Word: strachey
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...bright young (40) Hector McNeil from Minister of State in the Foreign Office to Secretary of State for Scotland. The effect of this was to deprive ailing Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin of his ablest aide. The other shuffle of doubtful value was the appointment of former Food Minister John Strachey to the post of Secretary of State for War (see below...
Clement Attlee's new cabinet was scarcely 24 hours old before one of its members was under heavy attack from Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard and his morning Daily Express. The object of Beaverbrook's wrath was bright, balding John Strachey, 48, whom Attlee had just promoted from Minister of Food to Secretary of State for War. The Standard called Strachey "an avowed Communist [who] has never publicly retracted his belief in Communism." The attack touched an exposed nerve: the British public has been shocked by the laxity of military intelligence services disclosed by the espionage...
...Standard recalled, Strachey had said: "Like all Socialists, I believe that the Socialist society evolves in time into the Communist society." In The Coming Struggle for Power, published in 1932, Strachey had written: "The coming of Communism can alone render our problems soluble." Strachey had once told a friend in the U.S.: "Communism is really a movement for better plumbing...
...Standard's charges were true-up to a point. Strachey, after joining Sir Oswald Mosley (1931), had broken with him by 1935 and made the small but conspicuous shift to Communism. He says he never became a party member, but he was certainly one of the most influential spokesmen for Stalinism in the English-speaking world of the Swirling Thirties...
...Standard had failed to point out what every politically literate Briton knew: that Strachey had repudiated Stalinism after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 and has attacked it many times since then. Attlee issued a government statement calling the Standard's attack "disgraceful...