FACTS ABOUT STRESA
TO THE EDITOR LETTERS
Sut,—Lord Vansittart's letter of May 29th does not controvert the facts set out in my letter to you. He repeats the explanation given in chap. iv of his book as to why no warning about Abyssinia was given to Mussolini. at the Stresa Conference. I would remind him that the only reason which he gave me at the time for rejecting my proposal that a warning snould be given to Mussolini by one of our two principal delegates was that the existence of psychological tension between them and Mussolini made such a step undesirable and might have endangered the success of the Conference.
Lord Vansittart now asks me a question which I expected, namely, why I did not talk to our Ministers myself. The answer is that Lord Vansittart, who was Permanent Secretary to the Foreign Office, and, therefore, the chief official adviser to H.M. Government on foreign policy generally and who was at the centre of the Conference, had told me that he would himself try to talk to Mussolini. Unhappily, he felt unable to make this attempt till the last day of the Conference, and when he informed me that he had failed to bioach the subject with Mussolini it was too late for any further effort. As Lord Vansittart is aware, warn- ings were issued before Stresa both by the Foreign Secretary and by himself to the Italian Ambassador in London, while I gave Mussolini official'and personal warnings both before and after the Conference ; but the lack of plain speech at Stresa deprived them in Mussolini's mind c f
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