Portrait of the Week— THE TIME WAS OUT OF JOINT
INDEED, indeed: no wonder the Greenwich pips for once fell silent in such a week. The heirs of Mahatma Gandhi launched a ferocious invasion of Pakistan, so that the shoddy, patched-up 'peace' over Kashmir dis- integrated in the familiar miseries of air raids and land battles, of refugees and casualties. U Thant set off to the scene to try to salvage order from the ruins: the UN was shocked, the Common- wealth was rocked, and there was a smile on the race of the Chinese tiger.
AT HOME, TOO, TIME was not on our side: so Mr.. Ray Gunter told the TUC, as he deployed all his Oratory on the theme of incomes restraint. But Mr. Cousins's union, the Transport Workers, had already given their answer—'No'—and on Wednesday the plan for 'voluntary' restraint was carried by a majority of only two million. Mr. Enoch Powell, brooding on the future, saw the Government descending the slippery slope to more and more compulsion in our national life. Others, likewise brooding, wondered whether the Government itself had any future at all, with the Speaker's death seemingly cutting their majority to one and a Labour MP, Mr. Reginald Paget, Putting the question in an article in the Guardian: 'Ought a I.abour Government. committed to Tory expediency, to be permitted to continue in office'?' The voters of Frith and Crayford, at any rate, were bracing themselves for a by-election cam- paign to remember, and a 28—I outsider won the St. I,eger.
AtiGREssioN, it seemed, was in the air: a mouse bit and killed an adder at Slough, Yorkshire Slaughtered Surrey in the final of the Gillette Cup and Mr. George Brown was stung by a wasp. The Pope is to address the General Assembly in Octo- ber, Dr. Schweitzer died, a magnificently obsolete monument to other times, and Lord Beaverbrook's Iortune, it was reported, has largely escaped nritish death duties because of his Canadian ! domicile. Balmoral learned that its railway station is being axed, a court of inquiry into railway pay disputes is being set up, and further cuts in the rimds programme were announced. Mr. Heath !aid a short holiday in Scotland (grouse-shooting, said one report) and Sir Alec Douglas-Home had a successful two-day sale of 'odds and ends' up Lit The Hirsel.
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