Lost cause

MAX BELOFF

The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott 1911- 1928 edited by Trevor Wilson (Collins 70s) The period covered by these diaries was probably the last in which the editors of daily or Sunday newspapers were important figures on the political field; in which they felt able to take up the time of prime minis- ters even when the country was at war, not just to be 'briefed' but to offer their own advice and assistance. Since the Liberal party was for most of this time in or close to government and since the Manchester Guardian had not yet destroyed its import- ance by moving to London and changing its name, and since C. P. Scott was himself a remarkable man, his diaries of the period were bound to be of historical importance.

If there is a sense of disappointment in reading them, it is not because of any failure on the part of their very competent editor, but because of their own limited nature. They consist almost exclusively of notes made by Scott of his conversations with statesmen on his frequent visits to London, and even when taken with the letters that Professor Wilson has printed with the diary entries, they tell us all too little of what Scott himself felt, and nothing at all about the Manchester world which was his own power base.

If there is a personal and political tragedy inherent in Scott's position the reader has to piece it out for himself. It is the tragedy of the Liberal mind in an 'illiberal world.

Scott's own sympathies were from the be- ginning with the radical wing of the Liberal

party, and his own hope was to see it com- bine with Labour to form a party of the moderate left. Tory men and Tory measures were anathema to him. Lloyd George was his original hero and time and ag,ain we find him trying to retain a faith that, despite all backsliding, Lloyd George would emerge as the pivot of the political combination that Scott desired.

At the outset Scott was an opponent of the Grey policies and of the commitments to the

French. It took the invasion of Belgium to place him with those who found the war inescapable, and who once it was entered upon saw no alternative to its effective prose- cution. He was thus more sympathetic than some Liberals of his school to the rise of Lloyd George to the national leadership. But once Lloyd George was in power, Scott's main concern was with the possibilities of preventing a vindictive peace settlement and with avoiding further bitterness in Ireland.

The diaries are a useful reminder of the touchstone that Irish affairs still were in British politics in the war and immediately post-war periods, and of the extreme fluidity of parties in the 1916-1923 period. Churchill as well as Lloyd George was a maverick figure, though Scott's sympathies were less attracted by him, since he felt that there was in him a distinct and permanent Tory streak. The diaries also contain some interesting sidelights on Scott's role as an intermediary between Weizmann and Lloyd George, and on the extent to which Weizmann himself believed that the Feisal-Lawrence combina- tion might solve the problem of reconciling Zionist and Arab aspirations. Scott, like many Liberals of his school; had little pati- ence with the French in the Middle East or later in Europe.

It was not in the end Lloyd George's 'unreliability' or Asquith's rigidity that wrecked Scott's political hopes. It was the belief of leaders of the Labour party, and notably of MacDonald and Henderson, that Labour's fortunes would only be secure if

the Liberal party were utterly destroyed. The Liberals rather than the Tories were

seen as the real enemy, and all that was offered to radicals, then as later, was to sink without trace as individuals into membership of the Labour party. And this was not, as Scott went on believing, the doing of the left wing of Labour; it was the hard calcula- tion of the party's central core.

The diaries throw a good deal of light on the dilemma of the Liberals in the 1924 Pailiament. The course they chose—support for Labour with no terms exacted—may have been inevitable; it was certainly fatal.

It could be argued that there were a good many things that both Liberals and Labour wanted to do and that the Parliament could

have lasted much longer while they were

done; but Labour cared for power not policies, and MacDonald himself would not

go an inch out of his way to make the Liberal path easier. He rode for a fall and got it.

Much changes but neither parties nor even newspapers all that quickly. If Jeremy Thorpe finds himself on 19 June in Asquith's

position in December 1923, we may be sure that the Guardian will advise him to act in

the same way; and if he does, we may be sure that the consequences will be at least as disastrous for his party. Liberalism and Socialism are not complementary but

opposite; it was Scott's failing that he could never bring himself to admit that this was the case. 'Radical' is a word of dangerous ambiguity.