Former MP for St Marylebone
Having listened to the speech of the Leader of the Opposition in presenting this Motion to the House, he has left me in a state of bewilderment as to what his attitude is and as to what his grievance is. As I understood him, he repudiated with indignation the accuracy of the suggestion that he was anxious to avoid publication of the Zinovieff letter. At the beginning of his speech, in order...
I hope I need not assure the right hon. Gentleman that I accept his assurance. The point I am putting is quite a different one. The point about which I should like information, about which his followers think he has given information, though they do not know what it was, is this. If there had been no intervention by the "Daily Mail," if his hand had not been forced, to use his own expression,...
The right hon. Gentleman knows very well that he has not answered my question.
Evidently, then, I did not make it plain. I will try again. But for the "Daily Mail's" intervention, did the right hon. Gentleman intend to publish the Zinovieff letter before the General Election or not? Answer that.
I understand that answer to be a rather indirect way of saying that the right hon. Gentleman did not intend to publish it until after the General Election.
Because I was not asking the right hon. Gentleman whether he assumed he was met by honest opponents. I was asking him a very simple question—when did he mean to publish the Zinovieff letter?—and he cannot answer. Let me put this dilemma. Either he did intend to publish it before 29th October or he did not. I still do not know which, but I think he means he did not. If he did mean to...
The right hon. Gentleman seems to have a most cautious lack of desire to answer a straight question with straightness. I need not remind him that I cannot insist on an answer, but if he will not give me an answer I think the House can draw its own conclusions. The truth is that the right hon. Gentleman, in his own heart, believes the document to be genuine, but he dare not say so. I know well...
As the Foreign Secretary told the House as long ago as December, 1924, the evidence of this document reached the Foreign Office, not from one source, but from four different and independent sources, every one of which was a source which had previously been tested and found to be absolutely reliable.
