N o tebo ok Now that the Slater Walker report has been Published,

there must be many red faces in the City of London. The reddest of all Should be the face of the Bank of England, Which showed a confidence in Jim Slater now seen to be completely unjustified, although he did attempt—and thereby forced Others to attempt—to make better use of assets. When Slater expanded his business interests in the Far East, he could rely on glowing references from both the Bank and Other leading City institutions sufficient to overcome the reservations of many doubters in the Far Eastern business community. The Bank of England was not, of course, alone in its almost unqualified admiration for Mr Slater. Mr Edward Heath, among Others, frequently sought his advice. (What, incidentally, has happened to Mr Heath's threatened libel action against the Sunday Times?) But the Bank—and hence the taxpayer—is having to pay a heavy price for its naivety. The Bank may have been right to shore up the company, for the consequences of a sudden collapse could have beenfar-reaching. But what must be avoided now is any hint of a cover-up. The auditors Who reported this week were asked only to review the ongoing business of the comPany. Nevertheless, they came up with strong evidence that Slater Walker — by lending money to related companies in order that they should buy SW shares— May have broken company law. There must therefore be a Department of Trade enquiry, however embarrassing this may turn out to be for Mr Slater's friends—or should one say former friends—in the City.

That the Government'should be entertaining Mr Bohuslav Chnoupek as the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia is bad enough. He has played willing lackey to his Russian Masters for many years, before and ever since the invasion of 1968. Given that he is here, it is understandable that he should visit the opera with the Foreign Secretary, Mr Crosland. But why should the Secretary of State for Social Services, Mr David Ennals, give a lunch in honour of Mr Chnoupek ? Was a friendship formed when Mr Ennals was Minister of State at the 'Foreign Office, an association which Mr Ennals wished to renew ?

If the Czechoslovak people were able to determine their own fate, Bernard Levin Wrote in The Times last week, Chnoupek Would be put on trial as the traitor and criminal that he is'. Mr Ennals may not agree with this judgment, but perhaps his brother Martin, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, will be able to enlighten him.

The immense film on the rise of Mao shown by BBC 2 last Sunday night was three hours of more or less undiluted propaganda for Communist China. The Frenchman who made the film is euphemistically described as 'a friend of China', and the commentary was his, translated into English and spoken by an English actor. (The original Englishlanguage version was spoken by an American, but the BBC went to the added expense of re-dubbing it with an English accent.) It would be interesting to know how the decision to put it out was taken. Clearly it was all done in a great rush, because the BBC only had about 72 hours to prepare it for showing. There had already been a fortyfive-minute Panorama Special' on Mao, so the film was not needed for obituary purposes. It was a gratuitous and particularly flagrant contribution to the Mao cult, now for gullible Westerners taking the place of the Soviet cult which flourished until Stalin was denounced by one of his own henchmen. One should add that some of the film's sequences were of considerably historical interest, but they should have been shown with a historically objective commentary.

There are not many rewards for young writers in this country, and it should be more than a pity if existing awards were to wither through lack of interest on the part of writers themselves. The John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, administered by the National Book League, is a case in point. Last year the entries were so few in number and so doubtful in quality that the prize—of £100 —was not awarded. And so this year, the organisers have decided to increase the award to £200 and are hoping that more young writers (ho must be under thirty) will press their publishers—large or small— into submitting their books. It would be useful though, if the sum could be increased and the National Book League are looking for extra financial support for the prize

from large corporations or concerns. The health of, and the public interest in, contemporary writing might be immeasurably increased if the year's best novel, book of poems or play by a young writer were to be awarded, say, 000. Meanwhile, the Spectator is doing its best by reviving the £500 prize for the best essay written by a sixth-former.

