Hacks have spotted that Rachel Reeves replaced Jeremy Hunt’s portrait of Nigel Lawson with one of Ellen Wilkinson in her pre-budget photoshoot. Wilkinson was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920 before becoming a Labour MP and Minister for Education…
What the Lobby has missed about Reeves’ communist darling, who the Chancellor says is one of her “leading lights,” is her status as a Soviet agent of influence in the West. In 1921 Ellen was given £500 to travel first class to Russia with future British Communist Party General Secretary Harry Pollitt for the Red Trade Union Conference in Moscow. Wilkinson rubbed shoulders with Trotsky and other revolutionaries before founding the ‘Red International of Labour Unions,’ a Soviet front…
Back in the UK “Red Ellen” had an active relationship with Soviet spy Otto Katz from the 1930s, “Stalin’s main man in Europe” who was regarded by MI5 as “the most important communist agent outside Russia.” Ellen fraternised with Katz while in a romantic relationship with Home Secretary Herbert Morrison…
Katz was with Ellen on numerous trips to Spain during the Civil War and got her involved in communist-led campaigns. They remained close while Ellen was a Cabinet Minister after the war. Special Branch archives recall that officers tailed and chased Ellen and Katz on one of their joyrides at high speed before she shook them off. They would often spend the night at Wilkinson’s flat on Guildford Street in Bloomsbury. Letters between them reveal Wilkinson offered to keep secret material on Katz’ behalf…
At the same time Wilkinson was a staunch defender of Stalin’s regime. In March 1930 she signed a statement along with other Labour MPs decrying “a fierce campaign on the part of the capitalist press, with one or two honourable exceptions, against Soviet Russia, with whom the Labour Government has just resumed normal diplomatic relations.” It added: “We trust British public opinion to resist most emphatically any attempts to injure the development of friendly relations between these two great countries by means of false atrocity stories and malicious inventions.” She attacked reporting of religious persecution in Russia as “false atrocity stories” – arrests of priests, monks, nuns, immans, and rabbis and the closure of places of worship…
So the Chancellor has put up a photo of a Soviet agent of influence and Stalin-fan in her No 11 office. Asked about it, a Treasury spokesman said: “Change.” You bet…
In Henry Mance’s piece today for the FT, lunching with Nigel Farage:
“Splendido!” Farage says, when the drinks arrive; I suppose it’s a step to European reconciliation. We clink glasses, and he lights the first of two back-to-back Benson & Hedges. A few minutes later, we’re back downstairs. “Are you drinking? Good.” He orders a glass of Sauvignon blanc for each of us — not a bottle, “because it’s Lent” — followed by a bottle of claret, to have with our meal. They say Farage drinks less than he used to. They say a lot of things.”