In the past month multiple links to articles or press stories about the Zinoviev Letter of 1924 have pinged into my inbox. It really is, as I wrote in my book about the Letter, ‘the conspiracy that never dies’.

I maintain an ‘alert’ to the Zinoviev Letter so that I can keep up with what people are saying and track new research, but also to keep an eye on potential disinformation. As a former chief historian of the Foreign Office, I am no stranger to false assertions, by foreign as well as domestic commentators. I have had to confirm or deny ‘secret’ theories or rumours, and I prefer to know what is being attributed to me. But the continuing interest aroused by this one-hundred-year-old political scandal is also an instructive illustration of how those suffering a reverse or defeat usually look for someone else to blame, with destructive results.

The Zinoviev Letter was ostensibly sent in September 1924 by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Soviet propaganda organisation, the comintern, to the Communist Party of Great Britain. He castigated them for insufficient revolutionary fervour and urged them to greater effort. The comintern sent many such letters to communist parties round the world: but this one surfaced just as the first ever British Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, had resigned after losing a vote of confidence. There are lots of mysterious aspects to the story, but it is indisputable that the Letter was leaked and manipulated by right-wing interests to attack Labour in the run-up to the General Election held on 29 October 1924. The Daily Mail headline on 25 October read ‘Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters: Moscow orders to our Reds.’ Although Labour polled a million more votes than they had in the previous election that put them into power, the Conservatives, split over free trade in 1923, were reunited and reorganised and were always going to win. But the episode damaged and humiliated Labour, and when it emerged that the Zinoviev Letter was probably a forgery, accusations that it was an Establishment stitch-up by the Conservative party/civil service/intelligence agencies/right-wing press were quick to emerge — and have never quite gone away. There is no decade in the past century when the Zinoviev Letter has not been raised in Parliament and press, often in the context of an election.

In 2024, in an environment of increasingly polarised politics, the spread of disinformation through social media and suspicions of electoral interference, it is unsurprising that the Zinoviev Letter is back in the news. There is no question that the 1924 episode was murky: although it has never been possible to prove conclusively who wrote the Letter, there is no doubt about its manipulation for political advantage, and the involvement of British officials, including members of the intelligence agencies, cannot be ruled out. It is unlikely the ‘truth’ can be established at this distance in time, but the enduring fascination with the Letter raises an interesting issue: that of apportioning blame for a negative outcome.

It can be hard to accept defeat, and the temptation to blame someone else may be very strong. Even for individuals, it can be a struggle to accept that one lost a contest on merit, or failed to secure a job, because the other person or team put in a better performance. It is human nature to look to mitigating factors: one’s own health, for example, or local conditions that favoured the victor. It may be ‘unsportsmanlike’ to attribute the outcome to cheating by the other side, but the dividing line between accepting our own inferior performance and suspicion of unfair advantage can be a very fine one. It may be a small step from saying ‘I lost’ to ‘I lost, but I should have won’, and in the latter case the next step is finding someone else to blame.

If this is true for individuals, it applies a hundredfold to nations, governments and political parties. Defeat in war, even if undisputed, often breeds resentment among those on the losing side, particularly the military. Germany after 1918 is a case in point: a number of senior generals felt they should have fought on, disaffected young men began to group together and espouse embryonic national socialism before the ink was dry on the armistice agreement, and the war guilt clauses of the Peace Treaty were bitterly divisive. In some cases, the outcome of conflict may never be accepted by certain sections of a population, as the long history of Balkan politics shows. Election defeats, whether local or national, may be less existential but still provoke intense emotion. Graceful concession by a politician or party is becoming rarer, and the first reaction to defeat is far more likely to be to find someone to blame, whether that is a party leader or, less personally, an unanticipated turn of events that ‘unfairly’ conferred advantage on the victor. Some who lose merely deny the fact and hope that repeating their denials will convince others. Others reject the outcome and impose their own victory by force, blaming their defeat on falsification of results, ‘foreign interference’ (George Soros must be astonished at the scope of his supposed global reach) or lack of patriotism on the part of their opponents. The overall impact of this blame game risks undermining society, public institutions and public confidence. Who is going to play the game within the rules if their opponent cheats and will not accept losing?

