When Clement Attlee led the British Labour Party into the 1945 general election against Winston Churchill and the Conservatives, the controversial Harold Laski was serving as the Party’s chairman. Laski was a political scientist at the London School of Economics– his office close to F. A. Hayek’s– and a leading socialist intellectual. When a series of newspaper stories reported Laski’s seemingly favorable statements about the Soviet economic system and Stalin’s government, Attlee was not pleased. After winning the election by a wide margin, Prime Minister Atlee informed reporters that he, not Professor Laski, would be in charge of policy making. The New York Times duly ran a story with the droll headline: “Britain Not Run by Intellectuals.”

Professor Laski, after the election was over, sued the popular British newspaper The Daily Express, charging that its stories had libelously accused him of advocating violent revolution. During the trial Laski had to spend several hours in the witness box interpreting his own speeches and academic prose as the newspaper’s barrister confronted him with statement after statement that did, on its face, seem to favor such a revolution. Instructed by the judge that they could interpret Laski’s words according to their ordinary meanings, the jury found that Professor Laski had not in fact been libeled.