Anti-Communism in Britain During the Early Cold War

Front matter

Anti-Communism in Britain During the Early Cold War

A Very British Witch Hunt

MATTHEW GERTH i UNIVERSITY ; £ s] OF LONDON New Historical

Chapter 1 British McCarthyism

Look round. You see floods, torrents, train accidents, two feet of snow in Jerusalem. Something tremendous is happening. Britain again will have to lead the world as she did in two world wars. As she saved the world from the dictatorship of Hitler so she will save the world from communism.'*

—Waldron Smithers

After all, they are among those unable to defend themselves against communist intrigue and deceit unless people like myself stand up for them. After all, we are fighting for our lives. The substance of this motion is that we must not mention names. Was there ever such rubbish? You cannot possibly fight a cold war that way. You cannot possibly make a political omelette without breaking some bad eggs.’

—Lord Vansittart

The Cold War produced a form of political repression and societal paranoia in many countries which often infected governmental and civic institutions. In the UK and the US, anti-communism rumbled like thunder over the political atmosphere as international tensions rose between East and West. Charges of red infiltration were levelled fast and furious by a number of politicians. These men of zeal dedicated their lives to the crusade against Marxism-Leninism and did much to amplify the supposed threat the ideology engendered. In their hunt to root out the menace, they targeted governmental ministers, teachers, journalists and even clergymen. No one was above suspicion. Although the general public did not rush to support their efforts, their charges and allegations impacted governmental and societal attitudes. They heightened the level of suspicion and paranoia in politics.

This chapter explores the concept of British McCarthyism primarily through the red-hunting careers of two politicians. It uses the efforts of Lord Vansittart and Sir Waldron Smithers to examine how a type of McCarthyite repression functioned in the nation. Both men urged an extreme national reaction to communism. They called for an all-out war to halt the ‘red menace’ — neither wished for anything less. Although no public auto-da-fé resulted from their actions, they left in their wake a path of damning attacks and red-baiting allegations which heightened the level of political anxiety over the communist issue. Tangible evidence of this is shown throughout the chapter. It first looks at the earliest form of ‘Vansittartism’ propagated against the Germans during the Second World War, soon to shift after the fighting stopped, not in form, but in target, towards communism. This new version of Vansittartism took on a very bellicose and anti-Labour form, as the rhetoric of Vansittart, and a unique type of ‘journalist’ named Kenneth de Courcy, shows. It examines the repressive rhetoric used by Vansittart, paying close attention to his famed 28 May 1950 speech in the House of Lords and the national reaction it elicited. The next section details both Vansittart’s specific criticism of the Church of England’s response to communism and in more general terms the Anglican and Catholic anti-communism of the early Cold War period. It then turns to the career of Smithers and both his involvement in the public red-baiting of Minister of War John Strachey and his efforts to garner a governmental investigation of the BBC.

Vansittartism

Robert Vansittart fancied himself as a British Cassandra of the twentieth century. Like the character from the Greek legend, he warned of impending threats, but most refused to take heed.* However, many of his contemporaries viewed him quite differently. They called him the British Joseph McCarthy and mockingly labelled him ‘VanWitchhunt’. In 1902, Vansittart joined the FO at the age of twenty-one. After numerous diplomatic and governmental posts, he attained the position of permanent undersecretary of state for foreign affairs in 1930." Shortly after the rise of Hitler, Vansittart began an unsuccessful attempt to warn against the dangers of Nazism to his FO superiors. His strong opposition to appeasement policies led to him being stripped of his position by Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Vansittart officially retired from the FO in 1941, and the same year Winston Churchill raised him to the peerage as Baron Vansittart of Denham. A marked shift occurred in Vansittart after he left the FO in failure. Friends and colleagues noted the change. While visiting ‘Van’ (as his intimate friends called him) during the war, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge described his host as ‘an aggrieved man’ with ‘a deep underneath of real conceit’. Muggeridge found it difficult to understand this, since ‘he was head of his profession, received every honour, was given a peerage, married a rich and lovely wife and is now a national figure’. He guessed that a ‘wounded conceit’ was the cause of Vansittart’s ‘bitterness’.” Muggeridge did not catch Vansittart on a bad day; in years to come others saw the same general sense of acrimony in the lord. After having lunch with Vansittart in May 1948, Harold Nicolson described his dining companion as gloomy over world affairs and with a bitter disposition. Nicolson deduced Vansittart’s mood came from a ‘disappointment in his own career’ and a sense of grievance over failed ambitions.° This personal bitterness and anger were not limited to Vansittart’s private interactions. A 1949 profile piece appearing in the Observer described how when Vansittart expressed his political views he showed ‘an intensity of passion which he is not always able to control ... And there is little in the language of invective that Lord Vansittart will not use to release the pent-up fury that boils within him’. When sparring with political opponents, the article stated he resembled ‘a ferocious tiger, driven by uncontrollable emotion to rend his victim in pieces’.’

