The end of a shabby affair
When Colonel Leslie Lohan's understand- able sense of injury over certain privileged innuendoes made about him in Parliament by the Prime Minister was referred to a tribunal of three senior civil servants, the SPECTATOR described this act as a further blunder in the D Notice affair: and so it has proved. The tribunal's report, published this week, is a feeble document, throwing little fresh Belt on the affair and (for all that Colonel Lohan has 'accepted' it, no doubt out of a feeling of nausea at the whole epi- sode) miserably failing to clear up the dispute between the colonel and the Prime Minister.
The report, quaintly enough, makes no reference to Mr Wilson at all. With the kind of deference towards their political master that might be expected of its civil servant authors, it deals instead with something it calls 'Government statements.' TheSe, it has to be deduced, are the remarks made by Mr Wilson in the closing minutes of the D Notice debate (when he could not be questioned upon them and when no one could reply to them)—remarks which were widely under- stood as insinuating some sort of vague accusation against Colonel Lohan. These `Government statements,' the report asserts, were 'in accordance with the facts and . . . having regard to all the circumstances they were not unfair.'
What 'all the circumstances' added up to is a matter of opinion, of course. It is at least arguable that. they included the circumstance that the Prime Minister, having made a re- sounding hash of his quarrel with the Daily Express over their disclosure of some embar- rassing information, sought to defend himself by throwing mud around in a thoroughly unscrupulous way. It is hard to be sure, how- ever, whether the three authors of this report intended to include this among the circum- stances which they believe justified Mr Wilson's tactics: indeed, they are so respect- fully vague about everything to do with the 'Government statements' that they are not to be pinned down to anything.
However, with all its inadequacies this report may presumably be regarded as the closing chapter in the D Notice affair so far as Colonel Lohan is concerned. It will no doubt be a great relief to him. He deserves much sympathy, partly for having been caught up in a ridiculous and shabby, quarrel between the Prime Minister and Fleet Street, as a result of which he has had to resign his post as secretary of the 1) Notice Committee; and also because when at the end he tried to defend himself against innuendo, the only appeal open to him was to the tribunal of Government servants which has produced this ineffectual report. The SPECTATOR'S earlier suggestion—that the dispute should have been sent to the Parliamentary Com- ntissioner—looks better than ever now that the civil service procedure has been carried out instead.
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