—Portrait of the Week— THE FRENCH ATOMIC BOMB went off,
forming, to the surprise of many observers, the familiar mush- room-shaped cloud instead of one looking like a Cross of Lorraine. The Ghana Government immediately froze all French assets in the country, and French sources worked overtime trying to establish simultaneously that the French bomb was large, powerful and devastating, and that it would have no harmful effects on the territories bordering the test-area.
BENEATH THE SHADOW, Mr. Macmillan returned from Africa looking sufficiently tanned to be classified with the Nie-blankes. There had been few little local difficulties for Mr. Butler to re- port, the railway strike having been called off at the last minute, to the distress, apparently, of Mr. Peter Thorneycroft, who feared that the settle- ment would only start another round of wage- claims, and that no real solution to the railways' problems was yet in sight. But Mr. Macmillan received congratulations from some unlikely quarters on his Capetown criticism of apartheid. Mr. Gaitskell, however, was not satisfied. Mr. Macleod reported to Mr. Macmillan on the out- come of the Kenya Conference, which ended, after more than one venture to the brink, with apparent agreement on a fairly rapid advance to African self-government. Agreement was firmly withheld, however, by Group Captain Briggs and his United Party, who appeared likely to be the only effective opposition from now on to African advance in Kenya.
* MR. HAROLD WATKINSON'S White Paper on De- fence went off like a Blue Streak—that is, with a dull thud and a wisp of smoke. The Government was seen to be galloping off in all directions, as far as defence is concerned, unable to decide whether missiles we have not got and which would be of no use if we had them should be fired from aircraft that won't fly or submarines of an obsolete pattern, or neither.
* THE DANISH SHIP Inge Toft finally unloaded her cargo and sailed from Port Said, after being de- tained since May, 1959, by the Egyptian authori- ties on the grounds that she was carrying from Israel a cargo of ivory, apes and peacocks, cedarwood, sandalwood and sweet white wine. Nobody showed any great desire to get excited over this clear breach by the Egyptian authorities of her contractual and other obligations, and a little desultory firing across Israel's borders was nothing new, either.
* rata SCANDAL of the Electrical Trades Union's elections took a new turn when Mr. Frank Foulkes announced that the executive would suspend all elections entirely if the members didn't stop complaining about the way the ones they have been holding recently were conducted. The Trades Union Congress, it was learned, is reluctant to take any further action at present about the Communists who run this union, and ,the Registrar of Friendly Societies apparently "as no power to intervene.
* AN UNOFFICIAL STRIKE stopped the docks at Hull, when forty dockers refused to use shovels to unload cargo, on the grounds that it was un- dignified. Soon 3,500 dockers had walked out in sympathy, and one more strike most citizens couldn't quite understand the need for was under weigh. Meanwhile Mr. Gaitskell struck a fine blow tor the Labour Party by saying that he hadn't meant what he said about Clause Four, and .also that he hadn't said what he meant, and that both he and Clause Four always said what they meant and meant what they said respectively. And there the matter rests at present.
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