LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
THE RUGBY BY-ELECTION
Sts,—Your correspondent, S. F. Mott, in the letter you published on May 8th, states that the " local Press showed a party oias in favour of the Conservative candidate " in the Rugby by-election.
There was no Conservative candidate, as such. Colonel Sir Claude Holbrook is certainly a Conservative and in rightful succession to the late member, Captain Margesson, a Conservative, he was the nominee of the Conservative Association But he was the National Government candidate, and it was as such that the local newspaper, of which I have the honour to be the editor, repeatedly urged the electorate to vote for him. That was Government bias, if you like, but not party bias If the retiring member had been a Liberal, or a Socialist, and his would- be successor a Liberal or a Socialist, and like Sir Claude, fighting under the terms of the truce as a National Government candidate, the attitude would have been the same—out-and-out support for him.
The two factors of Mr. Brown's success were the local non-observance of the political truce by the three principal parties whose leaders had arranged it, and the very large number of non-voters, and no psycho- logical analysis of the electorate (such as your correspondent attempts) can be complete which ignores the act of political perfidy of those mem- bers of all three principal parties who either voted against the truce can- didate or abstained. If those Conservatives, Socialists and Liberals, feeling that the time for independent action had come, had, previous to the election officially declared themselves against the truce there could be no complaint of their opposition to the National Govern- ment candidate. In no other way could they have righ:ly denied Sir Claude Holbrook their votes and support. That, Sir, was the line which, the local newspaper took. I submit it was the straight line, and a
Previous page
