ABSTRACT
At the General Election which followed the fall of the first Labour Government the Labour Party fought more seats than on any previous occasion—515 as against 428 in 1923—and increased its total vote from 4,348,379 to 5,487,620. An occasion for compassing the Government’s destruction was found in October in the “J. R. Campbell Case”. If the Campbell episode was bad, that of the alleged “Red Letter,” which occurred during the election campaign, was infinitely worse. The alleged letter urged the British Communists specifically to “organise a campaign of disclosure of the foreign policy of Ramsay MacDonald”, and represented him as forced by working-class pressure to make the Treaties with the Soviet Union. It has to be taken into account that nobody—neither the Foreign Office nor the Conservative Head Office nor the Daily Mail—was ever said to have seen the original of the alleged letter, of which only copies were ever produced.
