Jeremy Corbyn looked splendidly Old Labour. It was frightfully New Labour to refuse to do these things.
Bevan was once seated in white tie next to some young firebrand who was angry at having so to besport himself, and whose little protest was to refuse the cigar available. So the Great Man smoked two.
Corbyn is proving himself as much the heir of Gaitskell as the heir of Bevan. From The Fifties, by Peter Lewis, comes this account of Khrushchev's visit to Britain in 1955:
Mr K, as the headlines called him, was pleasantly enough impressed by the hospitality of Eden’s dacha, Chequers, by tea with the Queen, and by learning from Winston Churchill how to eat oysters.
He also watched Churchill nodding off in his seat in the Commons. It was a peaceful scene of bonhomie, but it was shattered by the Parliamentary Labour Party.
[At a dinner that the PLP gave him] Hugh Gaitskell, the party leader, presented a list of Social Democrats imprisoned in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev asked truculently why he should care what happened to the enemies of the working class.
George Brown shouted, “God forgive you”, Aneurin Bevan shook his finger at the guest with the warning “Don’t try to bully me!” and Khrushchev roared above the din: “I haven’t met people like you for thirty or forty years!”
Unused to the rough and ready answering-back of British socialism, he remarked next day that if he lived in Britain he would be a Tory.
Mr K, as the headlines called him, was pleasantly enough impressed by the hospitality of Eden’s dacha, Chequers, by tea with the Queen, and by learning from Winston Churchill how to eat oysters.
He also watched Churchill nodding off in his seat in the Commons. It was a peaceful scene of bonhomie, but it was shattered by the Parliamentary Labour Party.
[At a dinner that the PLP gave him] Hugh Gaitskell, the party leader, presented a list of Social Democrats imprisoned in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev asked truculently why he should care what happened to the enemies of the working class.
George Brown shouted, “God forgive you”, Aneurin Bevan shook his finger at the guest with the warning “Don’t try to bully me!” and Khrushchev roared above the din: “I haven’t met people like you for thirty or forty years!”
Unused to the rough and ready answering-back of British socialism, he remarked next day that if he lived in Britain he would be a Tory.
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