GREAT BRITAIN: Changeful Champion

Against the dragon, Hunger, strode a new knight last week. Out as Food Minister went Sir Ben Smith, a pottering ex-cabby; in came a more dashing champion, glamorous, aristocratic Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey. Of all Labor’s hopefuls his was the shiniest armor and the sharpest lance. Impressive showings in the House as Under Secretary for Air had gained John Strachey’s advancement to “the stickiest job in the Government.”

Strachey had less than a day to clear his desk at the Air Ministry, before plunging into the welter of technical problems involved in British Labor’s self-proclaimed world leadership against hunger. In a candid, highly’ successful press conference, he mended Sir Ben’s bad press relations by promising full advance information on food policies. Then he announced importations of a greater variety of foodstuffs, including long missed apples and oranges. Three days after taking office, Strachey made a brilliant speech in the House of Commons. “Famine, like peace, is indivisible . . .” he said. “This nation will play no small part in saving both itself and the world.” As even the Tory press applauded, Britons swallowed his warning of bread and flour rationing, avoided during the war.

Plumbing Politics. A less talented and engaging figure might not have survived Strachey’s political shiftings. Son of John St. Loe Strachey, noted Tory editor of The Spectator, he was schooled at Eton and Oxford, became one of Labor’s “wild young men” in the ’20s. Breaking violently away in 1931, young John was chief lieutenant for Sir Oswald Mosley when Mosley was not quite a fascist.

The rebound from Mosley carried him further left than he had ever been. Though he denies he was ever a Communist party member, he became the most brilliant apologist for the party line in the English-speaking world. A decade ago his Coming Struggle for Power was not the Communist bible, but it was, at least, the Book of Common Prayer of fellow travelers. In the U.S. he told an acquaintance: “Communism is really a movement for better plumbing.”*

His Red sympathies landed him in Ellis Island for two weeks in 1938. In white tie & tails the suave, beak-nosed Strachey (6 ft. 2 in.) enthralled U.S. audiences. But Communist policy in 1939 was too much for Strachey. He broke with them and did manful penance until the Laborites welcomed him home.

At 44, John Strachey is already touted as a future Prime Minister. Last week a Tory opponent predicted: “He will stand or fall by how he tackles this. But it is my bet that he will stand.”

*Such improvements have preoccupied the Strachey clan before. John’s eminent cousin, the late Historian Lytton Strachey, wrote of Elizabethan Sir John Harington: “The gay young man looked about for new worlds to conquer. . . . Suddenly inspired, he invented the water-closet.”