The minor reshuffle among the junior Ministers that took place
at the end of last week should strengthen the Government. Mr. Hudson, for instance, is too good an administrator to be left in the backwater of the Ministry of Pensions. Though his transference to the Parliamen- tary Secretaryship of the Ministry of Health is, on the face of it, a decline in status, his new position will give him far greater scope to show his undoubted Parliamentary talents. Mr. Geoffrey Shakespeare has done very well in that position, but he has been there since 1982 and it is quite time that he had a change of office. There is an obvious danger that the younger members of a Govern- ment that has already been in office five years, and is likely to continue for many years to come, should grow stale, particularly when the older men show no signs of relin- quishing their grip on the chief Cabinet positions. One of the reasons for the disappointing show put up this session by Sir Phillip Sassoon, for instance, in his position as Under-Secretary at the Air Ministry, is the fact that except for the interval of the second Labour Government, he has been in that office since 1924.
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