Document G

Extract from the Daily Mirror, 27 October 1938

Reference: Hailsham Papers, HLSM 5/1/3

“WILL OXFORD DARE TO ANNOY HITLER?

The Munich agreement was itself the forced consequence and the culmination of months of a foreign policy vaguely known as a policy of “appeasement” – as though any alternative foreign policy must be one making for war.

We all want appeasement. No political party can claim a monopoly of peace. The question is: “Which way to peace?”

One way to alleged peace (or appeasement) is to hand millions of unprotected people all over the world – whether Czechs, Jews, Liberals, democrats, Chinese, Spanish Republicans, or Abyssinians – to the sadistic tortures of one of the cruellest tyrannies ever known in modern history; then to send the victims money with good wishes. That gains time.

Meanwhile we can further seek appeasement by muddling hundreds of millions away in a scramble to re-arm, while huge reinforcements in lands, men and material fall, with bloodless victory, into the maw of the warmongers abroad.

We can add to that an appeasing effort not to irritate the Nazis who rave against our own democrats, liberals, and independents.

Lord Hailsham’s son (at Oxford) believes in this policy, and it may be an argument in his favour that the election to-day of Mr A.D. Lindsay, the Independent Progressive candidate, would seriously annoy Herr Hitler, as an eminent Nazi journalist has warned us. Mr A.D. Lindsay actually has the audacity not to care a damn. …”