Corridors . . .
PUZZLE IS SURPRISED to hear that Denis Healey still gets nervous before making speeches in public. Though the former Minister of Defence asserts that he "is nothing like as nervous as I used to be," Puzzle finds it an unexpectedly endearing trait in the apparently granitehard Shadow Chancellor.
MRS PEGGY FENNER, the Min. of Ag's prices watchdog, is finding it an uphill struggle to get the Government's argument about food price inflation across even to colleagues, who look sceptically on droughts in Siberia and famines in China — and other such other esoteric stuff — as explanations of our problems, true though they may be. "I suppose," a colleague said jocosely to her at dinner recently, when they were discussing the price of coffee, "that the increase is caused by a failure in the coffee crop in Brazil?" With the gratifying consciousness of being right, but with a weary sense of never being able to get through to some people, Mrs Fenner levelly replied, "Yes." And so it was.
ONE OF THE SURPRISING THINGS about the relative popularity of visiting speakers in the Lincoln by-election has been the extraordinarily high standing of Barbara Castle. The staff of the excellent Albion Hotel, where she was staying, were all of a twitter to meet her and round and about the city there was far more awareness that she was coming, and anticipation of what she might say, than there was for any other speaker. Like Enoch Powell, Barbara retains her magic on the backbenches.
SAD TO RELATE, Puzzle hears bad reports from the Counter-Inflation Bill Committee of the performance of nice Maurice Macmillan, the minister in charge of the Government's proceedings. He seems unable to make himself understood by the members and — as, for example, last Tuesday — the Prime Minister is continually having to explain obscurities in Maurice's remarks which give rise 'to offence and suspicion. The great burden of work in the Committee is being carried on the broad shoulders of Treasury minister Patrick Jenkin, whose erudition and stamina command staggered admiration from all sides.
PUZZLE WOULD LIKE to return to the vexed subject of how the Tories are outmanoeuvring Labour in the lobbies and getting their boys able to go to Strasbourg. It is more than a question of Francis Pym's cunning. It seems that Labour are taking far too seriously Anthony Crosland's suggestion that they should calm down and not go in for so much Tory bashing in the House of Commons. This week, on a number of important debates, the Government had majorities well in excess of its nominal plurality in the House. One such debate was on steel, another was on education: both subjects, one thought, on which socialists feel fanatically. Why is the whipping so loose? Has Bob Mellish lost heart? 11%,
Tom Puzzle
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