ABSTRACT
Battered in the 1950 general election, the Labour party was swept from power in the fall of the following year. Though the People’s Progressive party (PPP) fulminated against the Waddington proposals for not advocating complete self-government, it still prepared to fight in the elections scheduled for April 1953. Many of the proposals advanced by the PPP leaders during the next few months were wise and needed, but they were trying to storm heaven in a very short period of time. By moving so rapidly the PPP alienated a not-unsympathetic governor and the Winston Churchill government in London; it attracted the attention of a Washington still under the sway of the fierce communist-hunter from Wisconsin, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Alfred Savage convinced Churchill and Lyttelton that action was required immediately and, on the eve of the annual conference of the Conservative party, the British Lion judged that, at least in one part of the world, Palmerstonian-style gunboats could still do the job.