This change in temperament was perhaps only more evident after leaving government employment. Years earlier, John Colville surmised that ‘hatred and harsh words are the methods which he prescribes’ in dealing with perceived enemies.* Focusing on his time running the FO, historian John Ferris maintained that Vansittart often circulated reports against his opponents, withheld information that damaged himself and used allusions to secret sources to bolster his authority.’

A lifelong opponent and critic of what he termed Prussian militarism, Vansittart spent much of the interwar period and the entire span of the Second World War warning against the evils of Germany. It obsessed him to the point that both a number of his contemporaries and later historians argued he was a vehement Germanophobe.”° When reviewing Vansittart’s writings of the time, the charge is hard to dispute. In 1941, Vansittart published a book titled Black Record: Germans Past and Present in which he argued that the Germanic race and culture were as responsible for the current war as were the Nazi Party and Hitler. He wrote that the history of the Germans could be summated in a three-word quote from the Roman Tacitus — ‘they hate peace’. Vansittart claimed ‘for generations Germany has been trying to annex not only the earth but the heavens’. During the war, he argued for the harshest terms towards Germany in any future postwar settlement. In 1942, he declared in the Lords that ‘this time the world will not allow any government to weaken from the pledge to exact the punishment of German butchers as a condition of peace’. Writing in a 1944 article, he described the Germans as a duplicitous people who always blamed their woes on ‘a man, a clique, a class, but not we’. For this duplicity, Vansittart continued, he despised them, and ‘what I despise I cannot trust’.“ After the failed 20 July attempt to kill Hitler, he refused to give the plotters any credit. He claimed that their motive was only to quickly ‘wind up’ the failing war to have a ‘fresh run at it a third time’.

From these wartime contributions of Vansittart the concept of ‘Vansittartism’ emerged. The term, used by critics, was meant to denounce those who pressed for postwar destruction of the German state and held its citizens collectively accountable for the sins of the Nazi regime.” The anti- Vansittartists were mostly left-leaning in their politics (pacifists, Labour MPs, and so on), with a prominent number being members of the clergy.” However, the divide over opposition to Vansittartism did not break down along partisan lines — a large number of Labour politicians had no issue with such an uncompromising anti-German position."* A key argument against Vansittartism was that such vicious attacks against the German people and pledges of a forthcoming Carthaginian peace only served to undermine the war effort, since it strengthened the resolve of Germans to fight on. Even the Nazi leadership were in agreement with Vansittart’s domestic critics on that assessment. Joseph Goebbels once quipped that somewhere in Germany after the war they should erect a monument to him engraved with the words ‘to the Englishman who rendered the greatest service to the German cause’. The chief Nazi propagandist also gleefully wished for ‘Vansittart [to] carry on’, since ‘he is merely supplying grist for our propaganda mill’.’

Because ofits negative connotations, fewin the UK classified themselves as ‘Vansittartists’ or self-identified with the concept — except Vansittart himself, who appropriated the term to fit his purpose. In Lessons of My Life (1943), he wrote:

I must clear the ground by explaining very briefly what Vansittartism is and what it is not. I did not invent the word. My opponents did. I should not have been vain enough to credit myself with a doctrine. They did that; and I hasten to assure them that they are mistaken. It is not a doctrine: it is common sense, based on professional knowledge.”°

For Vansittart, the defeat of Nazism at the end of the Second World War did little to dampen his distrust of the Germans. For him, 8 May 1945 did not spark a road to Damascus moment on the ‘German question’. The record suggests such a moment never came. In 1946, he asserted the Germans remained unrepentant and that 75 per cent of them were ‘still Nazis at heart’. A year later he stated that ‘the democratisation of Germany is a difficult, if not impossible, task’? In 1950, Vansittart remained ‘sure that the German danger will return’.2? However, the postwar era did mark a turning point for Vansittart; it shifted his focus towards what he soon came to consider an even more diabolical enemy. As he did with German militarism, he endeavoured tirelessly through the coming years to warn his fellow countrymen of the ‘red menace’ of communism. Norman Rose eloquently wrote in his biography of Vansittart, ‘Like a latter-day Cincinnatus, he returned from his estates to save his countrymen from new dangers.’

