11 DECEMBER 1959, Page 3

Portrait of the Week

['RESIDENT EISENHOWER visited Italy, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and points East. Mr. Dillon, his Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, arrived in London on his way to Brussels, Bonn and Paris, to talk about econo- mic co-operation in Europe and, it was widely supposed, about European aid for some of the countries his President was visiting. The French Prime Minister turned the tap that set Saharan oil flowing to the North African shore and the French economy. A Baghdad newspaper reported that 'the lion has returned to his lair': this referred to General Kassem's emergence from hospital.

I HE QUEEN was graciously pleased to appoint, and some of her subjects were not so graciously pleased to hear that she had appointed, Mr. Charles Robert Swart, Minister of what is de- scribed in South Africa as Justice, as Governor- General of South Africa. It was Mr. Swart who reorganised the 'special' (i.e., the political) branch of the South African CID, and told them `to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.' In a House of Commons debate, the Opposition spokesman asked the Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations, 'Are you against apartheid or for it?' and got no answer, but Mr. Christopher Chataway, an Olympic runner, in a maiden speech as a Tory M P, suggested that British sportsmen should only go to South Africa to play against multi-racial teams. The South African authorities agreed to a multi-racial team playing Egypt at table tennis. The Opposition refused to nominate any members to the Monckton Commission, and the Govern- ment filled the three gaps that this left with three gap-fillers. Mr. Macleod, the Colonial Secretary, visited Malta, but not Mr. Mintoff, whose sup- Porters staged a demonstration, one of the exhibits of which was a British peer in a top-hat flogging a small Maltese girl. The hearty patriots who intended to open an anti-Egyptian cxhibition, 'See How They Run.' in answer to the proposed Moor- house museum in Port Said, dropped the idea after a dignified rebuke from young Moorhouse's father.

* NI[iRE. 'DIAN "I WILE HUNDRED people were killed, and more than twenty million pounds' worth of damage was done, when a dam burst at Frejus, in the South of France. More than fifty other people died in various countries of Western Europe buffeted by gales, among them twelve seamen of an Aberdeen trawler and the crew of eight of the Broughty Ferry lifeboat.

* IN THE COURSE OF a libel action, the editor of the Daily Mail denied that the Mail was a Conserva- tive newspaper although, he said, it supported the Conservative Party from time to time. Mr. Harold Wilson denied reports in the same paper that he was leading a new anti-Gaitskell movement among Left-wing Labour MPs. Unimpressed, apparently, by Mr. Marples's parlour-pink attack on London's traffic, the Labour Party tabled a motion regretting the Government's failure to tackle the problem, and a Mr. Michael Heath, having parked his car two yards from a sign limiting parking to thirty minutes, went off to Canada for three weeks' holi- day, and was fined a fiver when he came back. A Stoke-on-Trent grocer, though, was fined £80 and costs for taking the lion symbol off Marketing Board eggs in order to sell them for the higher price commanded by eggs not so insulted. A Committee of the International Lawn Tennis Federation recommended that major tournaments should be allowed to declare themselves 'open,' which would mean that amateurs and profes- sionals could play against each other at Wimble- don in 1961: all that now remains is to define the difference.