Juggernaut
I find something curiously evocative about the phrase, 'the Tory machine,' which one so often comes across in articles and speeches by Socialists. It conjures up a vision of hard- faced men cooking statistics in over-heated offices, of arroghnt but very shrewd women working out campaigns of innuendo designed to destroy the credit of their opponems, of soulless hirelings from the advertising world perfecting the meretricious amenities of a false Utopia. I see it as an immensely powerful organisation, its coffers crammed with tainted gold, its specious, ruthless agents everywhere, its fundamental cynicism too gross to be concealed. And when one comes across it in action—when, from behind a sparse zareba of evergreens on the stage of the village hall, the retired colonel rises to propose a vote of thanks to the speaker whose name has clearly slipped his memory, and the audience of a dozen or even more 'reluctantly take their hands out of their overcoat pockets and contribute a round of perfunctory applause—at momentS like this one cannot withhold one's admiration for the cunning with which the Tory machine hoodwinks the electorate into underrating its true maleficent power.
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