To the Labour Left, what happened in November 1931 was a well deserved and expiating chastisement. ‘I honestly believe the movement is going to be purer and stronger for the very heavy defeat we have sustained’, wrote Lansbury early in 1932. ‘We have been beaten,’ observed Cole, ‘no doubt, thoroughly, devastatingly, overwhelmingly beaten … But all the same the predominant feeling in my mind, and in the minds of most of those whom I meet, is not depression, but rather elation and escape.’

This view was particularly popular among upper class intellectuals, themselves immune from the allures of the aristocratic embrace. ‘Ethel [Snowden] and Jimmy [Thomas] have caricatured social climbing,’ wrote Beatrice Webb, ‘and in so doing have put their particular type of ugly fawning out of bounds: they will find no imitators. MacDonald's act of treachery has, in fact, served as a drastic emetic’. R. H.Tawneyjoined the Webbs in callingfor a new socialist covenant. Those in the Labour Party who cultivated their financial betters and ‘succumb to convivial sociabilities like Red Indians to fire-water’ would be better off as footmen.

The moral of 1931 seemed to be that Labour must have nothing to do with politicians who did not share a socialist determination to transform the system. ‘Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a live tiger paw by paw; vivisection is its trade, and it does the skinning first’, wrote Tawney.