Citrine wrote that his robust exposure of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Great Britain attempts to subvert British trade union leaders' authority and to capture key posts in the trade union movement drew a "campaign of calumny" against him "in which everything I did was distorted into some sinister conspiracy against the workers". One example that he gave were allegations that he had colluded with the French Labour Minister Charles Pomaret "to clamp down on French labour with a set of drastic wage-&hour decrees in 1939 and had agreed a proposal by British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon that pay rises in Britain be stopped." As TUC General Secretary, Citrine and seven members of his General Council had gone to France to confer with its counterparts in the Confederation Generale du Travail "to secure close co-operation between the two trade union movements to prosecute the war against Hitlerism".