The minor Ministerial changes are old news by this time,
and they are not of great account in any case. Only one calls for comment, but that calls for it rather urgently. Mr. Attlee is not a man to be accused of ingratitude, and he usually has grounds for his decisions, but his treatment of Glenvil Hall, the late Financial Secretary to the Treasury, needs a very great deal of explaining. No Minister has deserved /better of the Government than Mr. Hall. For four years and a half he has been a hewer of wood and drawer of water first to Mr. Dalton and then to Sir Stafford Cripps—not a job everyone would covet. He has been immensely hard-working ; in the House he has been competent and unfailingly courteous, showing himself as good a Parliamentarian as Mr. Douglas Jay, who takes his place, is bad ; and he is reputed to have done extremely good work in the Treasury itself. The Financial Secretaryship has hitherto been regarded as the stepping-stone to the Cabinet. Why the Prime Minister should have chosen this time to make it a stepping-stone to the wilderness is a question to which no answer has yet been offered. A victim of injustice ? If anyone said so I should not find it possible to dissent. * * * *
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