“PUBLIC OPINION”

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 13 June 1942, Page 6

“PUBLIC OPINION”

BERLIN AND ROME VARIETY LEADER WRITER GIVES THE STORY “FROM TIIE INSIDE” If anyone wants to have the “inside stox-y” of our Cabinet changes he must turn to Berlin and Rome. They know it all far better than we can hope io do, comments the “Manchester Guardian,” in a leading article. In the first place all the Axis papers are-agreed that Britain is now in Stalin’s pocket, adds the “Guardian - ; as a week or two ago we were in Roosevelt’s pocket we are pretty agile. In the second place Sir Stafford Cripps and the Archbishop of York are the agents of this Bolshevist revolution. The papers abound in details, but it is the Berlin “Nachtausgabe” that has got nearest the keyhole. Its version is that Mr Churchill and a small clique round him are prepared by bringing Sir Stafford Cripps into the Cabinet to “let Communism ravage the English people while they themselves hope to retain their property and influence.” They have, it seems, been working with Communism for years, and Communist activity here has been specialising in attracting the younger nobility and the sons of war profiteers. A sub-committee of this “Kremlin clique” consists of bishops of the Anglican Church, “ who work in spiritual co-operation with Bolshevism.” Sir Stafford has been a member of the organisation since 1933, and Mr Churchill has spoken at its meetings. How odd that these things have been hidden from But still stranger and more dreadful things are going on. A Stalin “purge” has begun. Rome, in particular, is sure that Stalin will not be content

with his present representation in the British Cabinet, and the “Stampa” thinks that Sir Stafford will soon fling out Mr Churchill himself. This Sir Stafford is a most desperate man. The German wireless has been reporting to its hearers that we in Britain are already talking of “Butcher Cripps,” and noting that he is employing terrorist methods like those of the Bolshevists in 1917. It had a touching story (fathered on poor Reuter) of how Sir Stafford has evicted Sir Kingsley Wood not only from the War Cabinet but from No. 11 Downing c lreet, and has gone to live there himself. The reason is simple. From the windows of No. 11 you can watch Mr Churchill’s front door at No. 10. Sir Stafford “like a political commissar attached to a Bolshevist general,” has to know all his chief is up to. (In much the same way, one presumes, as Him mler’s Gestapo keep an eye on Goering). We must all go and look at Sir Stafford peeping through the lace curtains, the new sight of London. There is the snag that no one has lived at No. 11 for quite a long time, but a trifle like that is nothing to an artist. There are even more sinister things about Sir Stafford. He is as the German stations have warned us in English going to take away all our pleasures, even the cinema and “the pub.” “The workers are to be graded down to mere machine tools whose speed of production is determined by the War Cabinet and whose time of leisure is reckoned on something similar to a coupon system.” From all of which it may be inferred that the Germans are just a little afraid of Sir Stafford Cripps.