All-out war

Unlike many of his cold warrior contemporaries, before the end of the Second World War Vansittart voiced little concern over the threat of communism. When working at the FO in the 1930s, he argued for the UK and France to ally formally with the Soviet Union. He considered this the only realistic prospect in deterring Nazi aggression. During the war, Vansittart praised on numerous occasions the many sacrifices the Soviet Union had endured against the German war machine.” However, in the aftermath of Moscow’s refusal to assist the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, he gradually began to speak out against the UK’s wartime ally.” Vansittart showed increased concern over the developing global situation and voiced his opinions frequently as international tensions rose again. His rhetoric soon soared against communism and the Soviet Union to the level of odium he had earlier displayed against Nazism and Germany. In Events and Shadows (1947), a book written warning of increased dangers of the Cold War, he contended that the objective of the ‘Muscovites’ was nothing less than the world-rule of communism.”® He stressed that unlike the nationalist ideologies of Nazism and fascism, the creed of Marxist-Leninism held universal appeal to many around the world. The quasi-religious nature of it bred zealots who were willing to betray their country and use deceitful tactics in obtaining their goals. Communists of all nationalities worked in uniform fashion; they ‘turn to Moscow as Moslems to Mecca’. Using charged language, he cautioned ‘they are more convinced and convincing believers than Mahomed’s invading sectarians a dozen centuries ago; also their creed is somewhat more concrete’. He surmised that, similar to Islam, communism worked as a ‘primitive doctrine’, only it used tanks instead of camels. Hence, the UK diligently needed to expose and root out its red fifth columnists to survive the coming onslaught, which it had failed to do so far.”? In a 1947 hard-hitting debate broadcast by the BBC, R. Palme Dutt, chair of the CPGB, denounced such assertions as ‘stale red scare and anti-Soviet calumnies’.*° Dutt’s biographer wrote that in the intense argument the communist ‘ran rings around’ the lord.” Almost assuredly, the loss of such a dispute did nothing to weaken Vansittart’s resolve.

An irksome fact plagued Vansittart in his efforts — the inability of Britons to realise that a third world war had begun. It started ‘considerably before the end of the second’ and it needed winning; there was ‘no room or reason for timidity’. While the communists, ‘who were always at war’, understood the gravity of the situation, the West had yet to get to grips with the reality. To start winning the war, Vansittart argued Britons needed to fight back both at home and abroad against the enemy. Such was Vansittart’s assessment of the Yangtze Incident. In April 1949, the forces of the Communist People’s Liberation Army were on the verge of winning their long-fought struggle against the Nationalist Chinese government. The fall of China, for the West, was at hand. As the civil war raged, the admiralty ordered the frigate HMS Amethyst up the Yangtze River to assist in guarding the British Embassy in Nanjing. The Amethyst came under fire from communist artillery, and while attempting to evade the shelling, it ran aground. The incident resulted in the death of seventeen British sailors, including the ship’s captain. Vansittart argued that for the ‘ruthless murders’ of British servicemen ‘communism must be taught a sharp lesson’. He lamented that in earlier times such a transgression would have brought an open declaration of war by previous governments and that the RAF should have bombed the artillery batteries that molested the Amethyst. Yet such measures ‘would have involved courage in high places, so nothing was done’. The incident proved ‘communism is our open and implacable enemy’, thus ‘we should treat all communists and their pals accordingly’. This included those in the UK. Prior to the attack on the Amethyst, and for too long, the ‘British public has been patient with the communist conspiracy’. ‘All over the country let British communists be called to account’ for the murderous assault on the Amethyst, he urged. It was the only way to show them ‘it’s an ugly game’ and ‘not worth the candle’.** Although Vansittart’s statements never openly called for violence towards British communists, they bordered on the edge of the edge. Such bellicose and provocative rhetoric did not go unnoticed. Labour MP Konni Zilliacus denounced Vansittart for using the ‘tragic incident’ as a casus belli for war with China and ‘inciting a pogrom against communists and socialists in Britain’.

