Train spotting

Daniel Finkelstein has an excellent column in The Times on the different approaches of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to Labour history, and the political implications of that difference. But I'll quote just the introduction rather than the argument:

I HAVE a confession to make. Last week Stephen Pollard informed Times readers that he shared with a couple of unnamed friends, an unhealthy interest in political minutiae. He had, he said, recently reached the depths. He sent an excited e-mail to his mates to report spotting, out of the window of a London bus, Adrian Slade, the former president of the Liberal Party.

Reader, I confess. I am one of those friends.

Stephen’s alleged (conveniently there were no witnesses) spotting of Slade was a pathetic attempt to top my news that I had received a telephone call from Dom Mintoff, the former Prime Minister of Malta, and that our other friend had been in e-mail correspondence with the great-niece of the long dead left-wing Labour MP Konni Zilliacus.

I was the third person in this exchange, and the originator of the claim to have been contacted by the great-niece of Konni Zilliacus. I know my readers will be impressed, and will wonder why I have kept this Zilliacus connection from them. So let me explain.

Here, again, is my policy on reader comments. Emails from readers of this site or my journalism are treated in confidence; if you write to me, you may be assured that your message will not be reproduced on this site. If I do wish to publish an email, then I always ask permission first, and even then I keep the comments anonymous unless I have further permission to add my correspondent's name. The only exceptions to this rule come with the admittedly large number of crank, racist or otherwise abusive emails. Most of these aren't very interesting and I only skim them if I read them at all. (One correspondent who signs himself 'Jewish American' - probably not his real name - writes at length, mainly in capital letters, that, judging by my support for the defence of Bosnia against Milosevic's aggression, I am probably anti-Israel too. I stopped reading these messages about a quarter of the way through the first one.) But I regard these correspondents as fair game, and reserve the right to publish the emails with (on the precedent reasonably set by Polly Toynbee) their authors' names and email addresses.

My correspondence from Konni Zilliacus's great-niece falls squarely within the second category of emails, but I still hold back from publishing it unless Ms Zilliacus writes again to give me permission. She is, after all, a link with labour history; I'm grateful to her for writing, and extend my respects. I think it's permissible, though, to disclose that she wishes me debilitating afflictions and an early death.

Here, for the record, is what I have said about Konni Zilliacus in my book Anti-Totalitarianism, to which Ms Zilliacus alludes. The context is Labour's immediate postwar disputes over foreign policy:

But a more influential force [than other pro-Soviet Labour MPs] over the longer term was Konni Zilliacus, MP for Gateshead. The reputation of Zilliacus (his unusual name was of Swedo-Finnish origin; he was determinedly cosmopolitan and an accomplished linguist) was restored to some extent by his reinstatement in the party some years later and his service thereafter as Labour MP for Manchester Gorton. But a determined effort at rehabilitation came in 2002 with the publication of a hagiography by a writer who is described as a moderator in history courses for the North East Open College Network.

That author's name is Archie Potts. In his book (which I describe as an unremittingly disgusting volume), he cites Zilliacus’s defence of the 1948 Communist putsch in Czechoslovakia:

The Czechoslovak workers acting pretty much unanimously through the trade unions and the Social Democratic as well as the Communist Party made a bloodless semi-revolution rather than allow the Right and centre to get away with their avowed object in bringing down the Government and forcing an anti-Communist coalition on the model of what has happened in France and Italy.

Potts comments: "Very few people in the Labour Party agreed with Zilliacus on this point…" Let us be thankful for small mercies. By the standards of Archie Potts, this counts as fearless truth-telling, but at least - unlike much of what he writes about foreign policy - it is true. I comment in my book:

Very few people in the Labour Party at that time were willing to associate with Zilliacus’s pro-Sovietism. Zilliacus’s biographer makes the disingenuous argument that what appeared to be a pro-Soviet stance was in fact more heterodox than it appeared, being pro-Tito rather than pro-Stalin. But the language and stance of Zilliacus’s part of the Left mirrored precisely the line of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Zilliacus wrote to Attlee on 11 February 1946 at inordinate length (and made a virtue of verbosity by terming his remarks a memorandum) to condemn ‘the foreign policy they [the Government] inherited from the Tories’. He concluded: ‘Stop preparations for possible war against the USSR and join with fellow members of the Security Council to form an international police force and joint use of national forces.’ A contemporary Communist tract entitled Mr Bevin’s Record by the Stalinist ideologue R. Palme Dutt said much the same, declaring that ‘the gravest charge of all is the betrayal of peace by Mr Bevin’s policy and the rising menace of a new world war’.

If my new correspondent is reading this, let me repeat that a man whom you describe as "beautiful and highly intelligent" may well have been both in his family life, but he held political views that were very far from the adjectives you have chosen.