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Harold Laski, by Kingsley Martin
- Abstract
During the election campaign of 1945 there was a moment when both sides seriously imagined that the Conservatives might come back to power by exploiting the “Laski bogey,” i.e., the alleged power of Harold Laski, as chairman of the Labor party executive in that year, to dominate the policies of a Socialist government. In the end, the electorate decided otherwise. The Labor landslide probably could not have been stopped by anything short of an epidemic among the voters; its course certainly was not to be altered by scare headlines in the Daily Express, or even by Mr. Churchill’s fulminations on the radio. But the incident—which had been provoked by one of Laski’s characteristically tactless statements to the press—left a residue of bitterness. Among others it led to a libel action which gave Sir Patrick Hastings an opportunity to persuade a Special Jury that Laski had publicly advocated revolution and the breaking up of laws; and it permanently soured Laski’s relations with his colleagues on the Labor executive. If, in the years that followed, he was out of sympathy not only with Bevin, but with Attlee, and even with Cripps, that was partly because they had all come to regard him as a liability: a devoted colleague, but decidedly one who talked too much; even—though it took a candid reviewer of Mr. Martin’s biography to say so in print—one who “talked after he had stopped thinking.”
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