— Portrait of the Week B ORROWING PHOTOGRAPHS and echoing innuendoes from
the popular press, the Opposition began a full-scale attack on the possible implications of the conduct of present and late members of the Government. In the light of new evidence Mr. Macmillan then surprisingly gave way to pressure for a Tribunal of Inquiry to be set up to investigate the whole affair. Lord Kilmuir was also attacked for accepting a lucrative director- ship of the electronics company Plessey so soon after leaving office, and the Foreign Office for their dismissal of Mr. Geoffrey'McDermott from his position of British Minister in Berlin. Lord Eccles meanwhile quietly accepted a direc- torship of Courtaulds.
BUT SUCH SEAMY QUARRELLING was not confined to Britain alone. Dr. Adenauer continued to be embarrassed by the Spiegel affair, running first into diplomatic trouble with Spain over the irregular arrest of the assistant editor, Herr Abler, on Spanish territory and then into renewed demands for the dismissal of his Defence Minis- ter, Herr Strauss. Der Spiegel appeared again and the Social Democrats made impressive gains in the Hesse Land elections, but the Chancellor was too worried over American policy on Berlin to resist a third visit to New York since President Ken- nedy's accession. Russia and America still quar- relled over the terms of the Cuban settlement, With the thirty or forty defensive Ilyushin bombers remaining on Cuban soil and Fidel Castro continuing to refuse 'on-site inspection. Behind the scenes Russia quarrelled with China, too, and in the struggle for the leadership of the Communist world it was revealed that the C. hinese had shut down many of their embassies In Eastern Europe, Fighting on the Indo-Chinese border lulled; the dead [mann of the Yemen returned to life, saying that during his fifteen years as Minister of Defence he had seen that all Y. emeni aircraft were grounded as useless and there were only two ships, so that any bombing that was going on must be done by the Egyp- tians; Japanese Ministers ran round signing trade treaties with China and Britain; Lord Boothby Wrote to the Times saying he had withdrawn his support for the British entry to the Common Market, then, unable to keep the secret, wrote !.gain to say he had only acted thus to strengthen Mr. Heath's hand. Amid such quiet only Mr. Macmillan showed any real power of decision in announcing a British underground test: in Nevada on the eye of a possible test-ban agreement.
THE NYASALAND CONSTITUTIONAL CONFERENCE opened in London, pledging itself only to deal With the question of the country's independence; another chapter of bombing opened in Katanga; and the wave of sabotage and house arrests in- creased in South Africa, and amid widespread hysteria the Belgian family on trial for the murder of a deformed thalidomide child were acquitted. The management at Ford's declared its intention of standing firm, but in the face of anti-strike meetings by workers' wives and a meeting of the twenty-two unions involved did not finally dismiss the seventy declared trouble-makers. Nominations for the 'little general election' next week closed with a total of twenty-seven candidates divided among the five constituencies, eight of them specially released from the armed forces. Lord Dilhorne summarily rejected the proposal for a British Ombudsman on the grounds that such an officer 'would seriously interfere with the prompt and efficient dispatch of public business.' In the Commons the opposition to the immediate setting Up of the Federation of South-West Arabia was rejected on much the same terms, the Under- Secretary to the Colonial Office saying that politi- cal prisoners in Aden prisons were not flogged but caned, 'a very different thing, which was carried out under medical supervision.'
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