Portrait of the week
most: PERFIDIOUS French very nearly said 'Non' to the General after all: Sunday's second round of voting left the Gaullists with only a wisp of a majority, Foreign Minister Couvc de Murville was defeated, and the new left-wing alliance flexed its muscles for some purposive opposition. Peace was signed, provisionally at least, between Malta and Britain; Dr Borg Olivier flew home with an agree- ment after Mr Duncan Sandys had intervened with- out, for once, issuing a full statement about it. Troubles followed one upon another at Aden, and there was criticism of a plan to fly in 400 British children to spend the Easter holidays in the thick of them. In Indonesia, President Sukarno was finally stripped of all his powers, and President Johnson prepared to spend the weekend at Guam, dis- cussing future strategy in Vietnam.
eouncs at Westminster were lively and noisy. Three by-elections delivered body-blows to the Government, but although the Tories won the Glasgow Pollok constituency the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists had more to crow about than anyone. Mr Emanuel Shinwell, at eighty-two, re- signed as chairman of the parliamentary Labour party, holding himself ready for fresh battles on the Common Market. Sterling touched its highest point for a year, and a meeting of gnomes and their friends at Basle renewed support arrangements for the pound. Sanctions against Rhodesia, so Mr Ian Smith's deputy calculated, had already cost Britain more than £150 million.
SOUNDS of dissension were heard all t;eck from the London School of Economics, and more than a hundred students were suspended on Wednesday after two all-night 'sit-ins' plus a hunger strike. Stalin's daughter Svetlana asked for asylum in the United States, and Washington feared she might be too embarrassing a refugee to be allowed past the Statue of Liberty. Snow fell in Devon and Corn- wall, but for most of Britain the spring arrived early. An inquiry into the loss of the Cornish pleasure boat Darlwyne with thirty-one lives last summer blamed the skipper (who was drowned) and the owner (who was not aboard). The budget season approached: and the Commons estimates commit- tee discovered that three empty packing cases had been returned from Singapore to England, by air, at a cost of £600 each, which, it thought, sug- gested that 'stricter controls' were needed.
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