Election Score Sheet
The fever which is said to attack the British public at election times is mounting surprisingly slowly. Indeed the effect of Mr. Churchill's broadcast and of his subsequent speeches has been to allay rather than excite it. The threat of a dirty 'election contest which lay in Mi. Morrison's carefully insinuated sugges- tion that the Conservatives were the warmongering party (by virtue of something which is persistently referred to as the " semi-hysteria " of their back-benchers), has not been com- pletely fulfilled but it has certainly not disappeared. Mr. Churchill's statement that he remained in public life to prevent war was so patently sincere that those who continue to rgise the cry of " warmonger," even in the most studiously muted tones, run the same risk as the Communist originators of this particular technique. They may damage their own cause rather than that of their opponents, before an audience so sick of wars that it suspects and resents any accusations of warlike intentions, whatever their source and whatever their target. But it is too soon to assert that the policy of slinging mud in the hope that some of it will stick has been defeated.
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