COUNTRY BUMPKINS LTD., that inexhaustible store- house of misery for
everybody Mr. Randolph Churchill thinks ought to be made miserable, has just produced a pamphlet (The Conduct of the Socialist Allies) on the Brighton conference of the Labour Party (will there be another one next week on the Tory gabfest, 1 wonder?). The spectacle of Mr. Churchill as a latter-day leveller is enough to start a new Civil War by itself, I should have thought; but if it sets a new fashion there will be a fair quantity of blessings for him amid the curses. For the standard of the pamphlets put out by all the political parties and splinter- groups at the moment is so low that it practically passes belief; most of them consist of lies and statistics in roughly equal proportions, all couched in prose so horrible that not even anybody fool enough to buy them is fool enough to read them once bought. Mr. Churchill, however, lays about him with a will (though perhaps there could now be general agreement that he will abandon the word `Silly-billy'), walloping Karl Marx Ca German bore'), Mr. Bevan Can agile politician') and Mr. Cousins ('no one assumed that he had particularly well thought-out views . . .') indis- criminately. The key word is indiscriminately. Price 6d.