A Spectator's Notebook
MR. GAITSKELL said at Margate on Sunday that Mr. Butler has been guilty of 'the biggest act of political deceit since Stanley Baldwin sealed his lips in 1935.' Mr. Gaitskell is entitled to accuse Mr. Butler of political deception—he has been accused often enough of that himself, after all. But he really ought to know better than to say 'since Stanley Baldwin sealed his lips in 1935.' What Mr. Baldwin said in that famous speech was : 'Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to the cry at that moment? I cannot thing of anything that would have made the loss of the Election from my point of view more certain. . . .' But as Lord Hailsham has pointed out in The Left Was Never Right, and as Lord Templewood has con- clusively shown in his Nine Troubled Years, Baldwin was referring to the notorious Fulham by-election of 1933 and not to the 1935 General Election, in which rearmament was, in fact, one of the principal issues. Mr. Gaitskell must be perfectly Well aware of this, and I am surprised that a politician of his standing should attempt to revive so discredited a canard.
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