Paul Foot

In the 1929 General Election campaign, the Labour candidate for Aston, Birmingham issued the following leaflet:

£5 Reward!

DESPERATE TORIES WILD LIE.

Mr John Strachey writes: ‘It has come to my notice that Tory canvassers are making the outrageous statement that I am a foreigner. This is a most serious allegation which the Aston Tory Party, utterly beaten in political...

When prisoners write to me, as they do all the time, protesting their innocence, I always start with the question: ‘Why were you arrested?’ The answer usually gives some sort of clue as to whether their claims can be justified. In Judith Ward’s case the answer gives no clue at all. She was taken off the streets of Liverpool at half-past six one dark wet February morning in 1974. For several weeks she had been living the life of a drifter, sleeping in railway wagons off Euston Station. She had hitched a lift to Cardiff with a friend to spend a single night between sheets. From Cardiff she’d hitched again to Liverpool, where a police car came across her shivering in a shop doorway. She was taken in for questioning for one reason only: her driving licence was issued in Northern Ireland. Ambushed doesn’t help us much about what happened next: Judith Ward doesn’t remember. She was suffering from a serious mental disorder. One result was that she told the police anything she thought they wanted to know.

In the early Fifties the Hon. Angus Ogilvy, after National Service in the Scots Guards and three agreeable years at Trinity College, Oxford, approached his father, the 12th Earl of Airlie, with his plan ‘to do something in the City’. The old earl gruffly dismissed the idea with three monosyllables: ‘They’re all crooks.’ The Earl’s warning, which was ignored, seems to come up like a ghost at the feast throughout this remarkable book.

‘In office, but not in power’. It seemed unlikely that anything ever said by Norman Lamont would make history, but this phrase from his resignation speech struck a chord. A common charge against Labour governments throughout the century has been that they have been at the mercy of other people’s power; that the combined influence of hostile bankers, businessmen, judges and media moguls ‘blew them off course’, as Harold Wilson put it. When the Tories are in office, all those bankers and businessmen and judges are their friends. There’s no need or inclination to blow them off course. Then suddenly comes Norman Lamont’s shock claim, greeted by prolonged and fervent ‘hear, hear’ from the Tory benches.

Everyone knows that diamonds are a girl’s best friend, that diamonds are for ever, but where do the diamonds come from? It’s a question that Keats asked, and he was pretty indignant about the answer.