KIss and Tell, so what's new in the World?

Sex scandals, yea, so what’s new? The topic brings to mind a paper I wrote as last term on on social and sexual mores in Georgian England. Harriette Wilson was one of the people I touched on, a couretesan who attempted to extort money from her former lovers with her Interesting and Amorous Adventures. It was all rather sad really: her looks had faded and her annuities had stopped. Her book was little more than a desperate attempt at a pension scheme.

Sally Salisbury also deserves a mention here, for the simple reason that the 1723 An Account of the Tryal of Sally Salisbury is the first example of hack reporting of a sex scandal, demonstrating that the public had a taste for this sort of thing.

Margaret Leeson, whose real name was Peg Plunkett, published her own autobiography, Memoirs of Mrs Leeson, Madam, in 1795. Her clients included the high and the even higher; bankers, judges, merchants and noblemen, the Duke of Rutland being the highest of all.

She had the example before her of Fanny Murray, whose lovers had included Beau Nash, John Wilkes, Sir Francis Dashwood and the Earl of Sandwich. Her autobiography, Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny Murray, published in 1759, is particularly revealing, because she attributes the beginning of her 'downfall' to being raped by the disreputable Jack Spencer, grandson of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.

Julia Johnstone's story was just as unfortunate, though her social origins were quite different to those of Fanny Murray. The grand-daughter of Lord Carysfort, she was seduced by one Colonel Cotton, by whom she had several children before being abandoned. Thereafter she moved in with Harriette Wilson and, impressed by the success of her memoir, wrote her own Confessions of Julia Johnstone. But poor Julia was far too priggish, and her sexual secrets too tame, to cash in on the public mood.

These memoirs and confessions came at just the right point in history. In the past revelations of this kind would have been impossible because of the social and criminal penalties attached. The Georgian period was not only one of far greater sexual licence but publishing was becoming ever more important, with a new public, literate and prurient, eager for scandal of all sorts. You see; not much changes!

Defending Appeasement; Defending Neville Chamberlain

Churchill said that an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last, a criticism of the policy followed by the government of Neville Chamberlain in 1938-1939. He was, as always, demonstrating his mastery of English prose, always managing to coin a striking phrase. But his assessment of Chamberlain's motives, of the intention behind appeasement, is woefully inaccurate. It always was.

Chamberlain's intention was to preserve the peace; to sacrifice only as much felt had to be sacrificed in this process. At the time it was considered by the vast majority of people to be an entirely reasonable position. Only in retrospect does it seem to be morally bereft.

There were three separate roads to the preservation of peace: collective security through the League of Nations; an alliance with the anti-Axis powers outwith the auspices of the League; and appeasement.

By 1938 there was little confidence in the authority of the League. It had coped with the 'little crises' in its early years, but the 'big crises' of the late 1930s were quite beyond its power and its authority. "What country in Europe today if threatened by large power can rely on the League for protection?” Chamberlain asked in Parliament in March 1938. The answer was obvious to all, "None."

What, then, of an agreement among the powers to arrest German expansion? The United States was effectively precluded by the Neutrality Act of 1935, which in practice limited President Roosevelt to expressions of sympathy alone. Britain and France stood side by side, though by no firm treaty of alliance. France was certainly still a strong power in military terms, though no longer what it once was. Besides, many British Conservatives held the Popular Front government in deep suspicion. Even if the French had been prepared to act, and there is no guarantee of this, the country was seriously weakened at the time by industrial, social and political conflict.

The Soviet Union was a possibility. Stalin had been deeply unsettled by the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, which came in the face of the Comintern's ultra-left Third Period strategy, seriously weakening his position in Europe. Thereafter he became a late convert to collective security, with the Soviet Union joining the League of Nations and entering into the Franco-Soviet pact in 1935. No territorial concessions were demanded as part of this bargain.

However, for Chamberlain and his party, Soviet Russia was not a reliable partner, and not just for the obvious political reasons. In 1937 the Soviet officer corps was all but destroyed in the purges, leaving justified suspicions of the effectiveness of the military.

So, in the end, appeasement was the policy of political and strategic realism. It was based on an illusion, of course, a misreading of Hitler and his true intentions. But it had the press and it had the nation behind it, Churchill's Cassandra-like warnings notwithstanding. Even Lloyd George was convinced of Hitler's honourable intentions. Besides, what was the alternative: Churchill and war? If Britain had gone to war in 1938 it is almost certain, on the basis of the information that we have, that defeat, real defeat, would have followed. Appeasement, if nothing else, bought time.

Political Fraud; the Story of the People's Convention

The so-called People's Convention was set up after the outbreak of the Second World War, supposedly on the initiative of the Hammersmith Trade. In reality the initiative came from the Kremiln during the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the honeymoon of the odd couple. Loyal Communists were instructed to denounce the struggle with Germany as an 'imperialist war', hence the need for bogus front organisations like the People's Convention.

It was all quite subtle, of course, in the usual Communist style. People were encouraged to join in support of initiatives like higher living standards or better bomb shelters. Once safely enrolled they discovered that the 'real enemy' was not Germany but Winston Churchill and those members of the Labour party who joined the wartime coalition. The best denunciation of the whole fraud came from George Orwell, Harold Laski and Victor Gollancz, who in 1940, under the auspices of the Left Book Club, publised Betrayal of the Left. In this Gollancz asked,

Can anyone carry self-delusion to the point of being able to read through the file of the Daily Worker [The Communist Party Newspaper] and still believe that this motive was any other than to weaken the will to resist? When, at the same time, you tell people that this is an unjust war, fought for no purpose but to increase the profits of the rich: when you jeer at any comment about the morale and heroism of the public and call it 'sunshine talk'; what possible purpose can you have but to stir up hatred of the government and hatred of the war, with the object of underminining the country's determination to stand up to Hitler?

The Convention, shameful as it was, attracted the support of some prominent intellectuals, including Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote a pamphlet defending the Soviet aggression against Finland, because Stalin was only seeking to defend Russia against an attack by 'British imperialists'!

You will find more information on the Convention in "All the Russians Love the Prussians", Chapter Eight of Nick Cohen's What's Left, an excellent expose of the moral cowardice of so much left-wing thought.