Vansittart did not hold a monopoly on such combative language. Another Briton preached the need for an alternative measure than just bombing a single artillery battery on the Yangtze or formally declaring war on Red China. To end the threat of international communism, tougher stuff was required. Kenneth de Courcy, a journalist and editor of his own newsletter, Intelligence Digest (domestic circulation around 70,000 in 1950), caused numerous heads to spin in Whitehall when he advocated for a pre-emptive atomic attack on the Soviet Union in 1950. De Courcy, a would-be spymaster and want-to-be kingmaker, had long been a thorn in the side of the British government. By his own admission, Churchill came very close to locking up the self-described committed patriot and ardent anti-communist during the Second World War.** Since then, the FO, MI5 and Downing Street had sought ways to impede de Courcy’s journalistic efforts as well. All were concerned about the hyperbolic and sensationalist new stories that appeared in Intelligence Digest, alongside de Courcy’s uncanny ability to glean sensitive intelligence from a wide range of governmental and international sources. In many ways, the ‘de Courcy issue’ plagued and consumed government officials more than other pressing concerns. However, the matter proved delicate. The well-connected de Courcy had several Conservative backbenchers in Westminster at his beck and call. However, the need to muzzle him was even more apparent in 1949 when de Courcy became the first to report the initial test of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union.” His revelation of Russia going nuclear scooped all news outlets, and, as described in the US’s paper of record, the New York Times, de Courcy had published ‘long before the United States, Britain and Canada jointly announced it’** De Courcy’s stock in certain intelligence circles soared — especially those in Washington. He used his newly amplified influence to scaremonger the Atlantic world over the threat from the ‘Soviet Marxist aggressive empire’ and to denounce the UK’s ‘socialist government’ for its unwillingness to stand up both at home and abroad to communism.* ‘The public have not been told that in twenty-four months from now the Russians will be in a position to launch “A” [atomic] and “H” [hydrogen] bombs from the latest type of submarines against all our maritime cities’, de Courcy claimed. The only possible safeguard to stop such a Soviet attack, he argued, came from ‘the threat of retaliation’, one which ‘we do not yet possess’.*° Yet the Americans did.

Perhaps, for that reason, de Courcy embarked on a lecture tour across North America in 1950. On 6 April, to a packed house in Toronto’s Massey Hall, he warned his Canadian audience that war with the Soviet Union was likely in two years and presently ‘Russia could wipe out maritime facilities of the democracies in a week if it attacked’. The well-attended assembly garnered a significant amount of press attention. In its coverage of his address, Canada’s paper of record, The Globe and Mail, described de Courcy as the ‘top man in a personal spy system’ supported by his

‘extremely wealthy’ magazine.“ Indeed, such talk gave credence to his alarmist views to the newspaper’s readership. In the past, such talk had allowed de Courcy to glean intelligence from unsuspecting British officials both in the UK and abroad. Cognisant of such abilities, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had drafted a secret, and unofficial, advisory to embassies and consuls specifically pertaining to de Courcy only eight days prior to his lecture in Toronto. In the memo, Bevin describes de Courcy as ‘a man of considerable drive and ability’ who is ‘violently anti-Soviet’ and who ‘believes that the Catholic faith of General Franco is the surest bulwark against Soviet domination of Europe’? While Bevin praised de Courcy as ‘an able journalist’, he admonished his reporting, since de Courcy ‘makes little or no attempt to check the accuracy of his information and is quite undiscriminating in the methods which he employs to obtain it’. ‘Mr. de Courcy might again, as he has done in the past, constitute a serious embarrassment to His Majesty’s Government or official circles, in this country or abroad’, the memo concluded. Thus, ‘He should not, therefore, be given any special facilities during his travels.’

Surely, if de Courcy discovered the existence of the FO warning regarding him, he would have considered it a plot by the Labour government to silence him - which, in all fairness, it was. It had little effect in stopping de Courcy, and regardless of the memo, several British officials considered both the man and his speeches as valuable assets. Reporting on de Courcy’s time on the lecture circuit in Canada, the UK trade commissioner in Montreal stated the general impression he got of de Courcy’s visit was it ‘had given people a better understanding of the imminence of danger from Russia’. The deputy undersecretary for Commonwealth relations J.J. Saville Garner wrote he ‘heard privately ... Mr. de Courcy had electrified his Canadian audience into a real understanding of the communist menace’.“* The department head of the information office at Commonwealth relations found it perplexing that the FO were so against de Courcy’s ‘violently anti-Soviet’ activities: ‘I would have thought that at any rate, [they were] something to be thankful for.’ He went on to ponder whether de Courcy’s support for Franco might turn out to be the correct stance to take, since ‘it is anybody’s guess’ and ‘perhaps it will work!” Garner speculated that the FO’s animosity towards de Courcy — ‘an enterprising journalist who has built up some reputation’ - came from his attitude ‘during the war against Hitler, when his violent antagonism to communism led him into very doubtful views about Germany’. Garner disagreed with the FO holding such a grudge; de Courcy’s ‘violent’ anti-communism was what was needed, ‘since the situation is very different today and I do not see that there is any need to treat him as sinister’.“°

