Lee affair

This led to the development inside caucus of a monetary reform group, mainly from the more militant socialist wing of the party under the leadership of John A.

During the selection of his Cabinet, in both 1935 and in 1938, Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage had ignored Lee's personal appeals for insertion, thinking him too wild and unconventional.

[5]At the beginning of 1936 Lee got the impression in cabinet that the government hoped to postpone a pledge to guarantee prices for a year and were abandoning party policy.

In fact both ministers and public servants alike were proceeding with immense drive, but having a man so disaffected at cabinet meetings was becoming counter-productive.

Savage decided that he should instead be put in charge of state housing; and later in the year Lee became Under-Secretary to finance minister Nash instead.

[6] After finally winning the Treasury benches, the initial sense of camaraderie and intra-party democracy which had given such vivacity to Labour, steadily declined as a result of the burdens of office.

By contrast, the pro-Lee dissidents were mostly individual members who supported Labour out of their own intellectual morals and principles rather than out of possessing a working-class background.

While he was generally conceded to have great intellectual and oratorical gifts, it was widely considered that excessive vanity and obstreperousness clouded his judgement.

[2] However, Lee was by no means the sole source of the friction in caucus, which intensified from 1936 to 1940, but he was in personality, its focus, by pressing his opinions and rebuttals further than any other fellow dissentients.

[2] In a 1939 article entitled 'Psycho-pathology in politics', Lee wrote: An odd politician becomes physically, becomes mentally sick ... sycophants pour flattery on him ...

Whatever this problem of what I call pathology in politics occurred, except that the party managed to cut off the diseased limb, it went down to crashing defeat.

[14] Lee's final conduct made it near impossible for many of his sympathisers to defend him, even if he retained a certain following among some supporters who continued to agree with his criticisms of cabinet autocracy.

His dismissal reduced the enthusiasm of the party's members, with many active branch workers either resigning or returning to mere membership.

[17] The party attracted many of the more radical and disenchanted Labour members, but more importantly only one of Lee's sympathisers in Parliament joined him, Bill Barnard.