Sir Alec
Sir: — Many will endorse, and mostly rightly, what Patrick Cosgrave writes about Sir Alec Douglas Home's character and personality. That he is an extremely nice and honest man is unquestionably true. It is. however, possible, as we all know, to be both these and at times to be seriously wrong. Only can one endorse your contributor's assessment of Sir Alec's r6le at the time of Munich, for example, as 'a humble functionary', if one is prepared to accept — as I am not — that this can ever describe an M.P. without greatly detracting from his status and duty as a constituency representative at Westminster. For it depicts him as having,and showing, no independence as an individual. To describe Sir Alec thus therefore not only depersonalises him and is uncomplimentary, but it portrays him as being a man without a will or any ideas of his own at a time of
was wrong about unTeqhuaatlledsircriAsliesc.
Munich is now widely recognised. That he was wrong over Suez, which goes unmentioned by Patrick Cosgrove, is today almost universally agreed. Honest as he doubtless was in each case, but with a judgment dangerously bad, one finds it hard to go along with any one who can assert that Sir Alec has been the finest Foreign Secretary of this century. He has creditably done quite a bit recently to atone for the Suez disaster when he was not inaccurately described as a 'first in, first out man' in a wholly unjustified war. And if today Arab confidence in Britain is largely restored this owes quite a lot to a reversal of attitude on his part. But all of what I say must be taken into account before it becomes possible to agree with the main conclusions set out by Patrick Cosgrave in an over
biased a T C. Steffington-Lodge article.
5 Pours Grove, Brighton
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