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THE Daily Mail since Suez—when, after wobbling for a day or two, it decided that its duty was to follow its readers and support the invasion—has been in a state of inferiority-complex jingoism Which would do credit to the smallest and most xenophobic banana republic. This would not matter if there were not good reason to believe that it was still giving its readers the views they Wanted to read, i.e., their own. On Tuesday the Mail excelled itself. Under the heading 'Impossible Men' it devoted its leader to Archbishop Makarios and President Nasser. 'Both are the kind of impos- sible characters devoid of tolerance, balance, com- promise and humanity. . . In view of his failure to denounce terrorism it is legitimate to accuse Makarios of lack of humanity, but however much the Mail may dislike Nasser what possible evi- dence has it got for saying he is not humane? As Desmond Stewart points out in his perceptive if rather scrappy account of how Egypt came to be What she is today, Young Egypt (Wingate, 18s.), the Egyptian revolution has been singularly blood- less; Nasser cannot therefore be accused of .
YPocrisy when in the course of a very revealing interview he told Stewart that he did not admire anton or Robespierre because they were `too bl oodshedding' but that he admired Voltaire. To return to the Daily Mail article, it described 'our withdrawal from Egypt' as 'one of the greatest acts of self-abnegation in history.' The greatest, indeed, since Lord Kemsley abnegated control of the Daily Sketch to Lord Rothermere.
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