5 JULY 1957, Page 18

A Spectator's Notebook

WHO, I WONDER, has come worst out of this whole telephone-tapping business, which The Times in two very trenchant leaderi has rightly called odious? Not Mr. Butler, who has merely happened to be answer- able for his predecessors' sins; his only fault has lain in the disingenuousness of his circumlocutory wriggling. Nor can I feel it in my heart to put Lord Tenby at the top of this list: as G. Lloyd George he was admittedly, as Professor Brogan unkindly put it, the worst Home Secretary since Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, but a survey of his ministerial career (including his introduction of the ridiculous Shops Bill) shows that he was at worst the classic 'front' man : a man in the Goody Goderich, the Thomas Inskip tradition.

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