London 13 January Poliakoff has heard from the French here that the other day, when Simon was receiving the French Ambassdr, M. De Fleuriau said, in regard to the coming Disarm Conference, ‘if there is any talk of revising the political clauses, it is war.’ To which Simon replied — ‘Well, in view of the present division of forces, you oughtn't to have much difficulty.’!

This amazed & rather pleased Fleuriau. He no doubt expected solemn words of deprecation. But it sounds true to Simon's extraordinary open-mindedness & detachment. He never seems to have a prepossession of any sort.

13 January In one of my periodical talks with Leeper at the F.O. yesterday we discussed the methods of the various recent Secies of State. I said that as far as I had bn able to judge from the outside, Henderson had bn best at regulating the work he had to do i.e. deciding what he was to do himself & what cd be settled by subordinates. Leeper said perhaps yes, but it had put a great strain on his secies — for he wd not read papers except the few most important, & his secies had to remember the contents & retail them to him whenever he wanted. Henderson moreover never wrote a minute himself. He just said the line of policy he wanted the various Departments of the Office to take in their different problems.

2 January This morng I met several diplomats at the Memorial Service for poor M. Duca, cruelly murdered by the Black-guards of Rumania, among them M. Caclamanos, who asked me to come & see him some time; so I went this evening, to try him on the subject of what further guarantee we (Gt Bn) can possibly give to France to persuade her to reduce her armaments. I said, not Art[icle] XVI, of the Covenant, not the Kellogg Pact, which being universal, wd mean, if we guaranteed it, vague unforeseeable obligatns all over the world — but an undertaking that we wd be ‘actively interested’ if a new Convention were infringed, i.e. if we want a new order, we must be ready to make some sacrifice in its favour.

10 January Had a short but v. interesting talk with Simon yesterday evening. […] he told me that after the recent H. of Commons debate (in which German re-armament was freely talked about by both Simon & Baldwin & not condemned) Simon told Phipps to explain privately to the German Govt that this did not imply that Gt Bn would condone uniliateral denunciation of the Treaty.

11 Jan: Simon must indeed have spoken to the Ger: Ambassador of his Saar proposal then & there; & what is more, he must have sent instructions that same evening to Phipps, in Berlin, to sound the Ger: Govt in that sense.

That did not give The Times much chance of making the suggestion! &, worse luck, the D. T. got hold of it somehow, & referred to it next morning (yesterday, 10th) so we were dished.

Gulf of Suez 16 January to Geoffrey Dawson: [The Times' articles on the Hoare crisis] … evidently gave faithful expression to public feeling, and I congratulate you on the freshness and vigour with which they are written (I judge them to have been by your own hand). I'll have no difficulty in agreeing to this line of policy; though actually the Hoare-Laval plan doesn't appear to me to have been a reversal of policy so much as a panic amplification of the Eden offer made before hostilities began, and to have been quite unjustified by the present military position. The original Eden proposal of nearly a year ago (which as you remember we approved) still seems to me to have been perfectly sound and to stand as the proper bases of an agreed peace. […]

At the beginning of the year Kennedy's book, Britain Faces Germany, appeared. The new, cynical opinion that he had formed of Hitler and the Nazis during his stay in Berlin now crystallised. Hitler had gone over to ‘gangsterism’ in foreign affairs; his demands had grown steadily greater. ‘It is probably true to say that he will always demand as much as he dares to demand.’ Thus, it was essential that Britain rearm and prepare to face war. If the Nazi system was to be made a scourge to humanity Britain would have to oppose it as it had opposed Napoleon, until his power to do harm was destroyed.

18 February — Kennedy to Dawson: […] It is rather satisfactory to win the applause of a League fan because the main trend of the article was rather favourable to the anti-collectivists — no coercion, no obligatory action etc. each nation must judge for itself. I am glad to see that Halifax said quite definitely in the H of Lords yesterday that it is not desirable to say precisely beforehand what we shall do in every case and that we shall be free to act as we think right in the circumstances — at the same time every country should know that what we do will certainly be in the general framework of Article XVI and the rest of the Covenant. But I hope Halifax does not suppose — as he seemed to imply — that Machiavelli is a back number on the Continent! He errs very greatly if he does!

With things brewing up — more to come in Austria? I can and will finish off things here at our Legation in Prague. Being however somewhat short of funds I could not do much unless I came to an arrangement by which T.T. would at any rate pay for a return ticket for me.

7 Jan: Saw Cadogan again at the F.O. yesterday. He has become more fluent than he used to be — this, combined with his habitual directness, makes him most informative & helpful. I think & hope that he now feels he has shaken off Vansittart!

He is just off to Rome with the P.M. & Ld Halifax. He said he believed Hitler still thought that the democracies were ‘on the run,’ but that Musso: was shrewder & better advised. Hitler doesn't hear anything except what a few v. biased people (like Ribbentrop) tell him.