A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
HE disclosures in Sir Austen Chamberlain's memoirs T . in the Daily Telegraph have attracted singularly little notice. The story they tell of the proposed arrangement for depriving this country of a Cabinet altogether in the • early . months of 1919 is really amazing. Mr. Lloyd George, it appears, offered Sir Austen the. Chancellorship . of the Exchequer without a seat in the Cabinet, explaining that there could be no Cabinet at home when the Prime Minister, Mr. Bonar. Law, and the Foreign Secretary (Mr. Balfour) . were all in Paris. " His idea," says Sir Austen, " had been not to appoint any Cabinet." Mr. Bonar Law, however, was only to stay in Paris for a few days, coming home to be Acting Prime Minister and to consult such individual Ministers as might be necessary, without ever meeting them as a whole in Cabinet. The King, it is not surprising to learn, was " gravely dis- turbed " at the whole proposal, and ultimately, of course, it came to nothing. That the idea should ever . have been entertained is astonishing ; that nothing should have been heard of it (for I believe nothing has) for sixteen years is hardly less so.
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