From Lossiemouth to London

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1028, 19 July 1930, Page 16

From Lossiemouth to London

Life Story of Britain s Prime Minister

A Scots Lad’s Rise to Fame

(By

Alary Agnes Hamilton.)

THE SCS has secured the rights os tins interesting biography of Hr. Ramsay JlacHonald, Prime Minister ot England. The sixth instalment appears below. The biography icill be continued each Saturday. IF the historian of the future finds A the 1924 election interesting on no other grounds —and he will find it interesting on many—he will give it a place as the first in which the methods and discoveries of the new psychology were applied to an ignorant and highly suggestible mass mind. If he is sufficiently cynical it may further please him to note that they were applied more skilfully by the managers of a party which, with superior insight, glories in the name of stupid. It is to the Freudian terminology that he will have to resort in his effort to characterise what happened between October 12 and 30; he will find himself compelled, if he is to explain and not merely to describe, to speak of the “MacDonald complex” and the “Russian phobia." The first comes first, both chrouo logically and in importance. In a very real sense it was Mr, MacDonald’s election. It was fought not only to put his Government out, but to bring him down. It was on him that the attack was concentrated from the first and to the last.

More than one reputation was enhanced by the experience of the Government; Mr. J. H. Thomas and* Mr. Snowden, to mention only two. gained greatly in general esteem. But from the first MacDonald bore the main burden and made the main contribution. When he assumed office there was a brief moment of suspended breath; people paused, rubbed their eyes and kept them open in astonished and wondering attention. By the summer of 1924 the view that his was the dominating mind in Europe was an accepted commonplace. From every quarter the limelight converged upon him. and his figure grew, instead of shrinking, under the glare. Europe and America in varying tones con gratulated Great Britain on a Prime Minister worthy of its highest traditions, and waited for the words and deeds of a man who was pouring new life into the exhausted veins of a continent. An electric curv-’nl of hope spread out from him in every direction. The prestige and moral reputation of Great Britain, which had fallen to nothing, rose visibly. Very soon ho had achieved a personal popularity of a kind unknown since the days of Gladstone. Downing Street was blocked by people; crowds surged in the streets when he went

out of Loudon, gathering even in remote country villages. Interest and hope from politics were blown into a steady flame; the House of Commons was, by common admission, the most popular show r in London, and queues sat all day on the benches waiting to get into the galleries. Abroad, recognition was equally marked and outspoken. The United States newspapers put him steadily on the front page, generally reserved exclusively for domestic matters. Everywhere it was agreed that the centreing of public interest on him had a special accent. It was due. not to the office, but to the man himself; belonged to Mr. MacDonald rather than to the Prime Minister.

Fo- years he had enjoyed the confidence and excited the affection of the Labour movement he had done so much to build up; something of this confidence and of this affection was, during the first half of 1924, communicated to the people outside. Innumerable men and women, not much interested in or concerned with parties or even with politics, were being compelled to believe in him aud, almost unawares, to take a new attitude to Labour aud Socialism because of him. He became popular in quite a special sense, a sense connected with the feelings people do not talk about. “He is .a white man,” said a typical country Tory, and the phrase covered much. Mr. H. W. Nevinson, in the account he gave later of the election tour, described “a passionate affection revealed from the top ot' England, through the centre, and to the side far into Wales," and. endeavouring to explain it, wrote: “Apparently there Is something irresistible in the man himself. He has that power which Goethe was the first to call ‘personality.’ I cannot define the origin of that power. One may call it ‘quality’; one may call it ‘significance.’ It is partly physical. Look along the front row of any platform where he is and when your eyes reach him you will say at once, 'There’s the man.' There is the singularly handsome head, the tall and active frame, the voice of wide and powerful range, sometimes wearied on this journey by the 50 speeches or more, most of them in the open air, and a voice always responding to the compelling spirit within that seemed to rise to new life at the sight of every new audience; and the larger the audience, the more inspiring was the life. “All those enviable qualities contribute to the power of ‘personality.’ But something more is needed and I hardly know how to describe it. The

trained intellect is there, the record of hard, intellectual toil, the wide and accurate knowledge of the world and its problems, whether Indian or European. There is also the keen and cultivated appreciation of beauty, whether of nature or of art. But as the highest gift of his ‘personality’ I think I should put the rare and beautiful power of sympathetic imagination—that gift of mental vision that can make the sorrows and labour and joys of other men and women his very own.”

Since this halo was the intangible and at the same time effective bulwark of Labour, to break it was the surest method of breaking Labour's hold. Without the aid of the Russian phobia this picture might not have availed, since it was colourless. The removal of the halo still left a human face. Gradually, however, the two, at first separate, became beautifully entangled. Mr. MacDonald had been given a motor-car: was it not a red car? He wanted to give our money to Russia; was he not in their pay? Then there was the Campbell case: it had something to do with Bolsheviks; anyhow, it was a fishy' affair. There were wild men in his party: of course they called the tune, and it was a Bolshevik tune. Bolshevik —the very word had an unholy' ring; Bolsheviks scoffed at God and man. Obscurely' a connection with unspeakable things was suggested, so that when people saw him they saw—they knew not what. A murky cloud of suspicion, shot with dread, began to gather. Mystification, mounting apprehension, a dim sense of plots, the grim figure of Russia looming behind with all its terrifying associations, then —at the right moment —a real plot, so serious that the unwilling Foreign Office had to admit it. Of course they had tried to hide it, but it exploded under their feet.

The Red Letter represented a complete fusion of complex and phobia. It did its work because of that; becatise of the insidious preparation that had gone before. The work had been so ingenious that the letter was probably unnecessary'; but, as it was, it rounded the thing off, gave it a symbolic unity of design. Because ot that, no argument however lucid, no demonstration however logical, was of any avail against it. The atmosphere has not yet worn off. It worked like mustard gas; the eyes of those exposed to it still smart; they still cough and splutter when they think of it, aud suffer from the curious unsettlement of nerve centres with which it affected them at the time. Months after the election it was rare to find a defeated candidate, or worker for a defeated candidate, w'hether Labour or Liberal, who did not still feel a deep sense of inexplie able grievance, as of one sore from contact with evil spirits; many Lab our M.P.’s suffer from it still. At the time, as now, the obscurity ot the whole thing was what made it potent. Out of that obscurity emerged judgments which cannot stand the test of calm examination. It has been stated that the letter settled the election. It undoubtedly sent people, frightened people, to the booths who might otherwise not have bothered to go out—and they did nor vote Labour. It helped, w'ith the 80l shevik scare, ot which it formed the

crescendo, to get below the political into the unthinking electorate. The Labour vote did not go down, it went tip by' over a million, and practically all over the country; on the other hand, the Tory vote went up even more. But though the letter determined the issue, here and there, and swelled the Tory total, a Tovy sweep was certain, from the moment that the pact was formed. The Labour case, above all on the Russian treaties, demanded from the electorate a modicum of calm attention. That the ’gnorant and inattentive elector is in ih<majority; that he is more readilv swayed by fear than by any other emotion —it did not require a Red Letter to tell us that. Bolshevism would have served w'ithout any letter, though the show w'ould then have lacked artistic finish. The letter, however, though not a suffiicent explanation of the election results as a whole, syu bolises only' too aptly its particular character. It "had serious special reactions at the time: to some extent they are still going on, mainly because of the semi-darkness by which the entire episode remains encompassed