A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THERE has been something dramatically undramatic about the Joyce appeal in the House of Lords this week. The red benches in the Robing Room where the Lords now meet are well filled with peer-spectators, but all the interest is concentrated at the north end of the Chamber, where in what seems almost like a little pen sit the five Law Lords who are deciding Joyce's fate. Everything is almost disappointingly informal. Only the Lord Chancellor wears a wig, his four colleagues being in ordinary dress and ungowned. Opposite them, standing in front of a little knot of counsel crowded together, the Attorney-General quietly, very quietly, argues his case, now Lord Macmillan, now Lord Porter or one of the others interrupting to question a point in his argument—which all turns on how much allegiance the possession and retention of a British passport imposes— or suggest an inference to be drawn from some admitted fact or other. Listeners from the other House, packed behind the bar, strain their cars to catch Lord Porter's barely audible interventions, and away beyond counsel, flanked by two uniformed police and one in plain- dress, sits the subject of the whole grave procedure himself, his pink face above a blue soft collar wearing what looks like a rather cynical half-smile. It is hard to realise that for him these measured words
mean life or death. * * * *
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