Westminster Commentary

FIRST, let us call the roll of honour. It will not take us long. When, in the Hola debate, Mr. Enoch Powell (I shall re- turn to his contribution later) had finished his devastating assault on

the Government of Kenya (and by inevit- able implication, though he absolved Lennox-Boyd from blame, on the Colonial Secretary), he was warmly con- gratulated by Mr. Peter Kirk, who was sitting beside him, and by Mr. Jacob Astor, who leaned over from the bench behind to pat him on the back. Subse- quently Mr. Peter Thorneycroft left his seat and went to sit beside his erstwhile Treasury lieutenant. Two days later, when the House of Lords was discussing the Devlin Report, Lord Hemingford declared himself as the one Tory in Parliament who accepted the Report in full and called upon the Colonial Secre- tary to resign. He then voted for the Opposition amendment (to accept the Report in full). In the same division Lord Mansfield, who had spoken criti- cally, though not so critically as Lord Hemingford, of the Government's atti- tude, abstained.

And that was all. That was the full extent to which the Conservative Party has shown itself, in the dying days of this Parliament, ready to let peace in Africa, or racial harmony, or honour, or truth, come before Mr. Macmillan's desire to remain Prime Minister when the election is over. I have spoken be- fore of the catastrophic decline in governmental integrity that began at Suez. For this Government, Suez was like the Mau Mau oath; so much lying was done about it, in Parliament and outside, by members of the Government, that nothing they were asked to do there- after, whether it was more lying, faking evidence, smearing men more honourable than themselves, hushing up scandal, 'expressedly or impliedly' condoning violence and brutality—nothing they

were asked to do could, after Suez, logic- ally be refused. And yet, just as in Kenya there was an occasional member of Mau Mau who, though he had taken the most terrible oaths and indulged in the most dreadful practices, nevertheless revolted at the prospect of committing some par- ticularly hideous crime, even so I would have thought that even this Government would gag at putting up Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller to attack the Devlin Commission and its Report. They have rejected the Report because it told the truth about conditions in Nyasaland, and they rely instead on a dispatch by a Governor who has been shown, point by point, not merely to be unfit for his job but to have produced (in the March 18 White Paper) a document so improper, in its use of tampered-with evidence and statements one of which at least the Report shows to be simple falsehood, that it makes one wonder whether mere dismissal would be adequate for Sir Robert Armitage. For the Government to do this to the Report of Com- missioners of such high repute, impec- cable conservative background and un- impeachable integrity, would be bad enough. But for the Government to put up a legal chawbacon—with a reputation in his profession so poor that not even Mr. Macmillan, who made Mr. Julian Amery, his son-in-law, a Minister, could bring himself to face the outcry that would have followed if he had appointed Sir Reginald Lord Chief Justice—to attack a Judge with one of the finest minds on the Bench, is something that I really did not think I would live to see.

It has been generally forgotten, and it is my pleasure to recall the fact to mind, that Sir Patrick Devlin and Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller have met before. It was Sir Patrick whose merciless dismant- ling of the prosecution's fantastically in- competent case against Dr. Bodkin Adams finally set the seal on Lord Parker's succession to the Chief Justice- ship. For although of course no prose- cution counsel could have succeeded in 'winning' that case in the face of the evidence that Dr. Adams was innocent (evidence so overwhelming that Dr. Adams was not only very properly acquitted but should never have been charged in the first place), a lawyer with a rather less slender grasp on his brief could at any rate have managed to make himself look less ridiculous than Sir Reginald did on that occasion. No doubt the experience riled the Attorney- General. Nobody likes being made to look a fool in public, particularly when he is one. But even a desire to get some of his own back can hardly ex- cuse the way he tried to smear the Commission's method of work, and to suggest that their hearing of witnesses in groups somehow invalidates the con- clusions to which they came, nor the pathetic way in which he went through the Report, picking out little scraps of comfort for the Government's case, and blandly ignoring the bulk of the docu- ment. And where he could not ignore the document (he did not say a word about the brutality and illegal force that the Commission found had been used by the authorities) he simply contradicted it, leaving us to weigh the respective merits of an impeccably-documented case presented by a leading Judge who had spent five weeks hearing evidence on the one hand, and the totally unsup- ported say-so of a fifth-rate politician on the other.

Replying, Mr. Callaghan opened in fine and powerful form. I remember, when Mr. Alport dragged his nasty little smear across the Stonehouse affair (there has still not been any explanation of where Mr. Alport got the letter he claimed was sent by Mr. Stonehouse to Sir Eldred Hitchcock, which was never in fact writ- ten), Mr. Gaitskell crushingly dismissing both smear and smearcr in nine words —In the course of his foolish and in- adequate speech . . . '. Much the same dismissal was effected by Mr. Callaghan at the beginning of his speech in reply to the Attorney-General.

Nyasaland today lies under a state of emergency. The Congress is disbanded and outlawed. It is forbidden to be- come a member of it. It is forbidden to import certain publications into the territory. Its principal political leaders are under arrest. There is, in the words of the Commission, 'a deep and bitter' gulf between the Government and the people. What contribution does the Attorney-General think that he has made to this situation?

