VITAL ARRANGEMENTS KEPT DARK

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 23, 27 July 1933, Page 11

VITAL ARRANGEMENTS KEPT DARK

I recollect the late Lord Northcliffe, at a dinner at Lord Birkenhea&'s house, whero he was invited to meet a number of Cabinet Ministers in the Liberal Administration, telling us all quite bluntly that the editor of a great London journal knew more about what was happening in the- capitals of the world than any Cabinet Minister. ■ He maintained that all the information we got was carefully filtered. He might have gone further and said that much of the information essential for forming .a sound opiuion was deliberately withheld. When a Cabinet Minister first takes office, nothing gives him a greater sense of his personal importance than' the stout little leather bag with a specially constructed key which is sent after him every night to any, address which he may give.

It is supposed to contain information of the most deadly import and secrecy as to what is happening in courts and chancelleries throughout the world. As a matter of fact, it is just a series of harmless dispatches from, our representatives -in every foreign country, great and 3'mall. ■. ,

All the things that mattered were convoyed in private and confidential letters from our diplomatic representatives abroad, to their Foreign Secretary personally, in his private and uupub-

lished replies, and in the interviews which he held with the ambassadors in the Foreign Office. * . " v There is no more conspicuous example of this kind of suppression of vital information than the way in which the military arrangements we entered into with France were kept from the Cabinet for six years. They came to my knowledge, first of all, in 1911, during the Agadir crisis, but the Cabinet as a whole were not acquainted with them before the fol-1 lowing year. There is abundant evidence that both the French and the Kussians regarded theso military arrangements as practically tantamount to a commitment on our part to come to the aid of France in the- event of her being attacked by Germany.

When the Government, in July, 1914, showed some reluctance to come to the aid of France after the German declaration of war, French statesmen were almost in the "perfidious Albion" mood, and the meek M. Paul Cambon said that the .only, question was whether the word "honour" was about to be expunged from the English dictionary. And yet the Cabinet were never informed of these vital arrangoments until we were so deeply involved in the details of military and naval plans that.it was too late to repudiate the inference. •