As MP for Dundee, Winston Churchill knew he was facing a desperate challenge to his seat in 1922. Believing he was being traduced by the press, on the night before the election he gave an outspoken speech to constituents in Broughty Ferry. In typically robust style he castigated Mr D. C. Thomson, the local newspaper owner who was managing director of twelve Scottish papers, for setting his face ‘against the free expression of opinion’. His outburst won him few friends, and the following day he was trounced at the polls by the teetotal Dundonian candidate, Mr Scrymgeour.
You have the Liberal and the Conservative newspaper owned by the same man and produced from the same office on the same day. Here is one man, Mr Thomson, selling Liberal opinions with his left hand and Conservative opinions with his right hand.… That is an extraordinary spectacle.… If such conduct were developed in private life or by politicians in public life every man and woman in the country would say ‘That is very double-faced. You cannot believe the two.’ What would be said, I would like to know, of a preacher who preached Roman Catholicism in the morning, Presbyterianism in the afternoon, and then took a turn at Mohammedanism in the evening? He would be regarded as coming perilously near a rogue. It would be said of a politician who made Socialist speeches in Scotland, Conservative speeches in England, and Radical speeches in Wales – you would say he was downright dishonest …
Here we get in the morning the Liberal Mr Thomson through the columns of the liberal ‘Dundee Advertiser’ advising the Liberals of Dundee to be very careful not to give a vote to Mr Churchill because his Liberalism is not quite orthodox. This is the Mr Thomson, the same Mr Thomson, who failed to get elected as chairman of the Conservative Party, telling the Liberals to be very careful of the company they keep, warning the Liberal Association that they have strayed from the true fold, and that by any attempt to stretch a friendly hand to progressive Conservatives they are running perilously in danger of jeopardizing their political soul.
At the same time, the same moment, you have the Conservative, the ‘Die-Hard’ Mr Thomson, through the columns of the Conservative ‘Dundee Courier’, advising the Conservative electors of Dundee to be very careful lest in giving a vote to Mr Churchill they should run the risk of building opposition to the new Conservative Government; and you get the same man behind these two absolutely differently served up dishes, hot or cold, roast or boiled, seasoned or unseasoned, according to taste, and both brought out by the same cook from the same kitchen. Behind those two, I say, you get the one single individual, a narrow, bitter, unreasonable being eaten up with his own conceit, consumed with his own petty arrogance, and pursued from day to day and from year to year by an unrelenting bee in his bonnet.