In Persia the Shah drove to the airport with full
ceremony to meet him for a few minutes, in Australia men waved mugs of beer at him with a cheery 'good on you, mate'. In Hong Kong clerics pondered how to persuade him not to broadcast to China, in Manila an attempt was made on his life. The dramas attendant on the Pope's pere- grination around the Far East were heightened, too, by speculation about his health. He looked 'visibly ill' boarding the plane, reported one cardinal. His more robust retinue mercifully preserved him by inches from an assassin's knife when he landed in the Philippines. Vatican statements insisted that the Pope was 'not aware what was going on' but observers credited either Cardinal Kim of Korea or the English-born Bishop of Sarawak, Mgr Galvin, with bring- ing Bolivian painter Benjamin Mendoza to the ground and disarming him. The official Philippine stories announced that President Marcos smashed the man down 'with a karate chop'. And took the trouble to get an affidavit from Mendoza to prove it.
Back in Rome, in the meantime, there were ill-disguised murmurings in the Sacred Col- lege. Before he left, the Pope announced that from 1 January cardinals wer the age of eighty will be ineligible to help choose the next Pope. Since this affected no less than twenty-five members of the College there was understandably much criticism from the newly-excluded, which was condemned by the Vatican as showing 'bad taste' and some 'malignity'. One cardinal was even reported to have remarked that he 'hoped to cast his vote for a new Pope before 1 January when his exclusion came into effect'. But the issue may already have been resolved by the appointment on Wednesday of Cardinal Villot as Chamberlain, and presumably there- fore the Pope's personal choice as heir appar- ent. If he does make it, it will be Rome's first non-Italian Pope since 1523.
If, as was reported on Friday, this is the worst year for strikes since 1926, then this must surely have been the most miserable week for management for just as long. The Port of Liverpool, reported to be in dire financial difficulties, met with an intractable refusal from the Government to bail it out. Postal and Giro services showed a f24.8 million loss, Lord Hall the Chairman of the PO was fired and telephone engineers marched to Parliament in fear of their jobs. Our national fuel supply, we were warned, was in worrying condition. Coal Board stocks had dropped by 12 million tons, power station stocks were down to 54- weeks, and electricity workers were still threatening to work to rule. Gloom in the gas industry, too, as the Government hinted at breaking the Gas Council's monopoly on the distribu- tion of Natural Gas. BOAC profits were down £3 million on last year and both the chair- men of BOAC and BEA quit. As if all this was not enough, plans for a mini-National Strike on 8 December gained support throughout the country and Mr Eric Morley announced that he was prepared to. export the Miss World Contest. So all those lovely ladies will go the way of another of our national assets, the Velasquez portrait of Juan de Pareja, bought at Christies by an American dealer for the unimaginable sum of £2,300,000.
At the Portsmouth Royal Naval dockyard it is now the 84th week of fully-paid, en- forced idleness for three fitter-drillers owing to a demarcation dispute. Now it is an- nounced they will continue not to work for an extra £3 2s a week. Under a new pro- ductivity agreement.
From two very different writers this week, two very different kinds of protest. Russian Nobel prize-winner Solzhenitsyn, declining to visit Stockholm for the award ceremony, wrote the Swedish Academy an admirably defiant letter explaining his reasons. As he said in one paragraph: 'In the past week the hostile attitude towards my prize shown in the national press and, as before, the baiting of my books, the dismissal from jobs and the expulsion from institutes for reading them, compelled me to suppose that my trip to Stockholm would be used to cut me off from my native land by simply barring my return home'. In Japan Yukio Mishima, himself once a Nobel- Prize candidate, pro- tested against his country's unmilitary con- stitution by indulging in the grisly Samurai tradition of Hara-Kiri. After failing to rouse troops at army headquarters to a coup d'etat, he plunged a two-and-a-half foot sword into his stomach and was beheaded—at the fourth attempt—by one of his fanatical disciples. The saddest thing about the whole macabre episode was not that the army chiefs laughed the whole thing off, but that an eighteen- year-old boy in Osaka followed his example.
Urged on by loudspeaker appeals from a first-floor window, hundreds of LSE students came out of their morning lectures and loitered in Houghton Street, London, stop- ping all traffic and calling on the Council to close the road to traffic, being highly dangerous to pedestrians. Even after the arrests had been made and the rioters cleared, it was still a pretty dangerous street for pedestrians, littered . as it was with broken milk bottles and running with „eggs, water bombs and toilet rolls. Less messily and more effectively, East German border guards blocked the Berlin autobahn simply by searching every West German. It was, it turned out, just their way of saying they didn't approve of'Russia's softening attitude to road and rail links to West Berlin.
One suspects that those lonely ladies• of the National Federation of Business and Pro- fessional Women's Club, who reported this week that unaccompanied women get a hard deal in hotels and restaurants, would get short shrift from WACM. Women Against the Common Market, launched this week, made suitably emancipated noises at its opening meeting. As' the vice-chairman said 'If you want to get a campaign going, you use the cheapest and strongest weapon available—a woman's tongue'. And could there have been intimations of Lysistrata when Mrs Anne Kerr announced that 'If we are dragged into the Common Market against our will all hell will be let loose—a general strike'? But per- haps they can take comfort from the news that, if we do go into Europe, by inter- national consent women will still be able to buy a bra by asking for a 'size 36, B cup'. Not so flattering, though, will be their vital statistics which will, it seems, be reckoned in centimetres. Now who could possibly fancy a girl of 9045-95?
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