20 FEBRUARY 1942, Page 14

DUTY OF A PRIME MINISTER

SIR,—The following quotation is not without interest at the present time: "When offering me Cabinet office in his Government in 1908, he [Mr. Asquith] repeated to me Mr. Gladstone's saying, 'The first essential for a Prime Minister is to be a good butcher,' and he added, 'There are several who must be pole-axed now.' They were. Loyal as he was to his colleagues, he never shrank, when the time came and public need required it, from putting them aside—once and for all. Personal friendship might survive if it would. Political association was finished. But how else can States be governed? "

The quotation is from an essay on the first Earl of Oxford and Asquith in Great Contemporaries, by Winston S. Churchill.—Yours

Glasfryn, Llanfyllin, Mont.