In October 1924 Ramsay MacDonald, though disappointed about the election result, was not surprised the Conservatives had won, even if he despised their tactics. Although he was outraged by the use made of the Zinoviev Letter and wanted to discover the truth about its origins, he did not blame it for Labour’s defeat. MacDonald resisted demands from some members of the cabinet to denounce the British civil service or intelligence organisations: Lord Parmoor and Charles Trevelyan (both Liberals who had become Labour ministers) announced that they were ‘quite prepared to blow up’ the Foreign Office if they would ‘get rid of the spy system’. The prime minister appealed for calm, though agreeing that there should be a committee of enquiry into the authenticity of the Zinoviev Letter. But then (as now) it proved impossible to conclude with absolute certainty whether it was genuine or forged, and MacDonald submitted the government’s resignation to the king. In the following months and years, while retaining a strong interest in the further enquiries that were instituted, he resisted demands from more militant Labour supporters to make political capital out of the episode.

MacDonald’s reticence was not rooted merely in pragmatism or the search for a quiet life. His instinctive reaction to the puzzling aspects of the Letter — who had written it, how it had reached Britain, who was involved in its leakage and publication — was one of caution in the face of complexity. Reluctant to believe in the bad faith of Sir Eyre Crowe, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office whose conduct was puzzling if not equivocal, MacDonald also felt instinctively that to blame the civil service as a whole was not only unfair but risked undermining an important element of the state essential to the functioning of government. As he told a committee of enquiry in 1928, ‘if anything happens to besmirch you it is one of the most disastrous things that has happened in our time’. Similarly, while history and MacDonald’s own experience suggested an endemic bias against Labour within the British intelligence community, he understood the importance of that community, and the secrecy on which it rested, to national security; he himself rejected communism, and was well aware of the high level of Soviet espionage and subversion that was the focus of all the agencies’ efforts.

Ramsay MacDonald has been judged rather harshly by history, particularly in relation to the events of 1931 that split the Labour Party. But I consider him a substantial figure: the illegitimate son of a Highland ploughman and a dressmaker, who became leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1911 but resigned in 1914 because he opposed the First World War; returning as leader in 1922, in January 1924 he formed — with considerable difficulty — the first British Labour government. In its nine months of existence, against great political odds, that government achieved a good deal, especially in the realm of foreign policy (MacDonald was so short of potential ministers that he had to serve as his own foreign secretary). By the beginning of October 1924, the government had run out of steam and made silly mistakes, but that does not negate its significance. While the Zinoviev Letter did not cause Labour to lose the General Election, it did damage the party, as well as MacDonald; but his refusal to play the blame game set an example others might do well to follow.

In the century since the Zinoviev Letter appeared, it has been invoked at times by Labour politicians as an illustration of the dirty tricks employed by ‘right-wing forces’ or, indeed, the ‘British Establishment’, against the left. It has been the subject of two major cross-Whitehall enquiries, in the late 1960s and late 1990s (the latter undertaken by me at Labour Foreign Minister Robin Cook’s request) to try to determine who really wrote the Letter and who knew about it. Yet no genuine smoking gun has been found, as MacDonald probably suspected; though he might have been dismayed to discover how many people, in the age of social media, are willing to believe, no matter how much sober evidence to the contrary is presented. MacDonald might have approved of one of his successors (albeit a Conservative), David Cameron, who resigned after the ‘Yes’ vote in the Brexit referendum in 2016. Just before the vote, the journalist Martin Kettle warned that if Cameron had to resign he would be the first British prime minister to be ‘ousted by the Daily Mail’ since MacDonald in 1924; as always, the myth proves more enduring than the reality.