r Portrait of the Week- 'MAC FACES CRISIS' has become
the most Over- worked headline of the month. Having faced and somehow found a way round crises over Profumo/Christine/himself/the Cabinet/Enoch's conscience/twenty-seven Tories/ himself again / the multilateral force, the Prime Minister could hardly be expected to treat the Philby affair as a crisis. In light manner, he claimed it a triumph for the security services to discover that an ex-diplomat who had disappeared in the Middle East had in fact been the tip-off man to Burgess and Maclean and had now fled behind the Iron Curtain. On the other dozen crises, the Prime Minister was clearly winning: playing on the total absence of any ideas, tactics, leaders or candidates among the back-benchers, except for a few paragraphs of windy nonsense by Lord Lambton in the Beaver- brook press, Mr. Macmillan calmly announced he wasn't retiring. Dr. Ward was sent for trial, and, in spite of Mandy Rice-Davies' liberal name- dropping, there were few revelations of public faces in private places. Lord Denning asked Miss Mandy to give evidence to him 'I'm having noth- ing to do with that' was her answer, an apt comment on the Denning inquiry, and its powers.
BRITAIN AND CZECHOSLOVAkIA, the US and (shortly, one presumes) the USSR declared each other's diplomats non grata. Promotion came to Lord Hill to chair ITA, with the snag of the new ITV channel beginning in 1966. Promotion for Mr. Godber to the War OffiFe, with two snags—the sixteen troops captured in the Yemen, and the news that the Belgian plane that crashed last week with thirty-eight deaths may have been shot down by the British Army practising. Gold re- serves went down, but really up, and the balance of payments did go up. In more serious financial trouble is the new Committee of 100 Against Tyranny, already in debt. One in three British households has a car, it was announced, but Stirling Moss, banned from driving, failed his scooter test. Cunard still threaten to cripple their shareholders by building another Queen liner, and the new Thames Hoverbus broke down on its second day. Balliol (Oxford) celebrated its 700th anniversary with rather less pomp than the open- ing of the New York Hilton PRESIDENT KENNEDY received the Freedom of Cork, Galway, Wexford, and Limerick, a wild reception in Germany, chilliness in Italy and saw the death of the multilateral force at Birch Grove. Mr. Khrushchev followed the President's example and swooped on Berlin, while de Gaulle is visiting Bonn shortly. Mr. Khrushchev expelled five Chinese diplomats for distributing leaflets putting the case against co-existence, and similar Sino. Soviet wrangles made a shambles of the World Congress of Women. The French tomato riots proved a great success, and imports of tomatoes from North Africa have been banned by the French Government. Kenya is to be independent on December 12, and the Central African Federa- tion is to be broken up on December 31. The Italian Government may not last so long: said its new Premier,.Signor Leone, sadly, his Cabinet would be limited 'both in its scope and in its lifetime.'
11IF LONDON Evening News sank to a new low in sentimental slush with an article 'Adam Faith talks to Godfrey Winn about teenage love.' Adam Faith's name was also linked with those of Mr. Sidney Greene and Mr. John Freeman, seemingly as one of Britain's ten best-dressed radicals. Wimbledon tennis players were suspected of making an easy profit by selling their books of free tickets at vast prices, but no names were mentioned. A three-year inquiry into noise decidel life was becoming unbearable with noise at its present level, and Lord Hailsham, who MU Illy examines his conscience in public, said people should shut their big mouths.
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