Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings by Craig Brown Page B

leader of the Soviet Union, and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin, his Premier, both of whom are in Britain at the invitation of the Conservative government.
    Khrushchev is never the easiest of guests. 40 Mrs Anthony Eden thinks his idea of dinner-table repartee is to declare that Soviet missiles ‘could easily reach your island and quite a bit farther’. 41 Fortunately, dinner with the Queen earlier in the week passes without incident: she is not one to pick an argument. In fact, Khrushchev finds her ‘completely unpretentious, completely without haughtiness ... the sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy Sunday afternoon’.
    During the Labour Party dinner, the Shadow Minister of Supply, George Brown, puffs away on his pipe, dutifully listening to a welcoming speech by the Chairman of the Labour Party, then to a speech by Bulganin. Before long, a few of his more left-wing colleagues, keen to demonstrate their friendliness towards the Soviet Union, start thumping the table and chanting, ‘We – want – Khrush-chev,’ over and over again.
    Never short of things to say, Khrushchev leaps up with a great beam on his face to deliver an impromptu speech. The way Brown remembers it, Khrushchev ‘just went on and on. He delivered a great denunciation ofGermany, put in a lot of stuff about the beginning of the war, and followed this with a particularly offensive passage about Britain’s role in the war – how we had thrown the blood-thirsty Germans at the throat of the nice Russians, and so on.’
    For Brown, enough is enough. He remembers muttering, ‘May God forgive you,’ but to his fellow guests the mutter emerges as more of a bark. Khrushchev stops speaking. He turns to Brown and asks him to repeat what he has just said. Brown does not reply, and those around him urge him to stay silent. But Khrushchev is spoiling for a fight, and announces to the room that Brown is clearly too afraid to repeat his remark.
    Brown isn’t going to take this lying down. ‘I will gladly repeat my remark!’ he announces. ‘I said, “May God forgive you!” ... What I meant was that it was you who signed the treaty with Ribbentrop, not us, and that if you hadn’t signed your treaty with Ribbentrop, we wouldn’t have been at war for a whole year before you even got started, that a lot of my comrades wouldn’t now be dead, and that a lot of brave Poles wouldn’t now be dead!’
    At this, pandemonium breaks out, with Khrushchev launching a tirade against democratic socialists, against Britain, and, in Brown’s words, against ‘pretty well everybody’. Neither man is prepared to back down. Whenever Khrushchev pauses for breath, Brown puts his oar in, voicing his support for the Eastern European political prisoners whom the Labour Party has solemnly agreed, in a pre-dinner arrangement, not to mention. For good measure, he adds that Khrushchev’s son Sergei, who is there at the meal, dares not disagree with his father. Khrushchev replies with a lengthy speech, delivered, thinks the mild-mannered Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, ‘with vehemence, even brutality’, and ends by telling his hosts they should make an alliance with the Russians, because if not, they will be swatted ‘off the face of the earth like a dirty old black beetle’.
    At this point, the Welsh firebrand Aneurin Bevan leaps to Brown’s aid, wagging his finger and repeating, ‘But this is ridiculous, Mr Khrushchev, but this is ridiculous.’ Gaitskell attempts a conciliatory speech, ending with a toast ‘to our next meeting’.
    ‘Not for me!’ shouts Brown. 42
    In Brown’s memoir, he insists that ‘I don’t want to leave an impression that the events of this Khrushchev dinner were all either ludicrous, or bad-tempered, or bitchy ... It was not just a boorish evening with the hosts being discourteous to the guests.’ He then rather ruins the impression of composure by adding a coda that might best be summarised as ‘ He