--- Portrait of the .Week—
NORMAL PROCESSES OF CONSULTATION AGAIN: the
Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference was announced for July 8 to 15. Southern Rhodesia's presence or absence was much debated, there were riots and demonstrations by Africans against the banishment of Joshua Nkomo to a remote part of the country, rumblings came from Sir Roy Welensky, and U Thant of the UN intervened. At home the Government announced four by-elec- tions, and Mr. Greville Wynne was exchanged for the Russian spy Gordon Lonsdale.
MUCH TALK ABOUT PROSPERITY : Sir Alec told the voters, 'Don't let prosperity go with Labour'. President de Gaulle told the French not to let prosperity go with inflation. President Johnson told the Americans they were more prosperous than ever. The Government told the chemists they could expect another £3,000,000. Ferranti, the electronics company, made a profit of 63 per cent on the Bloodhound 1 missile (although the Ministry of Aviation had meant it to be only 7 per cent). The miners asked for a 'substantial' wage increase. The Budget, it was said, had put up the cost of living by nine-tenths of a point, and Professor E. N. da C. Andrade calculated that the real cost of whisky is now twenty-six times what it was fifty years ago.
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BRITAIN, AMERICA AND RUSSIA AGREED: they would cut production of materials for nuclear weapons, but without . weakening their military strength. Non-nuclear strength was being brandished in various parts of the world, and in Cyprus Arch- hishop Makarios looked less and less secure in an island where security of any sort grew scarcer.
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THE BLACKOUT RETURNED TO LONDON: fire at Battersea power station darkened a large area, and extinguished the opening night of the BBC's Channel Two. The brave new TV service started up 'next night, however, with fireworks from Southend and an American musical to honour the event. Mr. William Deedes, Minister Without Portfolio, gave a timely denial that the British were a nation of television addicts. He said 50,000 People now hunt regularly, 'including a pack of miners' in Wales.
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LANDMARKS FOR THE FAMOUS: President de Gaulle had an operation for a prostate condition, and Mr. Macmillan, who had greater advance pub- licity for his own operation last autumn, explained that he had refused an earldom because he liked being called Mister. Mr. Khrushchev advised his Juniors not to be frightened of age—`there is nothing terrifying about it', he said on his seventieth birthday. William Shakespeare, born 400 Years ago, was having a world-wide success: among other birthday events were a play called Everybody's Making Money—Except Shakes- Peare, and a quarrel over the provision of a car- park at Stratford. Henry Luce retired as editor of Tnne-Life-Fortune, and Lady Beaverbrook joined the board of Beaverbrook- Newspapers.
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MMEMENr IN ALL DIRECTIONS: two Highland railway lines were reprieved from execution by 1)r• 'leeching, but in London the Mansion House underground station was closed (temporarily) by a bomb hoax. Traffic jams (staged as a Negro 'protest, as well as the ordinary unplanned kind) threatened the New York World's Fair. The Aus- tralian cricketers reached England and went shivering to Lord's, a burglar found his way into the flat of two Beatles, and in California a twelve- Year-old boy rose 3,000 feet in the air hanging from a rope underneath a hot-air balloon which he had been helping to hold down.
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