THE ARROGANT ADVENTURE

Grey River Argus, 21 October 1943, Page 3

THE ARROGANT ADVENTURE

OF JOHN A, 1 LEE. - (By Richard Morant.) Those of you who have read Clemence Dane’s “Arrogant History of White Ben’’ will appreciate the aptness of my amended title. For the benefit of less lucky readers, let it be said that White Ben was a scarecrow who, through inadvertent magic on the part of a small girl, was endowed with the powers of speech, movement and thought. Immediately upon the heels of this endowment the chances of war threw him into close contact with a newspaper magnate, his supersecretary, a Government publicity man and a popular flying ace, an excellent nucleus for the formation of a new political party. The book traces Ben’s rise to notoriety in their hands, his accquired lust for greater power, his breakaway from their guidance and hD consequent crash. •>!

When the Labour Party became the occupants of the Treasury benches the position of Under-Sec-retary for Housing was given to J. A. Lee, who immediately commenced to chafe under the comparison of what he considered to be a minor appointment with that of actual Ministerial rank. This rankling continued in a more or less obvious form until 1938, when, with the Government earmark, he held his _ seat with the largest majority in New Zealand. After (possibly because of) this, the disgruntlement intensified until it crystalised into personal quarrels with the then Prime Minister and Finance Minister The method in which he conducted his quarrelling subsequently led to Mr. Lee’s expulsion from' the party. Quite a considerable amount of public sympathy was shown to him at this juncture—not so much that the general public thought him in the right as that they considered both parties in the wrong and it was Mr. Lee’s lack of proportion in apportioning this sympathy correctly which added to his arrogance and urged him to adventure. With the advent of the last election came his opportunity. He had already provided himself with one of the essentials of dictatorship, a party slogan, “I fight for New Zealand,” and it only remained to make the change in the name of his party which the altered circumstances suggested as expedient. For the Democratic Labour Party had been an unfortunate bantling from its birth. Before the time arrived for it to take the field, one-half of its membership in the House had seceded to enlist under the all-embracing banner of the Independents. Also a war had intervened before the babe was clear of its swaddling clothes. To meet, the latter occurrence the word ‘soldier’ was added 1o an already clumsy title, and as the Democratic Soldier Labour Party it took the field and proceeded. a trifle haltingly, towards its objective.

And what an objective. The re-

placement of a Labour Administration by Tories upon the Treasury benches. Whether by prearrangement with the Opposition or not Mr. Lee must have known that, win or lose as far •;.s his party was concerned, even an average of moderate success in his candidates’ , polling meant a victory for the Tories. Anyone with Mr. Lee’s flair for politics must have known from the outset that an actual win for his party was impossible, therefore he adventured for what he obviously considered the next best thing—-a victory for the Tories. Of course, had the arrangement gone according to plan all would have been well—from the Lee viewpoint. Unfortunately for ■ him, the electors took a commonsense view of the position, and Mr. Lee was left with the somewhat unsavoury honour of being New Zealand's first political Gauleiter. In a few isolated instances he was successful and Labour members were replaced by Tories. This partial success on their behalf should be taken into account by the Nationalists and their backers when they .are considering honours and awards for the recent campaign. If Mr. Lee could not assess the chances of his candidates more correctly than he would appear to have done, he is obviously unfit for the leadership of any political party: if, on the other hand, he lays claim to correct assessment then he is merely a self-confessed wrecker Yet the old arrogance persists. In his post-election statement he says that he is not politically dead--that he is coming again. Here again his sense of proportion is at fault: he fails to differentiate between an endurance which enables him to stand upon his political feet and the undoubted political rigor mortis which merely prevents him from a sagging collapse. He says, again that fine touch of arrogance, that before today he has heard people hoot him and later on had their hooting turned to cheers. He overlooks the fact that in both these instances he was the nominee of the same party which he recently tried to wreck. If he would have the correct respective values of J. A. Lee as . a member of the Labour Party and the same gentleman as Leader of the D.S.L.P, let him read the Grey Lynn figures for the last two elections. And so the arrogant .adventure comes to its sorry end. Not amidst the crash and wreckage of the party he set out to destroy; not with the cultured cheers of his Tory allies ringing in his ears, but’ silently, in the drabness of the political Potter’s Field.