Foreign & General
1. Polish official assassinated on Danzig frontier & consequent “tension.” Daily Telegraph [a]
Social
1. Times has leading article explaining (not very satisfactorily) the business of the Spender letter. The Times, 20.7.39
2. M.G. Weekly prints long letter extolling the Italian régime in Abyssinia & another answering this. Manchester Guardian Weekly [b]
Party Politics
1. Conservatives hold Hythe with reduced majority. Only 37% or electorate voted. People’s Party candidate polled 5-600 votes. Daily Telegraph [c]
2. Internal row in London I.L.P. still obscure, but evidently reduces to a quarrel between the E[xecutive].C.[ommittee] who wish to attract pacifists into the party & the London Divisional Council who are more or less Trotskyist. Apparently some hope of getting rid of the latter. New Leader
3. Parliamentary debate on Palestine, illegal immigration etc., passed off with less row than had been anticipated. Daily Telegraph [d]
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Orwell Diaries 1938-1942 
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Assassination in Eastern Europe, a controversial Italian leader, trouble in Ethiopia, Trots infiltrating a political party, and the Daily Telegraph banging on about illegal immigration. So what’s new?
Max
Max If you Really want a mirror of history check out the newspapers from the 1930’s!
Its quite telling how similar things are to today.
http://newsfrom1930.blogspot.com/
Stay short! =P
Fascinating to see that a certain Mr Philby was contesting the Hythe by-election for a facist party ? I am sure i have heard that name somewhere before…. was it daddy ?
It looks as if it was:
“Harry St. John Bridger Philby CIE (3 April 1885 – 30 September 1960), also known as Jack Philby or Sheikh Abdullah (الشيخ عبدالله), his Arabic name, was an Arabist, explorer, writer, and British colonial office intelligence officer. He was born at St. John’s, Badulla, Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied oriental languages under E.G. Browne, and was a friend and classmate of Jawaharlal Nehru, later prime Minister of India. Philby’s son Kim Philby became famous for being a British intelligence agent who was a double agent for the Soviet Union.”
“Meanwhile Philby ran for election to the House of Commons for the British People’s Party declaring, “no cause whatever is worth the spilling of human blood” and “protection of the small man against big business”. He lost and soon thereafter the war began. Because of his activities, when he travelled to Bombay he was arrested on 3 August 1940 under Defence Regulation 18B and taken to England.
Friends such as John Maynard Keynes intervened, and after seven months he was released; it is not known precisely who arranged this. Shortly thereafter Jack Philby recommended his son Kim to Valentine “Vee Vee” Vivian, MI6 deputy chief, who recruited him into the British secret service.”
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_Philby