AT WESTMINSTER
R. BEVIN and Mr. Chuter Ede have played the " lead " on alternate nights. Mr. Bevin was in his familiar role of the realistic well-wisher of European union (functional brand and no federal nonsense). Mr Chuter Ede had been cast at short notice for the part of a ministerial Ajax defying Labour lightning on the " Peace " congress. He lent to the role robustness and humour. It was a romantic rather than classical interpretation. A Foreign Secretary in these days is a man who occasionally breaks off veritable Pauline journeyings and looks in at the House of Commons to see how the old place is getting on. Unhappily, illness has reduced even these occasional visits almost to nil in Mr. Bevin's case. This Parliament has entered its second session and yet Mr. Bevin is nearly a stranger to it. For the House, then, to have him all to itself for one whole day, as it did on Monday, was wonderful.
First, he made his statement on the Russian overture for four- power talks and then remained on the front bench throughout the ensuing debate on the Council of Europe, replying on it in a speech of half-an-hour. His mood was quiet, at times pianissimo, on both occasions. It was only towards the end of his winding-up speech that one began to suspect that the mood was probably enforced. He has never had any affection for the European unity movement of Mr. Churchill and his English and continental associates, and he complained that it had hampered his own efforts to promote the success of the Council of Europe. He even accused it of " semi- sabotage." A charge of that kind by Mr. Bevin would have been accompanied with thunders a couple of years ago. Instead, he launched it on the air as a quiet parenthesis. It was not to be expected that Mr. Churchill could receive it as such even if it was not to be expected that he would go so far in retort as to cry from his seat : " Your are the arch-saboteur." That was strong stuff and one looked at once for the riposte which Mr. Bevin would have delivered with full lungs and high passion a little while ago. He let it pass. It is clear he is in better trim than he was but he is still fighting—and how pluckily—against no small physical handicap. It does not require that light, amiable voice of his to tell you that, for all his bustling ways, he is fundamentally the most genial soul on the Treasury bench as well as its greatest personality.
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Others have provided their thumbnail sketches of Mr. Chuter Ede. Mr. Churchill once found aldermanic virtues in him ; the
leader of Opposition was a little cross at the time. Mr. Silverman has made the discovery—and he seemed enraptured to announce it—that Mr. Ede is a good Radical rather than a Socialist. This hardly amounted to revelation, and the label could be fixed to some others among Mr. Ede's colleagues. However, as they say in the House of Lords, Mr. Ede " cracked down " on him in that faintly surly voice of his: "I was a Socialist before you were born." So much for labels. There was no denying his conviction that his policy on the Sheffield congress was right and democratic. No one with any doubts about it could have made such a confident, robust and frequently humorous fight of it. Mr. Churchill had at first offered strong criticism of Mr. Ede's methods—not his policy—and he continued to do so, but in increasingly weaker language, prob- ably because this opinion was not being shared by his followers who, with the exception of Lord Hinchingbrooke, were behind the Home Secretary on policy and method.
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Lord Hinchingbrooke becomes an interesting case. The old critic of national savings, already out of sympathy with his party on rearmament, now came down strongly against the Home Secretary, presented a criticism of him on all fours with that of Mr. Silverman and exhibited great scorn for Mr. Ede's want of faith in the propa- ganda-proof qualities of the British people. The whole was wound up with a most apposite quotation from Pericles' funeral oration. Not long ago the Labour benches could hardly bear to listen to Lord Hinchingbrooke. Mr Ede's Labour critics now enveloped him in a look of " wonder, love and praise." It was a genuine tribute
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