Never being very happy under remote control myself, I could
not help feeling sorry for the Editor of the Daily Worker at the beginning of this week. On Monday, when banner headlines about the Amethyst' streamed across every other front page in London, he tucked the story away in a paragraph on an inside page after remov- ing from it all reference to the Chinese Communists or indeed to the nature of the exploit. The Amethyst ' " slipped her cables and steamed down the Yangtse in the darkness ": not a very exciting story. Underneath this he paraphrased the joint Foreign Office and Admiralty statement giving the background to her escape, garbling it slightly in the process and substituting " the Chinese military, authorities " for " the local Communist military authorities." On Tuesday the story, as embarrassing and as irrepressible as a boil, burst through on to the front page but—like a boil—it was treated. so as to attract the minimum of attention. Amethyst's' meeting with Jamaica,' Kerans' D.S.O., the birth of a child to the wife of a rating, &c.; still a very dull and—for those, if there arc any, whose only source of news is the Daily Worker—an almost entirely point- less story. It was not until Wednesday that guidance came via the Chinese Communist news agency and the Daily Worker had a story really worth telling under the headline " Amethyst' Sank Junks in her Flight." It was told at some length.
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