A Spectator's Notebook
EVERY TIME A ministerial reshuffle is pending (and few have been as vigorously 'leaked' in advance as this one) the mind leaps to two names, with the inevitability that the tongue leaps to explore a cavitied tooth before a visit to the dentist : Sir Reginald Manninghath-Buller and Dr. Charles Hill. We can breathe again : they have been left at their posts. Who could replace them? Sir Reginald (like Sydney Smith's friend) has defied the Newtonian laws : he has risen by his gravity. Great must be the confidence his legal acumen inspires in his colleagues, that they are prepared to put up with his parliamentary performances; I can think of no Minister whose departure would be more regretted by the benches opposite. Dr. Hill, too (though be has risen by his levity), is a contra-Newtonian figure. I always visualise him as a kind of political Pyecraft—the character in the H. G. Wells story who-.tried to lose weight and reduced himself down to a lower specific gravity than the surrounding atmosphere. That is how I see Dr. Hill, floating above the Cabinet table—moored to it, perhaps, like a captive balloon—advising Ministers below on how not to let the public know more than is good for us (and how to sugar that); circling the chandelier, among the cigar smoke, airy, insub- stantial. . . . I really do not know what they would do withouthim.
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