General Discussion

The two press lords were doing all possible to oust Baldwin, by supporting a new party, founded by Beaverbrook, to press for Empire Free Trade. In March 1931 there was a by-election in St George’s Westminster, in which Beaverbrook and Rothermere ran an Empire Free Trade candidate against Duff Cooper for the Conservatives.

Through their columns they accused Baldwin of running an ‘insolent plutocracy’ and of being clueless on how to improve the country’s faltering economy. Three days before the vote, on March 17, 1931, Baldwin counterattacked in a scathing speech.

The newspapers attacking me are not newspapers in the ordinary sense. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal vices, personal likes and dislikes of the two men. What are their methods? Their methods are direct false- hoods misrepresentation, half-truths, the alteration of the speaker’s meaning by publishing a sentence apart from the context…What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages

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‘Power without responsibility’ was a phrase Kipling had coined in 1916 in a conversation with Beaverbrook, whom he knew well and was coming to mistrust. In 1931 it turned the tide for Duff Cooper, and the candidate of the press lords was defeated.

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/quotation/quotes_harlot.htm