IN JANUARY 1914, SEVERAL newspapers announced Graham’s selection as the ‘socialist’ candidate for the Rectorship of Glasgow University, and the Marxist, John MacLean, was full of enthusiastic praise:

At this time in Scotland, MacLean was the leading light of the loosely constituted British Socialist Party (BSP), and at some point, Graham had joined the party. By 1916, the Manchester Guardian, described him as among the ‘leading members’ of the BSP. This involvement was never mentioned by Graham, nor by his biographers, but it fits the now familiar pattern of inconvenient facts being omitted. Two days after the Guardian article, at their annual conference at Caxton Hall, Manchester, the BSP acrimoniously split between the pro and antiwar factions, and the party leader, Hyndman, led his ‘Pro-Ally’ group out, both sides vigorously singing ‘The Red Flag’ at each other.5 For Graham, who previously had been anti-war, but who was one of those who had signed the BSP pro-war manifesto, this was his last direct involvement in purely socialist politics.

MacDiarmid would later write:

This was a typical overstatement. Hardie had published a well-argued and influential propagandist essay, From Serfdom To Socialism, in 1907,7 and a year before that, in October 1906, a young pretender to the radical journalistic crown of Scotland emerged in the person of Thomas Johnston, who co-founded and edited the ILP newspaper, Forward, with the stated intention ‘to rouse Scotland, to stir the lethargic, to waken the dead’. Forward was presented in an accessible and light-hearted style, and followed a left-wing, republican, pacifist, and home rule agenda.