Sir Richard Marsh, on giving up the chairmanship of the Railways Board, confesses: 'I don't really like trains at all'—thereby confirming what some of us had supposed during his term of office. It is to be hoped that his successor, Mr Peter Parker, actually likes trains. It is equally to be hoped that Sir Richard Marsh likes newspapers, since he is about to become chairman of the Newspaper Publishers Association. Otherwise his qualifications would appear to be nil.

One of Peter Walker's better deeds as Environment Secretary was to give a champagne party for superintendents and deputy superintendents of London parks, at which he thanked them for their work and said that it was greatly appreciated by visitors from every part of the world, as well as by their own compatriots. Now an attempt is being made by Greenwich borough council to carry out two developments within the Greenwich Park conservation area which, in the view of the local amenity societies and many others, would impair the amenity of one of the loveliest of London parks. And so far the DoE has turned down the demand for a public enquiry. Meanwhile another London borough—Camden—has been resisting a private development which would allegedly impair the visual amenity of Hampstead Heath. A private resident of the Vale of Health has been trying to build houses on his own grdund, but Camden council has refused him planning permission and he is now appealing to the DoE. In Greenwich the would-be developer is the council itself, though one of the plots in question was scheduled as public open space as recently as 1947. Clearly the Hampstead conservation area is taken more seriously by its local authority than its equivalent in south-east London.

What sort of man is Paul Johnson, millions of people are asking. They refer not to the Socialist journalist whose articles on trade unions have annoyed Jack Jones but to a new character in the Archers radio programme. Instalments so far suggest that Johnson is rather a smartyboots city-slicker type who has come back to his wife down in Ambridge after a torrid affair in London.

'We shall not submit.' Lord Hartwell, chairman and editor-in-chief of the two Telegraph newspapers, deserves the greatest credit for his robust rejoinder to the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades—the union, so dignified in name (calling themselves a 'Society', as if they upheld the standards of an ancient guild), who are now endangering

the future of the Sunday Telegraph. For the sake of their own immediate 'advantage' (as they think), its members are flying in the face of the Government's pay policy and are prepared to jeopardise the newspaper. The continuing publication of an important newspaper is now at risk—and if the Sunday Telegraph were to die, after fifteen brave years, much else would die as well, not only in journalism.

By the actions of its Sunday Telegraph members SOGAT has damaged more than its own reputation : it has injured the wider union movement. Meanwhile the company can congratulate itself on circulating so many copies of the Telegraph magazine— 'attached' last Sunday, for the first time, to the unpublished newspaper. The magazine was distributed separately (as always) and may have reached some 700,000 households. But that was small compensation for the absence of its new parent.

Squatters are hardly to be welcomed—but Mr Harold Macmillan is taking their arrival at Birch Grove rather well. A band of them have invested an old and derelict house on the estate. Mr Macmillan has apparently convinced himself that it will be months before they are evicted, such are the slow processes of the law. Meanwhile he looks on with interest, as if their arrival were somehow keeping him more in touch with the awful social realities of the modern world. The squatters seem to have given him quite a lift.

Our correspondent on consumer affairs, Elisabeth Dunn, wishes us to pay homage to the copywriters who created the following advertisement for a Sunmed holiday at an unspecified place.

'We know an unbelievable Greek island where mules are the main form of transport and distance is measured in donkey hours .. . a rugged island of large sandy bays, arid buff coloured mountains and secluded sandy beaches where most people find it the most natural thing in the world to sunbathe nude ... an unpretentious serene island that seems to attract like minded people; people who accept that three hours on a jet and nine hours on a ship is a price worth paying. As the sun sinks and tints gold the wine-dark sea, the mountains echo with the triumphant statements of Beethoven, Chopin, Mahler and like souls, the quiet passages overlaid with the moaning of the wind through the scrub eucalyptus.'

Either there really is a catch or the copywriters realised they'd gone too far this time, for they added : `This is the island of plain Greek food, indifferently cooked, eaten in crowded tavernas.'

