Westminster Commentary
'The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herds wind slowly off the lea; And Taper has a glorious month away From Mr. Selwyn Lloyd, QC, MP.
WHO goes home? Why, I do, and my 625 charges likewise. And, strange to relate, we have not been singing 'This time to- morrow, where shall I be? Not in this acadamee,' or at any rate not with any great degree of fervour. Indeed, I fancy I de- tected many a head turned nostalgically over many a shoulder as the cars slid out of New Palace Yard into the gathering dusk. Suddenly, in the last few days of term, the old school had been the place I knew in my youth, with cries of 'Take that, you rotter' mingling with others of 'Ow, yarooh, leggo, you brutes' up and down the cloisters.
For instance, I long ago observed—and am pleased now for the first time to make my dis- covery public—that a remarkably precise index to the political temperature in the House is to be found in its relations with the Speaker. It is axiomatic that nobody answers Mr. Morrison back. For one thing, his immense and kindly tolerance makes it unnecessary, and for another his grave and majestic bearing strikes awe into the breast Of anyone contemplating arguing the toss with him. Occasionally, however, the pot boils over and he is accused of sins normally attributed only to mortals. The point is, this happens only when the House is producing so much passion that it cannot, so to speak, be con- sumed locally, and so must be exported.
Chief exporter on this occasion was that bonny scrapper, Mr. Hugh Delargy, whom I have not seen around the place for some time, and who swam back into my ken, appropriately, with a bang rather than a whimper. The subject was a worthy one; it appears that the Government has been up to the merry old cash-and-carry with other people's lives again, this tim3 in Cuba, where one Batista is learning the hard way the truth of the old maxim that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. Now my own interest in Cuba, my knowledge of which is so slight that I do not even know where it is, is confined to an anxiety that there should be no interruption in my supply of Ramon Allones. Mr. Delargy, however (and you should have seen Mr. Bevan leaping in to close the wall up
with our Celtic dead), is rightly concerned with the more public aspects of the matter, namely the supply of rocket-firing planes, and the rockets to go with them, to an Al bastard like Batista. But Mr. Delargy had reckoned without Commander Noble, who was in charge of Foreign Office questions (and may Heaven help all poor sailor- men on a night like this). For Commander Noble obviously had no idea of what Mr. Delargy was talking about, and I should doubt, to judge by his demeanour, if he knows where Cuba is himself.
Anyway, during the splendid row which ensued, and which included the terror-provoking sight (after all, you never know when one of Jove's thunderbolts may richochet off and knock half the Press Gallery cold) of Mr. Delargy bawling- out the Speaker, a couple of PPS's actually man- aged to get it into the Commander's noddle that many persons believed, possibly with justification, that Britain was exporting arms to Cuba, and that any such traffic would in the circumstances be, as they say, repugnant to public opinion. In- deed, not only did the PPS's manage to explain to Commander Noble what was going on, but they must actually have induced him to go away and stop it, because the upshot was that he gave a promise that no further arms would be sent without the House being informed first. Now in this sort of incident, if anywhere, lies the justifica- tion of the House of Commons in general, and of people like Mr. Delargy, who don't care a fish's fin for anybody, in particular. For it may well be that as a result of half an hour's yelling and screaming, some chaps in Cuba who would otherwise have been dead quite soon will in fact stay alive at least a little longer, provided at any rate that they do not venture too near the Preston by-pass. Normally the only net product of half an hour's yelling and screaming at Westminstefis inflammation of the trachea; score one for democracy in action.
Nor was this the only row of the afternoon, though the PPS's, alas, were unable to explain to our Commendatore (it will be a good long time before anybody puts up a statue to him, I think) what the other major one was about. Suez was once more in the nuez, the attack again being led by Mr. Emrys Huez, with good support from the artillery in the shape (a remark- ably similar shape, now I come to think of it) of Mr. Bevan and Mr. Leslie Hale. Mr. Hale, indeed, lobbed one with a wallop right into HQ when he asked (and it must have been one of the most savagely offensive things heard in that place for a very long time) what the Government had to say in answer to the charge that they had been guilty of planning an aggressive war, 'for which fifteen war criminals were hung at Nuremberg.' Commander Noble would not deny it. Nor, on the other hand, would he admit it. And so, leaning neither towards partiality on the one hand, nor impartiality on the other, Commander Noble sat down, leaving me to reflect that what the Foreign Office ought to have carved above its gates is Fluelien's 'If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also, look you, be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb, in your own conscience now?'
And then, believe it or not, we had another row, when our Mr. Butler rose to announce that the Government had thought of a brilliant wangle
to avoid discussing some uncomforting topics on . Thursday. (He didn't put it exactly like that, of course, but there was no lack of people willing to put it like that for him.) All sorts of people began to flap at Mr. Butler, who rose to say in his blandest manner that the whole thing had been arranged through the usual channels; when up sprang Mr. Gaitskell to pull the rug smartly away from under Mr. Butler by announ- cing that, as a prominent usual channel, this was the first he'd heard of it.
Later, as they say in Hansard, Mr. Henry Brooke got up to drivel on about the House Purchase Bill. But already there was food for thought and a little left over to put in one's sandwiches. I do not believe (and of course I am not judging merely by this particular scene) that all this can be explained away merely as end-of- term high spirits. When the House resumes on January 20, it will do so conscious of the fact that it has entered upon its last calendar year before the election, and quite possibly its last quarter. Now 'statesmanship,' anel in particular Mr. Gaitskell's brand, of which we have seen a good deal in this dying year, is all very well in the trough between the twin crests of successive elec- tions. It would never eJo for an Opposition to convince the electorate that it was a hasty and irresponsible mob, capable of voting against the dispatch of troops to Jordan, for instance, merely because it thought such action wrong, or in favour of the implementation of the Wolfenden Committee's proposals merely because it thought them right. But the danger of burying yourself up to the neck in lard is that if anybody upsets one more saucepan you are hidden from view entirely. In other words, it would be a pit) the Labour Party, in an effort to convince voters that it was a grave body, managed to sho' that it was not only a grave body but actL1a II) buried, and indeed in an advanced state of deco' position. And the closer the election 'comes, the more important it becomes to jerk the ankle who the doctor taps the knee-cap.
It is essential, then, that the Labour should go into its election campaign wil engine running. And how better to get the running than to harry and snap (I say, mixing my metaphors today : I hope you mind) at the Government, to shout and ye drum upon the floor with the heels and 1 rhubarb-rhubarb whenever crowd noise required? The policy-making, after all, is the pamphlet selling like hot pamphlet! troops in as good heart as they are likely to some time; and the cloud on the emplo horizon is not only the size of a man's but the same shape, and with the thumb pc firmly upwards. I think the Labour Part decided that the election is going to be ' spring; whether they are right or not rema be seen, but I believe that when they come after the holiday they will try to work L excitement to the maximum and keep it th will not be easy, particularly if they have gi wrong about Der rag; but if the worst cor the worst, the exercise will at any rate have el the troops up. Meanwhile, the troops in qu have gone off on embarkation leave. I won any of them knows enough to come whistling Non piuundroi? Part h tht ani d 01 II and s are doll6 ; the be for yrriein hand in tint
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