—Portrait of the Week-
TA-TA-TA, TA-TA-TA, ta-ta-tiddle-ti-tum-pom-pom. Tchaikovsky never dreamed of providing the music for a pas seal of the kind that Dame Margot Fonteyn has been dancing this week—and this despite the fact that it is still not clear precisely what kind of a dance she has been leading the Panamanian Government. For some hours the great assoluta was languishing in a prison cell overlooking (just to add to the dreamlike quality of the whole business) a Chinese cemetery; but she was released and allowed to leave the country.
THE ELECTION LIGHTS on Fortinbras, or if not on Fortinbras apparently on the autumn. Publication of the Finance Bill, with its twenty-eight clauses, indicated that it would not be law until July, short of some high-class jiggery-pokery on the part of the Government. This virtually precludes an elec- tion before the end of September. Besides, Sir David Eccles is going to Russia in May.
IN ALGERIA, the advocates of postponed elections took rather stronger steps than tabling a compli- cated Finance Bill, which included throwing bombs about. Six people were killed and sixty injured, and the elections went ahead anyway. There was more news from other parts of the world where they have elections of .a type to cause raised eyebrows; the Chinese denounced the Dalai Lama's state- ment, made on arrival at his place of refuge in India, as a tissue of lies, but were careful to go on insisting that he was acting under duress. And in South Africa, the farce of the Treason Trial took another turn when the revised indictment against sixty-one of the accused was quashed for uncertainty. This still left thirty of the original defendants accused, to say nothing of the South African Government.
AFTER SOME DAYS of speculation, Mr. Christian Herter was, as expected, confirmed as Secretary of State in succession to Mr. Dulles. and the President did twenty-four holes in a single day. Mr. Herter was not inclined to change the policy of keeping the air route into Berlin Open at all heights, and the British Foreign Office, pressed to disagree, cautiously replied that there was no agreed 'ceiling' and that American aircraft might fly into Berlin at any height they pleased. Meanwhile. Herr Brandt, Mayor of Berlin, flew to Britain. and the Bolshoi Ballet to New York; it is not known; in
either case, at what height. • *
BRITISH OVERSEAS AIRWAYS CORPORATION expressed itself astonished at the recommendation made to the American Civil Aeronautics Board that the Corporation should not be allowed to fly from San Francisco to Tokyo via Hong Kong; there was much talk of stifling competition, and the Dutch, who have been refused (at the instance of the British Overseas Airways Corporation) the right to fly KLM aircraft to Singapore, were reported to be laughing fit to bust.
*
THE OIL CONGRESS in Cairo heard some fighting talk from a Mr. Hyndrex—not a toothpaste but an American adviser to the Saudi-Arabian director of petroleum affaiks—who suggested that the governments of oil-producing States had the right to break their contracts with the oil concessionaries if they felt that their public interest would be served thereby. There was a good deal of discus- sion of this thesis, but surprisingly little agreement with it, and the galvanic leap forward made by the clock on the Shell-Mex building was declared to have been caused by the arrival of British Summer Time, and not by shock.
Previous page
