Westminster Commentary
HERE we are again, happy as can be; thirty Scottish questions first, so Taper's having tea. Brushing the crumbs from his elegant lapels, Taper returned just in time to hear Mr. Butler, giggling like—well, like Mr. Butler—say, 'Naturally, leaks are un- desirable.' Mr. Butler was talking, as it happens, about the forthcoming announcement of Har- well's progress in the generation of neutrons from.. the successful fusion of heavy hydrogen atoms (the things I have to know about to understand these fellows!), but it was noticeable that the laughter which greeted this remark—for even MPs knew that publication of the Bank Rate Tribunal report was due within a matter of minutes—was not shared by Mr. Gaitskell. True, Mr. G may have picked up a cold on his travels, but I think that his greyish tinge had a rather more probable psychosomatic explanation. Besides, there was a notable absentee from the Opposition Front Bench; Mr. Harold Wilson was nowhere to be seen, Marshal Bigmouth clearly having decided that an announcement of the Tribunal's findings might provoke Lieutenant-Colonel Bromley- Davenport (a former heavyweight boxing cham- pion, and no respecter of persons) to nip across the Chamber and fetch him a crack on the lug- hole. There were other absentees, too; though Horatio Thorneycroft was there, as usual looking like an advertisement for after-shave lotion, Herminius and Spurius Lartius were not in evi- dence. Indeed, one whose authority is not to be questioned by mere mortals informed me that he had earlier seen Mr. Birch on the District Line, complete with a new hat, a fur collar, a cigar and a look of intense distaste on his face as the train arrived at Westminster. Nor had Herminius shown any signs of getting out of it.
Still, before the Vote Office opened its doors for business, there was the Home Office to be attended to. Whenever the Home Office says that one of it decisions is 'in principle, correct,' you may be sure that the decision is obviously and totally wrong in principle and in practice, and that any action taken as a result of it was carried out in a particularly disgraceful manner. The case of the Hungarian refugee stowaways seems to have been a classic demonstration of this theorem, and Mr. Butler's tortuous statement was as grudging an anzende as one would expect from his per- manent officials. No grounds could be found for departing from the original refusal to let them stay; however, since one of the women was expect- ing a baby any hour, she could stay until it was born; however, since she would not be fit to travel for some weeks afterwards, it would not be appro- priate any longer to treat her family as stowaways awaiting removal, so they could stay; however, no such considerations applied to the other families in the group; however, as it would be difficult to discriminate among three families who 'arrived in identical circumstances' (Mr. Butler had just been explaining that the circumstances were entirely different) they could all stay after all; however,' this was not to be taken as a prece- lent; however, a review of the machinery for !eating with such cases is to be undertaken. Mr. Butler sat down to mingled laughter and cheers; am quite sure that his officials, in their loose-box behind the Speaker's chair, had no idea what the laughter was about. If explanations are required for the desuetude, not to say contempt, into which Parliament has fallen, those seeking them might do worse than examine this kind of incident. And an examination of it should not ignore the typical bit of Home Office slipperiness contained in the reply to Mr. Greenwood's charge (one of several) that the police had not produced written authority for their action; the reply was that they had 'pro- duced their warrant card.' A policeman's warrant card is nothing but his identity card, and has nothing whatever to do with warrants or any other kind of authority.
However, at four o'clock the coins began rattling merrily on the Vote Office counter; busi- ness, I am informed, was brisk. This is not sur- prising; and not all the Opposition's agility in attempting to shift their fire to a different target is going to conceal the fact that their original aim was over the hills and far away. Nor is it going to gloss over the unpalatable truth that Marshal Bigmouth, from a vantage-point behind those two unlovely stalking-horses, parliamentary privilege and Sir Leslie Plummer, wronged Mr. Oliver Poole in a manner which, if this particular Par- liament were not the decrepit thing it is, would have the word 'expulsion' rising above the hum of conversation in the corridors.
But one of the salient features of the Tribunal landscape is the worthlessness of all the evidence other than that which was adduced in the course of the inquiry—the worthlessness, in other Words, of the evidence produced by those who were keenest on the scent of a leak in the first place. Chief among these was the Daily Express, whose representatives, appearing before the Tribunal, demonstrated, if they demonstrated nothing else, that the late Chancellor was quite right not to bother to include them among the journalists he briefed on the day before the Bank rate rose. The Express, which has been crabbing the South Pole expedition ever since the Daily Mail scooped it, saw fit to devote the entire top half of Wednes- day's issue to a gigantic picture of the meeting between Dr. Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary. Tucked beneath it, with a tiny heading, were some six inches about the Report; the Express was the only newspaper that did not make it its main headline news. Inside, the leading article de- clared, 'If it had not been for this newspaper's , persistent reports . . . there would not have been an Inquiry at all. . . . The reports of journalists were severely attacked during the hearings. Yet the broad accuracy of these reports was borne out by exacter knowledge. . . . This newspaper . . has been completely justified by events.' One can see why the Express was not keen to draw attention to the publication of the Report. Any- one who saw the merciless dismantling of the Express witnesses during the Tribunal (in particu- lar Mr. Frederick Ellis, their City Editor) will be able to translate 'the broad accuracy of these re- ports was borne out by exacter knowledge' into t le rather more grammatical English of 'there was not a word of truth in any of our allegations.' The desire of the Daily Express to protect its employees is laudable, no doubt; but it cannot disguise the fact that Mr. Ellis printed a series of wholly unsupported rumours, served up with a dressing of what even he was eventually forced to describe as 'journalistic licence' (whatever that might be), and printed them as facts.
Although no other newspaper showed up so badly before the Tribunal, none of them came off with any credit. Still, the treatment of the news- paper representatives does raise one or two points. It seems unfortunately probable, to begin with, that someone once told Mr. Rodger Winn that he is Dickensian, for, striking poses of positively Fezziwigian absurdity, he went after the scrib- blers like a last-hope defence barrister trying to shake Sir Bernard Spilsbury. It was clear from the outset that the newspaper rumour-mongers were going to be discredited as far as it lay within the power of the questioners to achieve that dubiously necessary aim. (Though the Attorney- General, adding his expected touch of blethering idiocy, remarked after the massacre of Mr. Ellis, 'There has . . . been no attack made on this wit- ness.') But it was Mr. Gardiner, in his unsuccess- ful request to be allowed to represent Mr. Ellis, who put his finger on a vital point. It is worth quoting his remarks at length.
I suppose the two questions from the point of view of the public are, who was it who sold, if anyone, and, if so, what information did they have? The bearing on that of the evidence of these different representatives of the press may seem somewhat obscure, but one must assume that since they are called they are called to relate to the questions which the Tribunal has to consider, though one would perhaps have ap- prehended that the first witnesses to be called would be witnesses who would say who it was sold and what information they had.
To this the Chairman replied: . . . The press are called because they were the people who brought the matter to light and it is only from the press and tracing back to jobbers and stockbrokers that they talked to that we can ever hope to elucidate the facts of this case. What we are aiming to get at are actual deals, as you suggest, but we must work backwards.
And Mr. Gardiner replied to this singularly lame explanation : 1 apprehend there could be no difficulty in ascertaining whether sales took place and, if so, who it was who sold, or, secondly, what in- formation those who sold had. . . .
Mr. Gardiner was, of course, quite right, and Lord Justice Parker's intervention still seems quite meaningless. There never was the slightest necessity to 'work backwards,' and, indeed, work- ing backwards made things both more difficult and worse. Nor is this all. Far more important is the whole question of the conduct of the questioning at this sort of Tribunal. The task of the questioners is twofold : first, to take the witnesses through their depositions, so that what they assert may be put in evidence, and then to cross-examine them upon it. In a civil or criminal case in a court of law there is a lawyer to attend to each of these functions. In a Tribunal, however, one man in his time must play both parts. This seems to me impossible, and it would still seem to me impossible even if the Attorney-General with whom we are currently blessed were a lawyer of incomparably greater stature and ability than he in fact is. Much has been made of the schizophrenic tendencies to which men like Lord Kindersley must be subject in their dual role as directors of the Bank of England and of other companies. Far worse is the position of the Attorney-General before a Tribunal of Inquiry. He and his juniors were in the position, again and again, of first leading a witness and then cross-examining him. Inevitably this dual role was impossible to sustain successfully. Not even Capablanca could play himself at chess (still less, one might add, anyone who scarcely knows the difference between a Queen's Gambit Declined and Five No Trumps). One result was that, in evitably, some parts of the ground remained un- covered (for example, almost all the, journalists were asked whether, having seen the Chancellor, they had come to the conclusion that the Bank rate might be about to rise, but this question was not asked of Mr. Richard Fry, of the Manchester Guardian, the only one who had formed such an opinion). There is good reason, after this in quiry, to consider whether some change in the procedure is not desirable.
However, the points of legal procedure, like the findings of the Tribunal themselves, are begin- fling to recede. The political issues are now goint, to grow larger. Owing to the way in which the Prime Minister handled the whole affair, it is going to be difficult for the Tories to use the Report either to shore up confidence in the Government or to damage the Opposition. As said a long time ago, many good folk in the saloon bar are now firmly convinced that the en- tire Government has for years been robbing the Bank of England, and nothing is going to shake them out of that opinion. And the Labour Party, committed against the will of some of its leading lights to the kind of campaign Mr. Wilson waged is now going to do its damnedest to pretend tha the most important political issues are those ol part-time directorships and the briefing of jour. nalists. They are wrong; and many a Tory going to point this out. No wonder that Mr. G when he rose to ask for a debate as early a! possible, looked grey and stricken; and no wondet that Mr. Butler, referring him to the usual channels, looked as happy as Mr. Butler ever does Though, of course, his look may have beer caused by the _news that the Hungarian womar refugee, when her baby is born, is going to cal it after him. And, now I come to think of it Mr. G's apparent anguish might (very under. standably) have been provoked by the jar to hi5 msthetic senses contained in the thought that is a few days' time there may be a tiny, howling British subject named Rab Farkas.
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