16 JUNE 1939, Page 6

I should be reluctant to say a word in gratuitous

criticism of Lord Perth. But it is not criticism, let alone gratuitous criticism, to say that just as he has no special qualifications for running the Ministry of Agriculture, so he has no special qualifications for running a Ministry of Information, to which the Government appears to intend to assign him (unless indeed, with its genius for doing things by halves, it intends to make Information merely a section of the Foreign Office). Mr. Chamberlain may think no special qualifications are needed for such a post. If so, he is abysmally wrong. Special qualifications and specialised experience are essential, and the last man who could be expected to possess them is an ex-Ambassador who has spent the whole of his official career in posts where publicity is usually shunned resolutely and the Press is regarded as an institution to be kept courteously at arm's length. Journalists at Geneva, it is fair to say, never bad reason to complain of Sir Eric Drummond's aloofness, but he would never have claimed then, and I should be very surprised to hear that he claimed now, that the science, or art, of publicity was within his competence.