Shopper's Guide Miss Elizabeth Gundrey, editor of Shopper's Guide, its
creator and mainstay, has resigned. I am not surprised that the magazine is reeling from the blow. Molony forecasts the possible disappearance of this 'struggling orphan' once the projected Consumer Council got properly into action but already Shopper's Guide is being measured for a shroud, though the Consumer Council is still with the midwife. In the six months since the journal passed from the British Standards Institution to its new managers (the Cornmarket Press) the budget available has shrunk to a level where there is barely enough to cover one major project a month. However, the real blame for the threatened demise of the only rival to Which? attaches to the muddled leadership given by BSI. First in the consumer field, with a unique service to offer and an unequalled opportunity to exploit, they completely failed to press home their advantages. Then, last August, when Shopper's Guide was sick with a surfeit of institutional red tape, they took the first opportunity of disowning it. Miss Gundrey was told she must find a new home for Shopper's Guide. Unfortunately the home she found miscalculated the size of the 'orphan's' appetite: I sincerely hope that her unique knowledge of consumer affairs is not going to be wasted. What a splendid 'director she would have made for the Consumer Council. With the redoubtable Baroness Elliot able to give only a fraction of her time to the job of chairman, I feel the Council is likely to need someone rather more dynamic• as director than an under- secretary from the Board of Trade. But any hopes that the Council would be the independent trouble-shooting body that Miss Gundrey might have made it were dashed when Elizabeth Ackroyd's appointment was announced on Sunday. We can look forward to yet another obedient offshoot of the Civil Service machine running at public expense.
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