Ian Gilmour
Ian Gilmour, who was, as is well-known to readers, the owner of The Spectator which he had bought from Sir Evelyn Wrench from 1954 until 1967, has the sincere good wishes of the paper in his due promotion to the Cabinet as Minister of Defence. Though he built up a reputation as an apologist for the Arab cause before he entered elective politics and still later when the Party was in opposition, this was small comfort for the extremists of Arab nationalism and traders in anti-Israeli sentiment. Before the Suez attack, which The Spectator under Gilmour opposed, there was the Gaza clash, and in March 1955, a leader stated that though the raid was so far on the Egyptian side of the border the "ultimate guilt is largely Egypt's. The tone of outraged innocence that Egypt had adopted would carry more conviction if she paid even nominal attention to the request of the Israeli government for peace talks."
Good health and a general election permitting Ian Gilmour should give some needed intellectual lift and a lack of stuffiness to a Cabinet that appears to suffer from that odd combination, an excess of rigidity yet lack of orthodoxy. Scepticism and empiricism are the foundations of conservatism is the view held by Gilmour and still fully shared by the paper. On a more personal level Ian Gilmour is probably too generous a spirit to get satisfaction from the toadying sycophancy he is beginning to receive from certain members of the press (seeing themselves perhaps as some Edward Marsh or Keeper of the Stairs should he rise further) who, when Gilmour was with The Spectator, missed few opportunities for calumny and the denigratory remark.
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