GRAHAM HAD STOPPED WRITING overtly propagandist material because it would have compromised his position as an elder statesman, while the younger man, Johnston, suffered from no such inhibitions until he too gained visibility and influence. The fundamental difference between Graham and Johnston was that Johnston was an optimist who believed that ‘there was very little wrong with Scotland that her sons and daughters might not speedily put right’, while Graham became increasingly mired in pessimism, since the old, brave, romantic world that he had cherished was increasingly eroded.

His volte-face over the war and the empire was, like his other crusades, based on a moral revulsion, for which, with some justification, he blamed Germany, but also, having been obliged to choose sides as a man for whom ‘bread was bread, and wine was wine’, as usual he took an uncompromising stance, giving him another cause for which to strive. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly also a major watershed in his political views, to which his silence over post-war strikes and civil unrest at home stands testament. Also, despite his occasional attraction to, and encouragement of, direct and even violent action, when Graham witnessed events in Ireland during and after the war, Mackenzie wrote that he became ‘naturally prejudiced against the Irish point of view’.

Graham increasingly looked like an isolated figure, a non-party man, at a time when ‘party men’ would predominate. He had distanced himself further from the Labour party by standing against Johnston on basically the same political platform. Now, and for decades to come, many of the left’s intelligentsia, of which, at one time, Graham had stood on the periphery, would look towards Soviet Russia for their inspiration, but he hated what he saw as Soviet barbarity.

His decision to stand as a Liberal in 1918 is perplexing, and his political allegiances appear promiscuous, but the Liberals now embraced many of the policies that he had campaigned for, and perhaps he saw an opportunity to advance these even further, and, as previously stated, he was less interested in party labels than political action. But why stand at all, having already been ‘defiled by the pitch of politics’ and protested so vigorously against the House of Commons?