‘If Simon is a catastrophe, as I agree that he is, the Prime Ministei seems me to be a cataclysm. If only there were an alternative government, I think it would be the duty of all of us to say so.’

‘At the last general election the Government had immense support in popular journalism. Now the Daily Herald and the News Chronicle together give the Socialist opposition all the pull in the Press for the millions. For different reasons, and pointing their guns from divergent angles, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express batter National Government from the other side. Nothing can correct this enormous disadvantage but some new and vivid organisation for propaganda directly organised by the Government itself.’

‘The National government in 1934 is certainly not as strong as it was in 1931 … Yet the alliance between different schools of political thought which brought it into being, has become quietly and steadily stronger, in spite of a Liberal recession. The allies at first regarded the emergency which brought them together as a mere interruption of normal conditions; they are beginning to recognise it now as the end of an era. Old policies which they had been willing to suspend as temporarily inapplicable, they are now inclined to write off as fundamentally obsolete. They are no longer content with the “doctor's mandate”; they want a new school of medicine. […]