A Spectator's Notebook
`I MUST REPEAT,' the Prime Minister told the Conservative Party Con- gress, 'that the problem of Cyprus is not a colonial but an inter- national question.' I wish he had acted on this assumption earlier: he could then have prevented the Colonial Secretary from making the idiotic reference the day before to 'Turkey's Offshore Island.' Cyprus is no more Turkey's offshore island than Britain is France's offshore island : even if it were, it was asking for trouble in the present lamentable state of Greco-Turkish rela- tions to use so loaded a phrase. In any case, if Mr. Macmillan wants to put the problem on to an international level, he should take it out of the hands of the Colonial Office altogether. No- body now pretends that Cyprus can ever again be a colony: either it will become a dependency, occupied by British forces and ruled in effect by the military, or it will be put under some form of international trusteeship. Whatever the island's fate, there is certainly no point in leaving it in the charge of Mr. Lennox-Boyd, who has shown himself conspicuously incapable of dealing with it.
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