Regardless of how various mandarins felt on the matter, de Courcy continued issuing his hyperbolic warnings of impending doom for the West. However, he soon changed tactics. In his new estimation, the threats of reprising atomic attacks were no longer sufficient in halting the impending world war, which he warned was just on the global horizon. De Courcy shifted his earlier stance of retaliation to one of an immediate attack on the Soviet Union. It stood as the only solution, since it decapitated the head of the international communist conspiracy. In a November 1950 speech delivered at the Executives’ Club in Chicago, de Courcy put the argument in these terms:

We are not fighting Red China. They do not want to fight us at all. We are not fighting North Korea ... You are fighting a single inspiration from the Kremlin. All their equipment comes from Russia. All the general staff direction comes from Russia. All the organization comes from Russia. The boys being killed in Korea were killed by communist bullets with Russian artillery and they are facing an army supported and inspired by the Russian general staff. The Russians have fired the first shot in the Third World War.“

The longer the ‘Atlantic System’ waited, he surmised, the stronger its mortal enemy, ‘Marxist imperialism’, grew. ‘Are we to fool about the periphery when the decision lies in our grasp by striking a very deadly, fatal blow at the guts of the Russian Empire?’, he rhetorically asked the audience. De Courcy recommended that the US immediately attack with its atomic capabilities the main oil-producing areas in the Soviet Union to neutralise the threat or it faced losing the Cold War.“* All-out war constituted the only way for the West to survive.

Such talk caused fear back home in London; de Courcy proved, oddly enough, ‘an anti-communist menace’ promoting a war which would likely result in the deaths of countless millions and leave the UK in ruins. The palpable threat of his words came from information originating from the British embassy in Washington reporting ‘that de Courcy is being taken seriously in some quarters in the US defence department’; indeed, quite high quarters. Through acontact the embassy discovered that the assistant to the secretary of defense for international security affairs, Major General James Burns, was ‘warmly’ recommending both ‘the [Intelligence] Digest, as well as Mr. de Courcy’ to colleagues. In addition, on one occasion, when de Courcy visited Washington, he had dinner with Burns’s superior secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, ‘who was considerably impressed’ with the British journalist.“ In 1952, Anthony Eden reported to MI5 the news that Johnson’s soon-to-be replacement, John Foster Dulles, ‘was in close touch with de Courcy’.*° The British government would continue to keep a close watch on de Courcy for the forthcoming years until multiple convictions of fraud placed him in Wormwood Scrubs.

Putting de Courcy’s longing for nuclear war aside, the failures of the government were becoming more the focal point of Vansittart’s anticommunist rhetoric as the 1950s approached. The Yangtze Incident and the seeming refusal of Attlee and Labour to enact more robust counterinsurgency measures were factors for the lord’s attitudinal shift. He concluded that, in theory, governments must do more, since the only ‘effective action that can be taken against communism’ came from state power.*! While he had earlier praised Attlee and other Labour leaders for their ‘courageous anti-communist utterances’, he became disillusioned by their apparent unwillingness to follow them up: ‘we need not words, but anti-communist action’. In 1949, Vansittart accused the Soviets of operating a spy ring through the London embassies of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. He also charged that international friendship societies (the Anglo-Rumanian Society, the Anglo-Bulgarian Club, the Hungarian Club and the Hungarian Association) acted as Soviet fronts and hubs for espionage activities.” He pressed the government to deport Soviet diplomats en masse and close all such friendship associations. Stoking his fury, Labour refused to do either.” Vansittart came to see the Attlee government and the Labour Party as inadequate agents for winning the Cold War. His attacks on communism were then often tinted with an anti-socialist narrative. He started stressing that the ‘British left’ needed to realise that ‘communism had always used’ socialism as a ‘stalking-horse’ in rising to power.*“ ‘Too many socialists in all Western countries’ were politically too close to ‘communism to conceive the deadly danger which they promote’. Many socialists were ‘either fellow-travellers or they have not sufficient sense to come in out of the rain’. Vansittart campaigned that ‘vigorous resistance to communism’ was ‘the acid test of party politicians’ and Labour had failed to pass it.” Thus, during the 1950 and 1951 General Elections, Vansittart lobbied against the Attlee government.” In 1955 he warned that ‘grave dangers faced us’ if Labour was returned to power.” Alongside his anti-Soviet stance, de Courcy took a hard line against domestic communism as well. He cosied up to Vansittart and wholeheartedly supported the lord’s charges against governmental failures to halt the red infiltration throughout British institutions.**

