The Secret Twenties by Timothy Phillips

Author:Timothy Phillips [Timothy Phillips]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The detailed coverage, and the use that right-wing politicians made of it, were more ruinous still.16 Churchill, speaking to a crowd that day, described how MacDonald had been ‘driven on by his extremists’ and had ended up demonstrating ‘comradeship and unity with these foul, filthy butchers of Moscow’, who now wanted to establish ‘germ cells […] in our regiments and on our ships [and] to disturb and defile our streets’. Backing him to the hilt, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, a Tory MP, said ‘the issue’ was now ‘whether we were to be governed by Britons or “Bolshies”’.17 And an editorial in The Times concluded that it was ‘hardly credible that the nation [would] again entrust the conduct of great Imperial affairs to a leader who has, on his own confession, allowed himself to be cajoled and outwitted by the worst enemies of our country’.18 Taking once more to his diary, on 29 October, H. Rider Haggard wrote that ‘everything that is evil in the land is at the back of these Socialists who love the Russian anarchists because they have reduced that great empire to a condition which they hope to see re-duplicated in Britain and her empire also’.19

On election day, Labour lost forty of its 191 seats, despite its total tally of votes rising by one million. The increase in its popular support shows how the crisis manufactured by British Intelligence had failed to resonate in the party’s heartlands, where its real policies and agenda were well known. However, thanks to tactical voting, the Conservatives ended up with 412 MPs, more than two thirds of the 615 seats in the House of Commons. Even if Baldwin’s victory had been all but assured, there can be no question that the scale of the triumph was boosted by the Zinoviev Letter. Traditional Liberal voters – now not daring to split the non-Labour vote – had deserted the party for the Tories, who ended up more than two million votes better off. A year of scaremongering had culminated in the deployment of the scariest tactic of all: the production of apparent proof that the first Labour government in history had been in cahoots with a hostile foreign power.

Later in the Cold War, commentators would often talk of ‘deep states’ existing within democracies and acting whenever necessary to prevent those democracies taking supposed wrong turns. 1924 is the moment when such a ‘deep state’ first made its presence felt in modern Britain, the moment when a concerted and thoroughly illegitimate attempt was made to subvert a national democratic process. Whatever the real extent of the ruse’s impact, it is worth bearing in mind that the protagonists themselves believed it to have been highly effective. Meanwhile, although the Labour Party would rise to power again, it was to suffer long-term damage, with many thousands of Britons continuing to believe these lies for decades to come.

Just one example of the anti-Labour propaganda that poured out of the British media after the Zinoviev Letter was revealed, this

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