An odd connection

[chickenfeet]

According to the introduction to the edition of John Buchan's The House of the Four Winds that I am currently reading Buchan was quite good friends with Clydeside labour leader and ILP MP Jimmy Maxton.  Buchan and Maxton were, of course, both MPs and both Scots but their politics were so different that friendship does seem a stretch.  Still connections are connections and while my connection with Buchan doesn't extend beyond reading his books and once or twice drinking beer in the Lord Tweedsmuir pub in Tweed, Ontario I do have a slightly closer connection with Jimmy Maxton having once met his widow, Annie, at an ILP conference in Scarborough.

Comments

[oursin]

In The Power-House, Leithen's sidekick is a Labour member: 'for all his failings in politics, I knew no-one I would rather have with me to go tiger-shooting'.

[legionseagle]

There's also many of the minor characters in Mr Standfast, including Lancelot the pacifist with the elastic principles (minesweeping I can quite see as entirely compatible with pacifism, but carrying messages asking for reinforcements seems over the line, personally) who are highly sympathetic and definitely towards the communist end of the Left.

It's a bit double edged, talking about which politician you'd rather have with you in a tiger shoot. I mean, I wouldn't go tiger shooting in the first place, but if the point is "which politician would you rather have as a human shield between you and an enraged big cat?" it's Boris Johnson all the way.

[chickenfeet]

"which politician would you rather have as a human shield between you and an enraged big cat?"

I think also, the price of goats being what it is, one might think about which one would prefer to use as bait.