Tribune in The 1940s
In 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the second world war, Tribune initially adopted the CP's position of denouncing the war as imperialist. But after the Soviet invasion of Finland, with Cripps off on a world tour, Strauss and Bevan became increasingly impatient at Hartshorn's unrelenting Stalinism. Strauss fired him in February 1940, replacing him as editor with Raymond Postgate. From then on the paper became the voice of the pro-war democratic left in the Labour Party, taking a position similar to that adopted by Gollancz in his famous edited volume attacking the communists for backing the Nazi-Soviet pact, Betrayal of the Left.
Bevan ousted Postgate after a series of personality clashes in 1941, assuming the role of editor himself, though the day-to-day running of the paper was done by Jon Kimche. The Bevan-Kimche Tribune is revered as one of the greatest left-wing papers in British history. It campaigned vigorously for the opening of a second front against Adolf Hitler's Germany, was consistently critical of the Churchill government's failings and argued that only a democratic socialist post-war settlement in Britain (and Europe as a whole) was viable.
George Orwell was hired in 1943 as literary editor. In this role, as well as commissioning and writing reviews, he wrote a series of columns, most of them under the title "As I Please", that have become touchstones of the opinion journalist's craft. Orwell left the Tribune staff in early 1945 to become a war correspondent for The Observer — he was replaced as literary editor by his friend Tosco Fyvel — but remained a regular contributor until March 1947.
Orwell's most famous contributions to Tribune as a columnist include "You and the atom bomb", "The sporting spirit", "Book v cigarettes", "Decline of the English murder" and "Some thoughts on the common toad", all of which have appeared in dozens of anthologies.
Kimche left Tribune to join Reuters in 1945, his place being taken by Frederic Mullally. After the Labour landslide election victory of 1945, Bevan joined Clement Attlee's government and formally left the paper, leaving Mullally and Evelyn Anderson as joint editors, with Foot playing Bevan's role of political director. Over the next five years, Tribune was critically involved in every key political event in the life of the Labour government and reached its highest-ever circulation, of some 40,000. Foot persuaded Kimche to return as joint editor in 1946 (after Mulally's departure to the Sunday Pictorial) and eventually himself became joint editor with Anderson in 1948 after Kimche was fired for disappearing from the office to Istanbul to negotiate the safe passage of two Jewish refugee ships through the Bosporus and Dardanelles.
In the first few years of the Attlee administration, Tribune became the focus for the Labour left's attempts to persuade Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, to adopt a "third force" democratic socialist foreign policy, with Europe acting independently from the US and the Soviet Union, most coherently advanced in the pamphlet Keep Left (which was published by the rival New Statesman).
In 1948, however, after the Soviet rejection of Marshall Aid and the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Tribune endorsed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and took a strongly anti-communist line. "The major threat to democratic socialism and the major danger of war in Europe arises from Soviet policy and not from American policy", declared the editors in November 1948. "It is not the Americans who have imposed a blockade on Berlin. It is not the Americans who have used conspiratorial methods to destroy democratic socialist parties in one country after another. It is not the Americans who have blocked effective action through one United Nations agency after another."
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