A Spectator' s Notebook IT IS ARGUABLE that Mr. Lennox-Boyd's decision
that the Devlin Commission on Nyasaland should sit in private and that witnesses or their counsel should not have the right to cross-examine other witnesses is the right one. I myself think that if charges as serious as those that have been levelled against the Nyasaland Congress are going to be made, the Government should be prepared to support them in open court at a proper trial; and that if the Government is not prepared to support them in this way, it should not make them. Either the situation in Nyasaland is such that normal British judicial procedures and habits of thought should apply; or it is so far removed from what we are accustomed to that they don't apply, in which case the normal British prejudices against, say, intimidation don't apply either. But if you accept that the need to protect witnesses, etc., means that anything approaching normal judicial procedure is impossible, then it seems to me that it was wrong to appoint a distin- guished judge to head the inquiry. Obviously judges are the right people to head a judicial inquiry, but when the inquiry is not judicial, the appointment of a distinguished judge implies that other judicial rules are being observed—which in this case they are manifestly not—and lends greater authority to the proceedings than they deserve.
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