain.
It seems scarcely imaginable, from reading his account, what with all the white anting going on, that the Conservatives - via Ramsay MacDonald establishing the National Government in 1931 - were in charge of the UK throughout the thirties, and so charged with the task of leading the nation in domestic and international affairs, with Baldwin and Chamberlain following MacDonald.
While it's possible to feel sympathy for Chamberlain's situation - how do you conduct negotiations with a sociopath in charge of a powerful state - there were more than a few reasons for all parties turning to Churchill when the going got tough.
What's it all mean?
Well for prejudice and distortions, and to see a kind of one man band contemporary Cato in action, you head off to The American Spectator and read Colebatch, and then for a more measured and tempered balance, you head off to other parts of the intertubes, where you can consider history with all its crudities ... and complexities.
Looking at the past through the reverse end of a monocular telescope can produce witheringly few insights into the ways of the world ...
By the way, if you want some fruity gossip about Peter Howard (shown below with his wife Doe at Caux), and the MRA, head off here. As a taster, here's Howard on sex between married couples:
Indulgence by the married, while having the cloak of legitimacy, may nevertheless be the source of irritable tempers and of inability to answer to the real needs of the children. Parents indulgent inside marriage need not be surprised if their children are indulgent outside marriage. A union which could otherwise be powerful for remaking the nation thus remains a soft and uninspiring association.
Remaking Men, Paul Campbell and Peter Howard, 1954, quoted in The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament; A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement, Tom Driberg, 1965, page 258.
Remaking Men, Paul Campbell and Peter Howard, 1954, quoted in The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament; A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement, Tom Driberg, 1965, page 258.
And make sure to follow the link to Peter Howard's relationship with Oswald Mosley, the Nazis and their subsequent falling out, with Mosley serving it up to Howard:
Unwhipped youths at Oxford are left languidly picking their noses over Russian novels... It is not suprising that these sensation hunters, after trying every novelty from Communism to cocaine, will ultimately switch back to religion, if it is served up to their taste. (here)
Innocent Men, Peter Howard, page 127.
Sounds almost worthy of Colebatch!
Looking back, it all seems vaguely surreal, and if it hadn't involved the obscenity of the second world war, a typical Oxbridge hootenanny. But nary a word of it in Colebatch, proving yet again that a mote in the eye can lead you to missing out on fascinating byways of history. And we haven't even got on to Lord Beaverbrook, for whom the three authors worked ...
Perhaps another time, when writing about Chairman Rupert and his minions, and the unhealthy power mongering of media moguls ... but then how else would we have had Lord Copper in Scoop and Lord Monomark in Vile Bodies.
"The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," he said. "Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad."
Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.
Other nations use 'force'; we Britons alone use 'Might'.
News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.
He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
"Up to a point, Lord Copper."
Lord Copper, proprietor of the Daily Beast is a man to whom one never says 'No' directly. This is what one says instead.
Lord Copper quite often gave banquets; it would be an understatement to say that no one enjoyed them more than the host, for no one else enjoyed them at all, while Lord Copper positively exulted in every minute.
It's a funny old world, and we can thank Colebatch for reminding us just how funny it is.
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