27 AUGUST 1948, Page 4

It is a pity the Dean of Canterbury is the

Dean of Canterbury. If he were simply the Rev. Hewlett Johnson, A.M.I.C.E. (for he rather strangely enjoys that distinction), or even Dean of Manchester, his pilgrimage would interest no one much, and the United States would have hardly thought it worth while to refuse him a visa. But Mr. Ramsay MacDonald (whom the Daily Worker, of which the Dean is a director, recently described as " the worst traitor in the history of the British Labour movement ") translated him from Manchester to Canterbury, thereby creating in the minds of the ill-informed—particularly the legitimately ill-informed in other lands—the impression that, if not a deputy of the Archbishop in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he at any rate enjoys an immeasurable primacy over other Deans. The Archbishop himself felt called on, not long ago, to dispel this illusion. I note in connection with the latest development that the Dean is just off, with a number of Far Left Wing friends, to a conference in Poland ; that he was to have undertaken an extensive tour in the United States but for the visa imbroglio ; and that he is to spend some weeks in Rumania preparing a book on the new South-Eastern Republics which he so much admires. But I take it he will look in at Canterbury now and then.

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