Mr Jordan’s Letter

Press, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24614, 10 July 1945, Page 4

Mr Jordan’s Letter

It is a little comical that a Government speaker in the Address-in-Reply debate should have been fancying Mr Jordan as New Zealand’s next Governor-General just as Mr Jordan was blundering in the High Commissionership. Miss Cook, of Marton, expressed some hard opinions about the Government’s policy and administration in her letter to the “Daily Mail”. She used some wild phrases and she grossly misquoted Mr Churchill; but the degree of discount necessary to reduce her letter from injudicious, to judicious severity is not worth discussirtg. The point is that Miss Cook’s letter, as and where it was printed, had an importance so slight that the Government’s taking notice of it was ludicrous. There is nothing ludicrous, unfortunately, in the manner of Mr Jordan’s intervention. Miss Cook injected a personal opinion into the General Election campaign. Mr Jordan used the occasion to throw the New Zealand Government into it. He did so twice over, “ We are thankful ”, he wrote, “ that the ties between the “ Dominion and the Mother “ Country are too strong to be “ affected by any action taken by a “ Conservative paper ’’ —Mr Jordan s little digs are done with angledozers—“ though- I am sure the “ people of New Zealand will be “ influenced in their attitude to- “ wards the Conservative Party of "Britain if they can be persuaded “that the party concurred in the “publication of the letter”, bo, with his “ though ” and his “ if,” Mr Jordan managed to get into print the hint of a charge, without even a hint of evidence, against the Conservative Party. At any time, such a hint would be improper; on July 5, it was grossly so. It was the artless hint of a man too simple to realise that it could and would be , read as such, no', by “ the people “ of New Zealand ” only, but by the English voters? Mr Jordan made

to dismiss this possibility. “ I "left Britain many years ago ”, he went on to say, “because of the “conditions prevailing here, and “ found . success and comfort there “in New Zealand. I am confident “ that if the working people of “ Britain, the richest country in the “world, knew the contrast between “ conditions here and in New Zealand, there would be a far greater “agitation to emulate the progress “ made by the Dominion ”. At another time and in other circumstances, perhaps, the High Commissioner for New Zealand could have said as much and laid himself open only to the reproach of being somewhat complacent in his missionary zeal. On July 5, on the occasion given him by Miss Cook and the “Daily Mail”, in the context of his little dig and his broad hint, and among the echoes of New Zealand Labour’s protest against Mr Churchill’s first broadcast, the High Commissioner could hardly have come nearer to saying in so many words, “Attlee for me, Attlee for “ you ”. Mr Jordan’s error is the more lamentable, if, as it seems, he has gone so far in dealing with Miss Cook and the “ Daily Mail ” and done nothing to deal with Mr Foot and the “ Daily Herald ”. Mr Michael Foot, it may be recalled, recently quoted, for electioneering purposes, the Prime Minister’s allegedly bitter condemnation of the “ British Tories ”. Mr Nash obtained from Mr Fraser a cabled assurance that Mr Foot misrepresented him. This was printed in New Zealand. But in England? If Mr Jordan wrote such a letter to the “ Herald ” as he has written to the “ Mail ”, it has not been Reported. It was needed.