Before Tobruk fell, no one gave even an outside chance to the Independent candidate in the by-election at Maldon, near London. Middle-class Maldon was considered a sure Conservative district. Independent Candidate Tom Driberg, 37, although England's most widely read columnist ("William Hickey" of the London Daily Express), was a breezy leftist, so unconventional that in 1939 he called Adolf Hitler at his Berlin telephone number (only to be told that he could not speak to the Führer). But when the Government candidate, Conservative Reuben Hunt, attributed Britain's Libyan reverses to "our...
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