She wasn't quite sure if he'd be good She wasn't
even sure if she'd be good So what did she do?
I leave it to you She did just what you'd do too.
And Mr Thorpe and Mr Steel and Mr Pardoe are just as desperate as you can imagine to do it. A pity they cannot hire Mr Jerome Kern and Mr Otto Harbach as the political script writers for, if they may not have contributed much to the political life of their 'c Juntry, they might at least have added to its light entertainment -we have, after all, precious little these days lightly to entertain us.
The coyness of Mr Thorpe and his colleagues in the face of offers of office resembles that of the pimply and forlorn wallflower in the face of a threatened rape: they would love it, but scarce dare risk it. There are, however, rather more serious and determined people in the Liberal Party, like the cohort that gathers around Mr Trevor Jones. There has been, since his own failure in the general election, a serious, determined and sustained campaign, on behalf of what one might laughingly call the Liberal Establishment, totally to exclude Mr Jones and his allies from the councils of the party: those who recall with fondness the drawing rooms of the Asquith era (and ignore its bibulousness) would prefer to have this rude mechanic out. It is possible, nowadays, to forget the contribution Mr Jones and people like him made to the pre-February Liberal revival — the seats won and the impact made by hard and devastating work at parish and even street level — only because of the unprecedented (and unjustified) television coverage awarded Mr Thorpe in the late campaign, which enabled the allies of that comic leader to attribute to him their success in numbers on election day itself.
But all that is evanescent: Mr Jones stands
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