IT IS ALL very well to talk about the majesty
of English law, but any ass knows perfectly well that even magistrates must turn a blind eye from time to time. No doubt if the people responsible in the Oxford Street shop had known who it was they had on their hands, the charge against Nina Ponomareva would have been dropped with appropriately hypocritical (i.e. diplomatic) apologies before the 'due process' had lumbered off on its inexorable course. The Russians, for their part, were quick off the mark to equal us in heavy- handedness with all their ridiculous talk about provocation. But it is the police, rather than the law which they enforce on the Russians, who take the palm for asininity. Instead of doing the sensible thing and turning their backs while Miss Ponomareva made her getaway, they had themselves photo- graphed clambering portentously in and out of aircraft in search of the lady. All this was in the worst tradition of British boobydom, and it would not have taken a Sherlock Holmes to find a solution. After all, it has not been apparent that Its Majesty The Law has suffered from a shortage of blind eyes lately—in Soho for example. And what sort of majesty is it that tips the wink to the Daily Express, so that it can have a photographer on the spot not merely at the time of Mrs. Richardson's rearrest, but half an hour before?
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