Konni Zilliacus

Konni Zilliacus was one of the first sponsors of The Week, His death is a loss to the whole left, which is by it deprived of a staunch partisan, who never failed to speak the truth as he saw it. He cannot easily be replaced, Hunted out of the Labour Party by its cold war warriors of the late ‘forties, he was frequently abused as a ‘crypto-communist' in the rather loathsome terminology of the Daily Telegraph, But while his McCarthyite detractors were smearing his name with such appellations, at the same time he found himself cited in the Slansky show-trial, in Prague in 1952, as an arm of British intelligence, During these trials, many people who had been glad enough to know him in his League of Nations days were quick to forsake hin, His transparent honesty had to be linked with considerable courage in those times, I often disagreed with him, In particular, I felt that his concern with the letter of the diplomatic law sometimes rendered him blind to the convulsive social processes which were unwinding beneath it. He was always on the side of the poor, the disinherited, but I felt he gave too much weight to the good faith of their adversaries. Naturally, this divergence of view was at its sharpest on the evaluation of the United Nations, which seemed to me to be increasingly overtly an arm of the imperial powers against their clients and subjects, However sharp his disagreements were, Konni Zilliacus knew very clearly who his worst enemy was, and displayed to his colleagues on the left as much co-operative tolerance as he showed scorn to his opponents on the right. After my expulsion from the Labour Party, he went out of his way to show his solidarity, and he could not have been kinder and more encouraging, or more vigorously active in his public efforts on my behalf, if I had agreed with every word he ever said, He had been suffering from a very painful foot complaint when I visited him, and he had to sit with his foot hoist in the air all the time we talked. We swapped experiences about our respective expulsions, and he told me that he had no doubt that I would be back, although it might take a year or two, Later, at the Brighton Conference last year, he was very sharp with some left-wing M.Ps who expressed doubts as to whether I might not be too hot a potato to hold, I think perhaps this had something to do with his own experiences, a decade before, Zilly was deeply distressed by the overall course of the Wilson administration, and he incessantly voiced his complaints, Most of his strongest aspirations were betrayed, yet again, by the second post-war Labour Government, I think he may well have died broken-hearted, Unpopular though he often was, throughout his life, I am quite sure he will be remembered with affection long after Harold Wilson is an object of universal contempt,