Everyone is by now familiar with the deterioration of the postal services, but it can do no harm (and may conceivably do some good) to expose particular failures from time to time. Thus: a copy of the Spectator in a sealed envelope bearing an 11 ip stamp and marked 'First Class' was posted from Doughty Street, Bloomsbury, on a Thursday and reached its destination in Orange Street, near Trafalgar Square, the following Tuesday. That is five days, Sir William Ryland.

There appears to be no limit to the costly follies of the bureaucracy. The latest comes from the Metropolitan Police, whose architects' department propose to remove the 176 largely Victorian and often elaborate blue lamps that have long adorned London's police stations and to replace them with a standard newly-designed lamp in the interest of 'systemisation'. They claim that the change will not cost much because the old lamps can be sold off as Victoriana either to nostalgic policemen or antique dealers. But why make it in the first place? They give a reassuring touch to a police station.

Lord Weidenfeld, who this week published Moshe Dayan's massive Story of my Life, can seldom have been blessed with an author so free of inhibitions about extolling the merits of his own work. At a press luncheon in the Travellers' Club, General Dayan declared with disarming frankness: `This is the best book written about Israel. I know the others. Don't touch them.' He added with total self-confidence that 'everything in the book is 100 per cent accurate.' Lf there are any shortcomings in the book,' he added, 'they will be due to translation.' The General is indeed well equipped to write about Israel. He was born in 1915 in the first Kibbutz and has been at the centre of events in Israel's struggle for survival ever since 1948. He is now out of active politics and has taken on a new job which, in his one flash of modesty, he confessed to being ill-equipped for—the editorship of a daily newspaper.

Among the most interesting of General Dayan's observations at lunch was the im pression he received at the time of Suez that Selwyn Lloyd 'didn't like the whole thing, he resented it.' The General was also hearteningly optimistic about the prospects for a peaceful settlement in the Middle East, believing that the Syrians are now as eager as the Egyptians to resolve things by political means. He is, however, uncompromising on the Palestinian question, refusing to contemplate a Palestinian state and arguing that the Palestinian refugees should be settled where they are now.

The Department of Health is apparently having second thoughts about bringing the government stick to bear on drug companies who advertise in free medical magazines. It has been taken aback by allegations of interference with the freedom of the press. The Conservative spokesman on Health affairs, Patrick Jenk in, even went so far the other day as to remind a meeting of the Medical Journalists Association, that 'the Nazis burned books in the streets—and it would not be very different from that if the DHSS deliberately killed off sections of the medical press through this scheme'.

The scheme involved an attempt by the Department to curtail the amount of promotional expenditure by drug companies. Drugs now cost the NHS almost £400 million a year. Every month the average GP prescribes drugs costing the NHS £1000. What the DHSS did was to draw up a scheme whereby the companies would reduce expenditure on representatives, literature and advertising in free journals by more than 25 per cent over the next three years.

Subscription journals such as the Lancet were to be exempted. Free publications such as World Medicine and the Department's own Prescribers' Journal were not.

Last week's note about Middlesex's victory in the County Championship is reinforced by the complete First Class averages, just published: six Middlesex bowlers are among the top twenty-one bowlers. Significant of the times is the fact that Featherstone, top of the bowling averages, took only 36 wickets. In fact, only five men took more than eighty wickets in this bowlers' summer, including Selvey with 90 and Edmonds with 88. It is as certain as anything can be that we shall never see a cricketer do the 'double' again during the English season. Will any bowler ever again take 100 wickets? It would be a good bet for an enterprising bookmaker to lay.

Among all the predictable nonsense written and spoken about Mao Tse-tung on the Chinese dictator's death there have been many ritual compliments paid to his accorm plishm:nt as a poet. Not many Englishmen are equipped to judge Chinese verse. One who was was the late Arthur Waley. He was once asked whcther Mao's poems were any good. After some pause for reflection the great sinologue replied, 'Let us say, theY are better than Hitler's paintings but not a$ good as Winston Churchill's'.