Political Commentary
By HENRY FAIRLIE on can leave aside the Daily Mirror, which has now reached the point of billing each great speech by Sir Winston Churchill as 'Positively his Last Appearance,' but there are still others of more serious intent who think that the Prime Minister has ceased to be a useful servant of the State. If they heard, or have read in full, his speech on the hydrogen bomb, they must either revise their opinion or be very deaf to the accents of leadership. Sir Winston Churchill uses oratory for a specific purpose: not to press home an argument or push a policy through, but to create a mood or an attitude., All his great post-war speeches have been designed to this end. His 'Iron Curtain' speech at Fulton created the attitude of mind in the West which for the next seven years was to shape all discus- sions of foreign policy. His famous speech in May, 1953, after Stalin's death, in which he advocated high-level talks with the Soviet Union, created a new attitude, favourable to ideas of co-existence, which in its turn remoulded all subsequent dis- cussion of foreign policy. He rarely, in these speeches, says anything 'new.' Mr. Shinwell was quite right, from that narrow point of view, in saying that there was nothing original in his speech on the hydrogen bomb. BUt he is the great synthesiser. He takes the facts, hopes, fears, doubts, speculations of the day and transmutes them into a single, coherent and intelli- gible challenge to the minds and hcarts of his listeners. This is what he did again on Tuesday. This is leadership on a scale of which no other man alive today is capable—read the re- actions of the world's press, including the headline which Le Figaro gave his speech, 'Meditations on the Theme of the Apocalypse'--and the country cannot afford to dispense with it a tnoment earlier than is necessary. Let all the rumours be true. Perhaps he does tire quicker than before. Perhaps he does nod now and then. There still remains the creative, imagina- tive genius of the man. It is of priceless value to the free world, even if his afternoon nap is half an hour longer than before. From the sublime . . well, it is a rum collection of Labour members who decided to abstain on the Defence debate. The pacifists one respects, and there is nothing more to be said about them. But let us have a closer look at Mr. Maurice Edelman, the blue-blazer-and-brass-button boy of the Labour Party. Mr. Edelman has been perfectly tailored, by whatever divinity shapes our beginnings, to be the star of the Purley Tennis and Badminton Club. (If Purley does not have a Tennis and Badminton Club, it should have.) But he is an adventurous soul, and has sought other worlds to conquer. Drop in at an embassy reception, and there will be Mr. Edelman, fresh with a quip which he picked up a month ago from M. Massigli. Look in at a literary cocktail party, and there will be Mr. Edelman again, this time with a delightful story about Claude' to cap the morning's obituary notices. But, why politics? And, why the Labour Party? Watch'him as he rises from his perch behind the Front Bench to put a supplementary question : the slight tug at the back of his jacket to make sure that it is lying straight, the deft reafrangement of his shirt cuff, then (and only then) the ever-go-modulated voice. 'Are you ready now, Miss Horsbrugh? Will I serve?' What is behind it all? One • asks the question because Mr. Edelman is a man of most elusive convictions. There is no one in the Labour Party who, intellectually and temperamentally, stands farther to the Right than Mr. Edelman, but no one has taken more trouble to avoid identifying hiniself with the Right. He sits for Coventry North, a hot-bed of tievanism, with Mr. Crossman rolling them in the aisles next door. But, no, that cannot be the explanation. The mystery remains. What is Mr. Edelman in politics for?