Eighty years ago a newspaper cartoon touches a raw nerve
Little better illustrates the strains with which Churchill and his government were having to cope under the combined assault of military defeats and discontent with his premiership, than the wild and disproportionate reaction to a cartoon in the left-wing and immensely popular tabloid Daily Mirror : one of the most famous of the war. Philip Zec's savage image of a survivor from a torpedoed ship clinging to a raft above the line, "The price of petrol has been increased by one penny - Official", hardly deserves to be considered subversive. Zec's claim that it was an attack on waste might have been somewhat disingenuous; the sailor's suffering is the true price of petrol. But Churchill's assertion that it was an attack on profiteering by petrol companies barely stands up to examination. The Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison supported Churchill but, perhaps fortunately for them, the government failed to suppress or punish the Mirror . Labour
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