LANSBURY THE SPARTAN

Waipa Post, Volume 51, Issue 3695, 9 December 1935, Page 7

LANSBURY THE SPARTAN

A PEN PICTURE. Writing of the recent resignation of the veteran Labour leader, Mr Geo. Lansbury, from the leadership of the British Labour Party, the Spectator says:— It is an open secret that G.L., as everyone calls him, friends and opponents alike —enemies he has none—was, months ago, giving up the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party, which he has held, with the warmest appreciation of his colleagues, since the deluge of 1931. He lias, in the last few years, had more than his share of personal domestic sorrow. He sustained, a short time back, a severe accident, and resultant operation, which might well have laid a man of less superb physique permanently on his back. He is over 76 years of age. Age, however, was not the reason then; it is, of course, not the reason, or any part of the reason, now. Of age, G.L. shows no sign. He stands as erect as ever. His voice has lost nothing of its range and force. His spartan habits have kept him ever green. Nor is the issue only that of sanctions. As he told the Brighton Conference recently, “ during the last six years, first in the

Labour Government, and then as leader of the Party, I have been in a kind of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde position.” In that sentence Mr Lansbury stated the real case exactly. From the days in which he cleaned up the Board of Guardians in Poplar, to the days when he made a conspicuous success of the Office of Wiorks, winning the surprised respect of officials who never expected to find the idealist a highly competent man of affairs, there have been operative in him, two strains, of which far the stronger is that which quarrels with his administrative capacity and crosses it with a deep individualism. The trouble is not that G.L. is too old for the Party. In a very real sense he is, rather, too young for it; too young for the eminently grown-up mind that it has developed out of the very strain and stress of the last four or five years. To-day G.L. is revered and loved as were in their day Keir Hardie and, later, MiaciDonald and Snowden; perhaps more loved than any of these, because the feeling he inspires is nearer, warmer, more purely personal than ever was the case with any of the others; as also because his own friendliness has flowed out so generously to all and sundry and with so little favouritism. Yet the issue is there; the division is there; and he himself, in his speech, characterised it as fundamental.