My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywithdrawn to some quiet garage of the mind. John Strachey had the necessaryrobustness of physique and character, but nausea overwhelmed him when his coldintellectual eye surveyed a familiar spectacle: the Labour leader engaged in keepinghis party together by importing to high office a strange assortment which was quiteunsuited to any place in the government of a great country. Some of the trade unionleaders were among the best practical minds of the nation, and would be of value toany administration. Yet not only trade union leaders, but key party figures, wereselected by party exigencies rather than their abilities.It is part of the fatality of Labour that the leader is always dependent on a balance offorces which inhibit action. The prisoner leader is an invariable result of the wholestructure, psychology and character of the party. MacDonald simply could not affordto dispense either with Thomas or Morrison, who chiefly obstructed action—Thomasbecause he understood nothing and Morrison because he was a narrow, rigid, vainlittle bureaucrat, devoid of vision and incapable of movement beyond his office stool.As Minister of Transport he rejected the schemes for national roads which thirty yearslater had to be put through in a hurry, with all the difficulty of such a task in a periodof full employment, while at that time they could have anticipated the comingbreakdown of the English road system and have provided work for the unemployed.There were then thirty different road surfaces between London and Birmingham—aninconvenient arrangement even for the stage coaches when these roads weredesigned—but Morrison strenuously resisted all proposals for a national road system;he was the man of the local authorities which had nurtured his career. That is why anew generation of young Englishmen spending weekends in their splendid cars havehad a better view of the backside of the car leading them in a large, coiling queue thanof the glorious countryside of England; even now the national road system I thenadvocated is far from complete.No persuasion would make Morrison move as Minister of Transport, and MacDonaldhad to protect him because he was the party chief and organiser of London, the localMrs. Fix-it. An excellent adjuster of local disputes within conflicting constituencyorganisations, he was totally unfitted by natural aptitude or experience for nationaladministration. He had considerable gifts as a propagandist, and in the Second WorldWar made a stirring appeal to the young 'to go to it'—an exercise from which he wasunfortunately inhibited in the First World War when young himself—but must thenhave been as incapable of an executive task as he proved himself earlier at theMinistry of Transport. He was an expert on the parish pump, who was later translatedby the domestic exigencies of the Labour Party not only to the highest offices of Statebut even to the Foreign Office when 'Europe' was in in the making.1 He was in theHome Office at the time of my release from detention in the war, and is sometimesgiven credit for that event. I have always understood it was only the heavy pressure ofChurchill which obliged him to release me; but Morrison showed a certain courage infacing the communist-led agitation to put me back.Morrison had a shrewd instinct from his point of view when he wrote to MacDonaldrebutting the Mosley Memorandum to the Cabinet: he complained that it wouldappear to involve such an overlordship of his executive responsibilities that aMinister's life would not have been worth living. He would certainly have shifteduneasily on his well-padded office stool if I had had the power to tell him to get on orget out. No wonder people of that kind resent the entry and action of any dynamic197 of 424