18 SEPTEMBER 1959, Page 8

A Spectator's Notebook

auction : A Prime Minister in an easy chair, reading a French novel. What do you think of that lot? Three Secretaries of State, one odious, another contemptible, the third both. They have their price, yet I would not be their purchaser. A new Lord Chancellor, like a new cheese, crude and flavourless: second-rate as a lawyer, as a states- man a nonentity, bought in by his own party from sheer necessity. As we are still a naval nation, our First Lord of the Admiralty should be worth something; but unfortunately nobody knows his name. . . . Were the destinies of a great people ever yet entrusted to such a grotesque and Hudibrastic crew?