But the question, of course, was rhe- torical. Sir Reginald had not the slightest intention of contributing to the situation. His job was to try and discredit the Commission in the eyes of those who have not read the Report, in order to improve the Conservative Party's elec- toral chances. It was a simple job, and not even Sir Reginald could really go very far wrong in reading out the speech with which he had been supplied by the Colonial Office shortly before he entered the House, though his unfamiliarity with , its contents was manifest from the num- ber of mis-readings and stumblings over words with which his delivery was lit- tered. This being so, Mr. Callaghan's speech, after its brief and effective dis- missal of the windbaggery which he was following, did well to concentrate on setting the Nyasaland scene properly in view—the history of Federation, the present state of the territory and the indications of what form the future will take there. This, indeed, was an indict- ment more damning than any point-by- point rebuttal of the Government's case would have been, for after all, the Gov- ernment did not need Mr. Callaghan or anybody else to show it that its case was dishonest; it knew that already. Mr. Callaghan, in fact, really responded to the breathtakingly hypocritical appeal to be above party politics so often made by a Government which I heard, within the space of 48 hours, defend for electoral reasons both the killing of fifty-one Africans in Nyasa- land and the fraudulent communiqué about the killing of eleven Africans in Kenya.

The back benches produced little of interest on this occasion, though the grossly offensive and partisan language used by the Speaker to Mr. Stonehouse is worthy of remark. Mr. Bevan, eloquent and passionate, yet very re- strained, summed up for honour and the Opposition. He went to the heart of the matter when he spoke of the 'squalid Parliament' that had come to an end in 1956, but had been kept alive ever since to restore the political fortunes of the Tory Party. The Colonial Secretary re- plied. Then the Conservative Party marched through the lobby for dis- honour and political pickings, and the squalid Parliament came to an end in fact as well as in theory.

But there were moments during the long previous night, when the Hola Camp massacre (they called it a tragedy, a disaster, and an incident, and a Mr. Peel went so far as to compare it to a railway accident) was discussed until three in the morning, when I really felt (as I did not during the Devlin Report debate) that Parliament did occasionally

justify its existence. There was Mrs. Castle's massive and unanswerable speech, delivered in a voice that was throughout very close to tears but in words that eschewed emotion and con- centrated on the relentless facts. There was Mr. George Thomas, who led the same Mr. Peel into defining 'sub- human' (a word he had used to describe the murdered Africans) as meaning, roughly, rejection by one's fellows, and then said, quietly and sadly, 'If that is the test for being called sub-human, the hon. Gentleman does not ask for very much'. There was Mr. Leslie Hale's des- cription of the very same Mr. Peel as having made a speech 'which Captain Ramsay would not have made in his

worst moments'. (It is fashionable among Tories today to forget Captain Ramsay, so perhaps I may just remind anybody who needs reminding that he was the Fascist blackguard who was elected and sat happily as a Conservative MP until he had to be imprisoned under Regulation 18b, and who celebrated his release at the end of the war by intro- ducing a Private Members' Bill to com- pel Jews in this country to wear large yellow patches on their backs, as under the Nazis in Germany.) There was mi.. Hale's charming aphorism, 'if one im- prisons a man for twenty-two years it does not improve his temper'. And, above all, there was Mr. Enoch Powell.

There were moments when I did not expect to hear Mr. Powell at all. Although he rose every time a speaker sat down, he was not called by the Chair until there was no other. Con- servative Member who wished to speak; the various occupants of the Chair even called ahead of him some who had not been present throughout the debate but had entered the Chamber long after he had. Indeed, it was noticeable, and curi- ous, that both Sir Charles MacAndrew (the Deputy-Speaker) and Sir Gordon Touche (the Deputy-Chairman), both of whom were in the Chair when it was in equity Mr. Powell's turn, looked fixedly away from Mr. Powell's place (he sits at the upper, or Chair, end of the Cham- ber) as he bounced dramatically and quite unmissably up each time. The upshot was that Mr. Powell was not called until 1.15 in the morning, and his speech consequently missed being re- ported in all the early editions of the newspapers and indeed some of the later ones. This is doubtless a coincidence, but it is a disturbing one, as is the fact that no Liberal speaker was called in the Devlin debate, though there was a Liberal amendment on the paper and Mr. Roderick Bowen remained in the Chamber throughout, rising on everY occasion. Still, Mr. Powell was worth waiting all night for. Pale as paper, he spoke with huge and moving emphasis of the 'fearful doctrine' that the quality and character of the murdered men can diminish the responsibility of those who killed them, or through whose negligence they were killed.

For it was that same doctrine that was on trial throughout both days, as it is on trial now throughout the whole of Africa. The brutal truth is, as Mrs. Castle pointed out, that too manY

Tories . . instinctively, sincerely and genuinely, without even being aware of it . . . do not believe that an Africall life is as important as a white man's life'. It is on that refusal to believe that British policy in Africa is foundering. After these last days, one can only hope that belief may come before it is too late for all of us. More practically, one hopes that it comes before the Govern- ment wins the Election.

TAPEg