THE NEW YEAR HONOURS contained no hereditary titles and (also
to no one's surprise) entailed no by-election. Mr. Heath, on tour around Asia with an entourage of journalists, adjusted his itinerary to include Saigon. Mr. Wilson went no farther than the Scillies (although he made a dynamic telephone call from there to stop the sale of some corned beef already declared safe by the Mini- stries of Health and Agriculture). Britain's police had a pay claim for another £5 a week turned down, and the Police Federation forecast sub- stantial resignations from the force—just as a new group called Motorists' Action planned a mass motorway protest against the 70 m.p.h. limit. In London the new rent officers started work. The brickmakers' organisation revealed that their response to Government appeals for more pro- duction had practically buried them in bricks, so that closures and redundancies were threatened. In fact, on its first showing, the New Year did not look very different from the old one: sym- bolically, perhaps, the first England v. Australia Test match of 1966 reached the same conclusion as the last one of 1965—a draw.
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