NEWS OF THE WEEK
IT is perhaps a pity that the debate on Mr. Strachey's now notorious Colchester speech should have turned so largely on the question of whether the speaker's admitted use of the word " plot " represented an attack on the Schuman Plan and all such schemes or on the Conservative Opposition in the House of Com- mons. As to that, Mr. Strachey's insistence that he introduced the " plot " passage with a sentence referring to a discussion in the House and Tory tactics there has to be measured against the equal insistence of several qualified reporters present at the meeting that he used no such words. All that can be said about that is that a speaker's memory is sometimes genuinely confused between what he meant to say and what he actually did say, and that the reporters would be considerably less than competent if they let what is plainly a salient sentence slip past them unobserved. The real charge against the Colchester speech is that it represented an attitude to the Schuman Plan totally different from the attitude of the Govern- ment as defined by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons. Mr. Attlee generously endeavoured on Tuesday to minimise the difference, but no one putting his speech and Mr. Strachey's side by side could ignore it for a moment. Mr. Strachey, of course, is fully entitled to hold views of his own on the Schuman Plan or any other question, but the Secretary of State for War figures among Ministers of Cabinet rank, and the rule recognised among Cabinet Ministers—that whatever anyone of them may think, he must not, while a Minister, give expression to views discordant with the Government's—must apply here. Mr. Attlee, while defending Mr. Strachey on some points, was compelled to join issue with him on others. If he had rated the differences higher, consequences would have necessarily followed which as Prime Minister he presumably does not desire. Mr. Strachey—and the Government—have ridden this particular storm, but the episode has ministered to the latter's prestige as little as Dr. Dalton's Brown Book escapade.
