My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleydebate with the rare quality at that time of a real understanding of monetary theoryand a grip of the Keynesian techniques. It appeared he was never entirely successfulin imparting knowledge of these mysteries to his chief during his sojourn at theTreasury as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor Churchill—not even withthe aid of the Treasury official, R. C. Hawtrey, who alone in the sphere of pure theorycould encounter Keynes on equal terms—but in these discussions at a later dateBoothby was of much assistance to us. When he was subject to concentrated attack Imyself was out of action under 18B, but I surmise that the Tory team would havebeen unable permanently to exclude Boothby's outstanding abilities from high officeif an Asquith or a Lloyd George had been his leader. Bob Boothby always was andstill is the best of company, immense fun.Foremost in the talks on the Labour side was Aneurin Bevan, and, of course, JohnStrachey, who had so long been associated with me. W. J. Brown also played animportant part at this stage. The warm emotional appeal of the gifted Bevancontrasted strikingly with the cool calculation of the Civil Service trade union leader;Bevan was almost exactly my age, but had not yet developed his full debatingprowess. Henry Mond—the son of the exceptionally able member of pre- and postwargovernments, already described—was most active among the Liberals, withArchie Sinclair maintaining a friendly attitude in the background. A considerablenumber of M.P.s of all parties participated in these loose and non-committaldiscussions, which took place mostly in my house at Smith Square. When the talksbegan, I asked them at once to suggest any points of disagreement they had with myresignation speech. I was glad to accept their amendments, which were insubstantialand in my view were an improvement. We arrived in policy at a virtually completeagreement.My tendency always is to drive things too hard, and when agreement was reached onpolicy, I began to ask for a date to be fixed for action, which is a very different thing.However, my usual insistence that action must follow a clear view of what should bedone was not responsible for the break this time. Several things occurred whichdrastically altered the situation. Decisive was the fact that the crisis was developingmore slowly than anticipated, and the sense of danger was relaxed, together with thecall of duty to take risks in the national interest. Baldwin, as we have seen in WalterElliott's case, was exercising enormous pressure, which was strengthened by theimproved prospects of the party, and the party machine was able to threaten youngConservative members, not only with exclusion from the now probable ToryGovernment but also with the loss of their seats. These factors in combination weresufficient to deter them from further action, and I make no complaint of what thenhappened. The Tories went out quite fairly and honourably, for they were committedto nothing. Oliver Stanley said to a mutual friend that I would never trust them in anyfuture action together because I would feel they had deserted. This was not so, I hadno such feeling. At this stage of the discussions they were committed to nothing andthey were quite entitled to withdraw.The same was true of Aneurin Bevan, who owed his career and his seat to the Miners'Federation, which was far from being completely under the control of Arthur Cook.He went quite honourably and fairly at about the same time, and so did most of theother Labour M.P.s who had signed the 'Mosley Manifesto' we will later consider.The enterprise of going further, breaking with the party machines and taking their228 of 424