10 MAY 1946, Page 4

Mr. Churchill announced on Monday that he had been told

by his doctor that he must go slow. On Tuesday he proceeded to go slow. Acknowledging the presentation of the freedom of the City of Westminster, he delivered a general political speech in the rounded style so characteristic of his oratory at its best. At the luncheon which followed the ceremony he made an ideal after- luncheon speech, spontaneous, human, personal, entertaining. In the afternoon, after engaging in a lively series of interchanges with Mr. Attlee over the latter's statement of policy on Egypt, he succeeded in getting an adjournment debate on the subject and wound it up. between nine and ten in the evening with as reasoned and pungent a contribution as could be asked for. We shall prob- ably see him going slower still yet. One allusion in the last speech, by the way, was hardly appreciated. " I have been mixed up in this Egyptian affair in one way or another for fifty years," he observed. Fifty, I fancy, is approximate. But there was a very definite mixing-up forty-eight years ago—in 1898, when a young subaltern in the Lancers, who was looking for trouble generally and had found some already in India with the Malakand Field Force, found some more with Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman. There can be few survivors of that historic engagement anywhere, and pretty certainly only one in the House of Commons. That, by the way. The young subaltern is now going slow in Holland.

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