Prime Minister Clynes
stifles the Nazi menace
Phil Woolas
On 30 June 1918,TheObserver newspaper opined that, within ten years, the Labour Party would form the government and that John Robert Clynes MP, Minister for Food Rationing, would be its Prime Minister. The newspaper was wrong. It was five years not ten.
* * *
Will Thorne MP had been in the game for too long not to spot a plot. It was the Scottish Labour MPs. He saw Jimmy Maxton in animated conference with Emanuel Shinwell by the entrance to the Oriel Room on the Library corridor of the House of Commons, so he knew something was afoot.
Six days earlier, on 15 November 1922, Thorne’s protégé Jack Clynes had led the Labour Party to its biggest success to date. By steady, cautious, responsible leadership, the Labour Party had risen from its birth a mere sixteen years previously to the ranks of His Majesty’s Official Opposition. Critical to that remorseless rise was the Member for Platting. The youngest of the 1906 intake and President of Thorne’s own trade union, the Gasworkers’ and General Workers’ Union, Clynes was recognised as the greatest strategic talent in the movement, and a man of subtle and poetic intelligence. Combined with that, he was the country’s best political organiser; apart from Thorne himself of course.
The Parliamentary Labour Party was due to meet on the lower committee corridor in the House later that day. Everyone assumed that Clynes’s re-election as leader (it had been agreed that the title of ‘chairman’ did not carry sufficient gravitas outside of Parliament) was a formality. Now, Thorne sensed trouble.
Maxton and the ‘Red Clydesiders’ were impatient for change. And what Socialist could blame them? Of all the country’s great cities, Glasgow was suffering the most. Mass starvation was a real possibility and the slums were stirring. Only the previous week, a crowd estimated at 100,000 had seen off the new Socialist MPs from Queen’s Square to make the trip to Westminster. As far as they were concerned, they had a mandate.
What Thorne and Clynes had underestimated though was not the impatient enthusiasm of Glasgow but the ambition of a re-tread Member: James Ramsay MacDonald.
Thorne summoned the Messengers; the thirty or so officers of the House who then, as now, wear traditional morning coats and carry silver badges with the symbol of Mercury, God of Messengers. With their help and that of the whips, a last minute ring round was organised of loyal Labour backbenchers to make sure they would be present in the House. Thorne got his black General and Municipal Union minute book and read out the numbers to the Messengers; some were arriving at Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross, a handful at London’s other terminals, some were in their digs and unobtainable, some were already in the smoking room and a few were where they shouldn’t have been and not reachable. The whips operation was not yet all seeing.
