A Spectator's Notebook T HE Cabinet shuffle rumours owe a good
deal, no doubt to the Lobby Correspondents' resourcefulness in speculation, and it is a little difficult to discoVer exactly what their starting-point was—for there was pretty obviously some motive force behind the bright discovery by The Times last Saturday that Sir John Simon's speech on blaekshirts and other shirts at Glasgow had qualified him supremely for a transfer to the Home Office. From that all the ingenious ideas about the coming general post (most of them really rather old ideas) sprang. It is true- no doubt that one or two important changes would produce a crop of consequential changes, but the one or two important changes, according to my information, are themselves some way off yet. What is being talked of in quarters where it is worth while to listen is the assumption of the Premiership by .141r Baldwin, who would quite certainly prefer Lord Halifax to anyone else at the Foreign Office. That would be an admirable appointment—I should say the best possible —but vacancies have to be created before they can be filled, and the process is not always so simple, as Sir John Simon has just shown.
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