What is now called the 'Easter Peace March' was a
confused—and confusing—event this year. I was grateful to The Times for this detail : Perhaps more significant than any demonstration was the sight of the campaign's public relations officer chatting with his opposite number from the USAF headquarters as they watched the marchers pass.
Evidence, perhaps, that the march is being institutionalised and traditionalised in the English way, and that it will in a foreseeable space of time take its place with the pancake race at Olney, Bucks, as a mellow part of the English social scene. The softening touch of the PR man is at work. But in fact it was the distinguished absentees from the march who most needed the services of a skilful public relations officer. Such ministers as Mr. Frank Cousins, for example, must be fretting terribly about their anti-nuclear image, and the damage done to it by their en- forced absence and their enforced silence. No wonder Mr. Cousins is suffering—or so I read in a remarkable eulogy of his prowess as Minister of Technology in the Sunday Times—an 'agony of conscience.' One thinks of George Lansbury, and how Ernest Bevin destroyed him with a savage accusation that he was 'hawking his conscience' around the Labour Party, Of course, Mr. Cousins is in some ways a more resistant figure than Lansbury : and where is today's Bevin?
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