Portrait of the Week
THE AUGUST 1RADF FIGURES showed a deficit of £52 million, an increase of £47 million over July, a deficit which was described by Mr. Douglas Jay as 'pretty good . . . the import figures were swollen by an exceptional increase in food im- ports.' We were, in truth, eating, drinking, and smoking more, and rampant materialism was still on the increase. Mr. George Brown, to a fanfare of carefully-synchronised trumpets, announced the master blueprint of Labour's policies for the economy, THE PLAN, but for the time being, at any rate, what seemed much more important
than Munchhausenish economic grand designs was the fact that gnomes all over the world were buy- ing sterling, spot and forward. As Jack Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, once remarked, 'In- terest never lies.'
AFTER DAYS of increasing military stalemate between India and Pakistan, U Thant departed from the sub-continent acknowledging temporary defeat in his peace-making mission. The Chinese defence minister, Marshal Lin Piao, announced that Peking hopes to encircle and destroy the West by promoting 'people's wars' in Asia, Africa and Latin America, a plan which Mr. Walter Lipp- mann compared with Hitler's idea of a thousand- year Reich. At home the search for a Speaker for the Commons continued, with party manoeuvring which would have done credit to the age of Walpole or Newcastle; the Tories firmly plumped for Labour's Dr. Horace King. and the Liberal Mr. 'Roddy' Bowen, QC, sent word from the bench in the Cardiff quarter sessions that he had nothing to say to'the gentlemen of the press. The situation produced the most endearing head- line of the week in the Guardian: 'No Hawking of Speakership—Labour.' Meanwhile, Mr. Wilson (as the Daily Mail put it) had his old chuckle muscle kidded by the Chief of the Diddy men --Mr. Ken Dodd, the comedian from the jam- Indy mines of Knotty Ash.
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GHOULS RIPPED OPEN the grave of Gcrtie Miller, the Gaiety Girl, Walsall leaped forward in Divi- sion III, and, turning to frivial things, the Daily Express announced that a Canadian beaver named 'Flip' had escaped from the Zoo and was en- sconced on an island in the canal at Maida Vale. Cathy McGowan's super-pop show Ready, Steady, Go! got the old chopper for the end of the year, while Mr. D. B. Lockhart of Cheltenham wrote to The Times that the British habit of taking Mediterranean holidays may be indicative of some, weakening of the national character and 'an un- willingness to face up to the challenges of life.' Memo to planmaster Mr. George Brown—a ban on travel south of (say) latitude 45° North?
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