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In this unhealthy atmosphere, the Gaitskellites were seeking their revenge. Their leader, far from discouraging them, was spurring them on, and some were aiming at expelling those who disagreed with him. A few of us, Barbara Castle, lan Mikardo and myself, felt that we should form a small tight group to work out our strategy and our week-by-week tactics. I was elected leader. We met at half-past one every Monday. I set myself the task of resisting extremism and provocative public statements.
For MPs to meet in unofficial groups, getting together informally, as distinct from in committees and sub-committees set up by the House of Commons itself, is probably as old as Parliament itself. King John could have written a thesis on the subject. But this was too much for Hugh Gaitskell, who would have been better advised to acknowledge that he led an unofficial group of his own. Immediately after the annual conference at Morecambe in 1952 he found his voice.
In a speech at Stalybridge, he repeated an allegation that one-sixth of the constituency party delegates at Morecambe were communist or communist-inspired. He drew the conclusion that at a time when communist policy was to infiltrate the Labour movement, the Bevanites were assisting them by their disruptive activities. Then, in a direct reference to us and our pamphlets, he went on: "It is time to end the attempt at mob rule by a group of frustrated journalists and restore the authority and leadership of the solid, sound, sensible majority of the movement.' He referred to 'the stream fit grossly misleading propaganda, with poisonous innuendoes and malicious attacks on Atlee, Morrison and the rest of the leadership."
Since the opening of the new session the Bevanites had sought to organize themselves into a more effective parliamentary group. On the suggestion of LAN Mikardo and on the precedent of the Keep Left group, it was agreed to elect a regular chairman - Harold Wilson was the first - and to meet at a regular time in the parliamentary week: 1.30 on Mondays. None of those participating in these secret rites thought at the outset that they might be indulging in some scandalous Mau Mau activity - (none at least except the compulsive informer in our midst who reported our proceedings regularly to Hugh Dalton and thereby to the Whips). Unofficial groups had existed in Parliament ever since the first Witenagemot, and the Bevanites of the early 1950s imagined they were following a more recent precedent set by others, notably the XYZ Club, which had been talking politics over exclusive dinner tables since its foundation by Douglas Jay and a few others in the early 1940s. No one, after all, had ever suggested that the Keep Left group should be outlawed. By January 1952 the new Bevanite arrangements were in full working order and the agenda was crowded.
(3) Ian Mikardo, speech (31st October 1952)
I rejoice that we are not going to have any more personal attacks by members of the Parliamentary Labour Party on other members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Never again, O my exhuberant heart, will I be referred to as one of "a band of splenetic furies". I rejoice.
Never again will there be talk of "parlour revolutionaries and other mischief-makers". That's a great step forward.
No more, never ever more, will those who write about Nye Bevan include me in the list of "sycophantic friends about him". Let us praise this day for evermore. For never again will even the more eminent amongst us refer to some of his comrades as "extreme Left-wingers… some with outlooks soured and warped by disappointment of personal ambitions, some highbrows educated beyond their capacity".
I rejoice at this new upsurge of self-restraint, even though it will undoubtedly rob us of many lambent pearls of English literature. We shall, for instance, have to sigh in vain for any more like "an uneasy coalition of well-meaning emotionalists, frustrates, crackpots and fellow-travellers, making Fred Karno's Army look like the Brigade of Guards".
But it ensures that we don't ever again hear some sizeable fraction of the constituency delegates to the party Conference (who include many Labour M.P.s) as appearing "to be Communist or Communist-inspired", or the proceedings of that Conference characterised as "mob rule by a group of frustrated journalists".
(4) Ian Mikardo, statement issued after the death of Konni Zilliacus (27th July, 1967)
Zilly was in many ways the greatest international Socialist of my time. It is for that reason, and only for that reason, he earned the distinction of being refused a visa to the United States, and being refused a visa to the Soviet Union, and of being expelled from the Labour Party all within the same year. He never gave up fighting for the principles of the United Nations, based on the all-inclusive covenants of the Charter, no matter who opposed him, whether it was Ernest Bevin or Wall Street or Stalin. He was completely devoted in the best sense to the socialist causes which are the basis of peace.
In a way Zilly was a non-politician. Most people who didn't know him personally but knew him only from reading what he wrote and reading about him, would think of him pre-eminently as a politician, but he really wasn't. He was a man of political ideas, but he wasn't very good at politics. The tactics, the ritual dances of parliamentary procedure and the order paper, were in a language that wasn't contained within the eleven he spoke. They were all foreign to him and when it really came to the tough stuff and the in-fighting I sometimes thought of Zilly as a child walking around a jungle of man-eating animals. That's why he was more than once such an easy victim for the hatchet men. Zilly was preeminently an analyst, perhaps unparalleled as a political analyst, and perhaps even more than that a teacher, a great teacher, and not only those like myself of his own generation learned at his feet, but the next generation of people in our movement derived a great deal from him and many of the new, younger men we have had in the House of Commons in the last three years know a great deal of what they know because of what they learned from Zilly.
