— Portrait of the Week— SEEMED A MOOT POINT on
Saturday whether the Commonwealth was disintegrating or had simply pepped up its bloodstream with a dose of salts. Mr. Wilson was happy to have achieved an ambiguous position on Rhodesia, and said his peace mission would remain dauntless and at the ready, apparently for ever if need be. Mr. Ian Smith, who was watching a' circus while the rest of the world, including his own parliament, waited till past midnight for a communiqué, said rumours had reached him of a Prime Ministers' conference but he personally hadn't shed a tear. Meanwhile in Washington the UN passed a dis- mal twentieth birthday, with Mr. Adlai Steven- son uncertain whether he was attending cele- 'brations of the birth of the UN or of the cold war. In, London the International Whaling Com- mission met, also in gloom and despondency over the shortage of whales.
MR. AUBREY JONES'S Prices and Incomes Board issued its first report condemning road haulage charges, while Hoovers abandoned their own charges by ending resale price maintenance. Saigon broke off diplomatic relations with France, the new Prime Minister suspended all its daily newspapers, and two bombs smashed an expensive waterfront restaurant, causing carnage at the peak dining hour. Regular but gentler demonstrations by Ben Bellistes in Algeria, beginning each even- ing as soon as the students had finished their meal, kept the police busy all week. The Afro-Asian conference, never very stout, collapsed entirely When nearly everyone refused to come, amid groans from the Chinese.
THE JUNE weather threw its Weight about all over the globe. While riot sqads in Italy struggled to control mobs fighting to reach the swimming pools, plagues of locusts polished off the tomato crop in Portugal and the Minister of Agriculture in. Canada engaged a rain-making company to combat drought, tribes in the Transkei were snow- hound and the Danube burst its banks to rise ten inches in twenty-four hours. A few British individualists stiffened their sinews: the Society of Merchant Venturers and a Mr. John James stepped in to rescue a girls' school in Bristol from the comprehensive dragon, television producers threatened the BBC with strike action, Bodley's librarian resigned in vain to save the Indian In- stitute, a party of foiled miners evolved a new strategy to oust the MP for Bosworth, and Spike Milligan was quietly putting foxglove hats and Yellow trousers on the gnomes in Kensington Gardens, in .a scheme to save the Elfin Oak from bureaucrats' neglect. The Salvation Army gathered in London. a bus-driver who charged through a line of cavalry (thirty troopers and sixty horses) in Sloane Street was fined £10, and a man from Lancashire ended a sixty-seven-day journey across the Atlantic in a twelve-foot dinghy.
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