By 1950, Vansittartism had crept back into the political consciousness of the nation, albeit directed at a new enemy: the scourge of international communism. Vansittart, in language reminiscent of the 1930s, warned that guilty men were turning a blind eye to the threat at hand and appeasers roamed the halls of British institutions foolishly seeking an unrealistic peace. For men like de Courcy and Vansittart, the times called for aggressive action, not lasting coexistence. The ‘Russians’ and the ‘Red Chinese’ were desperately in need of a virtuous bombing and domestic communists a lesson that they had chosen the wrong side in a very ‘ugly game’.

Lord VanWitchhunt

The apotheosis of Vansittart’s anti-communist campaign came in the form of an eighty-minute address he gave in the House of Lords on 29 March 1950. The speech solidified his image as one of the UK’s most dedicated cold warriors but also presented him with the dubious honour of being labelled the British McCarthy.” It consisted of an onslaught of charges and accusations, which even keen observers of the time could have easily confused with the utterances of the most die-hard American McCarthyite. ‘What this country needs is a good shaking up’, stressed Vansittart, ‘and if it cannot take that, it must take the consequences - and they will be bitter.’ Vansittart did not hold back; he claimed that communist fifth columnists had infested the majority of the political and civil institutions of the country. These included the Church of England, the civil service, the FO, the armed forces, the universities, the BBC, the trade unions, the British Legion, the Joint Industrial Council (known as the Whitley Council) and even the planning offices for the Festival of Britain. As Joseph McCarthy had done less than two months before in Wheeling, West Virginia, Vansittart claimed to possess a list of known communists working inside the government. Vansittart’s list included the names of sixteen employees of the Department of Inland Revenue.‘ He maintained he knew the identities of communists inside other government departments as well, including the War Office and the ministries of food, health and education. Although he refused to name them, he maintained that communists had no place inside the civil service on any level and thus they needed removing. This included those at the BBC. ‘Passing to another infected field’, Vansittart accused the government of employing 2,000 communists as teachers who used ‘a dozen different ways of inculcating communism’ to the youth of the nation.“ He concluded his speech by arguing that the UK needed to put its own house in order against the evil and motioned: ‘That attention be called to the extent of communist infiltration into the public service and other important branches of public life in this country; and to resolve that continuous and resolute precautions are necessary for public security.’

The immediate reaction to Vansittart’s speech inside the chamber ranged from enthusiasm to cautious opposition. Rising directly after

Vansittart’s remarks, Lord Milverton agreed that ‘We cannot tolerate enemies within our gates’ and went on to argue that there ‘is no room in the world for communism and freedom and one or the other must eventually win’. He urged that a step in the right direction was for the censorship of the Daily Worker. Shortly afterwards, Viscount Swinton contributed to the dread generated by Vansittart’s more bellicose statements by adding that actions by the Soviet Union were tantamount to war. Praising J. Edgar Hoover and calling it a ‘pleasure’ to have worked closely with him during the Second World War, Swinton also stated that he sympathised with the need for secrecy that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) required to work under. Swinton added that communism stood as a threat unlike any the UK had since encountered because of its insidious and hidden nature. It is not easy to discount these supportive statements as insignificant or of minor consequence by little-known lords. Both Lord Milverton, a former colonial governor of Gambia, Fiji, Jamaica and Nigeria, and Lord Swinton — previously president of the board of trade, secretary of state for the colonies and later secretary of state for air - were accomplished and respected politicians in their own right. Speaking from the Labour benches, the lord chancellor Viscount Jowitt gave a tepid response: