A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK L ORD CRANBORNE, the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs,
is by all accounts laying the foundations of a solid reputation in the House of Commons (though it will be his fate some day to be translated to the Lords). On the now frequent occasions when he answers for the Foreign Office at question time he displays a tact and authority rare in Junior Ministers. He is also developing into the type of speaker that can be trusted to wind up a difficult debate with the necessary confidence and resource. His success is a little surprising even to his friends, for he is essentially a shy and diffident man, who when he was on the back benches spoke seldom and under an obvious sense of strain. But before he took office he had had four years as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Mr. Eden and in that capacity attended many international conferences. He has thus acquired the assurance that comes with real knowledge of the background of every subject at issue. It is, of course, a notable example of hereditary talent, for Lord Cranborne is a grandson of the great Lord Salisbury, and Lord Cecil is his uncle. Mr. Eden and Lord Cranborne, both young men, and close friends, form an admirable partnership.
Mr. Lloyd George was of course the predestined speaker at the celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Dr. Clifford, for no man could better frame the speech such an occasion calls for. They were great combatants together in the Education Bill controversies at the beginning of the century. It was then that L. G. said, " You could ring a coin on the conscience of John Clifford," a phrase that had a boomerang quality when the two men differed after 1916. Fierce fighter though he was, Dr. Clifford was uniformly charitable in his private judgements. I only remember one exception to that. I was speaking to him of a religious leader still living. " Ah yes," he said, " but of course X is consti- tutionally incapable of intellectual honesty." I leave the identity of X to be divined, in the confidence that it will not be.
I read of the death of Dr. Bernhard von Billow, the permanent head of the German Foreign Office, and a nephew of the famous Chancellor, with great regret. Billow was to me (though not, I know, to many people) an attractive figure—austere, rather stiff, but completely human when once his reserve was broken down. He was unmarried, and devoted his Vacation to such sports as ski-ing and canoeing. It was apparently a canoeing expedition which brought on the illness that proved fatal. Before the advent of the Nazis he would have been ranked rather as a man of the Right, with a defensive Nationalism that was almost aggressive, but the revolution which moved nearly everything did not move him, and he remained as a restraining influence in the Wilhelm- strasse. In some ways it might have been more comfortable for him to have taken an Embassy abroad, but that would have involved his definitely representing the Nazi regime. He was never ready to do that, and as a Civil Servant he never had to face the necessity. He will almost certainly be succeeded by Dr. Dieckhoff, who was for many years Counsellor at the German Embassy in London.
• * * Lord William Cecil, who went twenty years ago to the See of Exeter straight from the family living at Hatfield, was of the Bishops who devote themselves to the affairs of their dioceses rather than of those who aspire to a national role. Even there he was not conspicuous as an administrator, but he was held in regard and affection to a quite unusual degree both by clergy and laity. He was a true—almost a great — e1rlavco7ros.. He had great sorrows, for three of his sons were killed in the War and one of his three daughters died later. He was the third marquess' second son, and older therefore than Viscount Cecil and Lord Hugh. Stories of his notorious absent-mindedness abound. One which serves as well as any other (and is, I believe, true) is of a ticket- collector who asked for the Bishop's ticket when he was travelling somewhere in Devon. Lord William searched for it in vain, and the collector, who, of course, recognised him, urged that there was no need at all to produce it. The Bishop insisted, the collector protested, and the Bishop then explained, with irrefutable logic, that if he could not find his ticket he could not tell where he was going. • * * The fact that next Tuesday is the anniversary of the Roehm " blood-bath " in 1934 lends some interest to the rumours current on the Continent of the intentions of the R.R. (Roehm Rae/le—Revenge Roehm) organisa- tion. Credited (no doubt with considerable exaggera- tion) with a membership of some 20,000, this terrorist secret society is believed to be responsible for a number of mysterious murders of S.S. and. S.A. men in Germany, and an attempt at a more spectacular coup on June 80th is talked of. But the odds are against it, for no one has ever questioned the efficiency of the German secret police. * * * Mr. Baldwin made one cryptic allusion in his sanctions speech in the House of Commons on Tuesday : " There is only one man living—and I regret that he is not in the House—who could devise a formula which would satisfy the Italians that sanctions were being raised and the League of Nations Union that they were being intensi- fied." The interpretation depends on whether " not in the House " means not a Member, or not in the Chamber at the moment. I gather most of the Prime Minister's hearers thought the latter, and fitted the cap on Mr. Lloyd George's head: * * * *
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- JANUS.
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