Lord Riddell had "no official connection with the British delegation." He had moreover a perfect alibi. There was Sir Arthur Willert, the official spokesman, who knew nothing and told nothing. Riddell's was a private enterprise. He was just a journalist willing to share with other journalists what information he collected. Just a journalist? Well, it was true that "Lloyd George had asked him to stay on" when he was on the point of departing. But that was a confidence and under the rules the press does not print confidences.
Riddell's disclosures were perfectly timed. The best of them came out in the morning when afternoon correspondents must either rush them through as facts—they could not even say "on the highest authority"—or explain to their editors why they had been beaten by their rivals.
Riddell is one of the British Premier's intimates. A lawyer turned newspaper proprietor, he brings out the News of the World, a London Sunday publication, sensational and trashy, of which 3,500,000 copies or some such preposterous number are sold. He started in during the war as a spokesman for the British Premier. He kept it up at the Paris Conference. And at Washington he scored his greatest success.
What he had said at his seance was, "Now, of course, I don't know, but I imagine the Conference will do thus and so." He was delightfully irresponsible, having no official connection. He could leak when he had anything to leak. He could guess, near the truth or far from the truth, for, after all, he was only "imagining." He joked. He indulged in buffoonery. He put out propaganda when he wished. But he mixed enough truth with it all so that the correspondents thronged his meetings. So far as there was publicity at the Conference, he was that publicity.
There was nothing of the great man about him. He did not pretend to be a statesman. He did not take himself seriously. He reached out for his public in the same undress way that he does in his Sunday newspaper. "Ex-tra-ter-ri-to-ri-al-ity," he would say, "that's a long word. I never heard it before I came here." "Kow Loon, where is the place anyway?" You felt that for the British Empire these places and issues were trivialities.
He was familiar, quite inoffensively. "The highly intelligent seal of the Associated Press—was it Mr. Hood here?—must have been under the table in the committee room when he got this story. He knows more about it than I do." He was humorous. "The Conference means to do good and, according to the well known rule—what is it?—Oh, yes! 'Cast your bread upon the waters'—and by—er—a certain repercussion we all expect to benefit."
It was not said cynically. It was no effort to be funny. It was natural and inevitable. Lord Riddell himself did good to the press, and by a certain repercussion the British Empire benefited. It was a publicity "stunt" that has never been equalled. Never before did one man have world opinion so much in his hands. Only Riddell's personality, his friendliness, his apparent disingenuousness, his trifling, enabled him to exercise his power—these and the immense demand for publicity, where aside from his there was little.
