—Portrait of the Week— LABOUR HELD WEST LOTHIAN, and the
Conserva- tive, the Liberal and the Communist candidates all lost their deposits. The Conservative Party came in for some punishment in Canada, too, losing the overall majority it had previously enjoyed: Mr. Lester Pearson's Liberals made something of a come-back, but it looked as though the balance of power in Parliament would be held by the Right-wing Social Credit Party, which gained thirty seats, having had none be- fore, and the Socialist New Democratic Party. It was widely reported, and generally believed, that Lord Russell had lost his formal connection with the Labour Party, but whether this was because of his sponsorship of a proscribed disarmament conference in Moscow, or because he hadn't paid his 6s. a year subscription was not quite clear. Canon Collins seemed to have talked his way out of trouble; Lord Chorley explained the differ- ence between sponsorship and sending a message, apparently to everybody's satisfaction; and no- body did anything about Lady Wootton because they all liked her so much.
SOVIET AUTHORITIES RELEASED Boris Pastemak's adopted daughter from prison after she had served half her sentence for alleged currency offences, but left her mother (the heroine of Dr. Zhivago) still serving her eight years. There were indications of an earlier military call-up in the Soviet Union, and Mr. Jenkin-Jones and Mr. Crane-Robinson, British exchange students at Moscow University, both got engaged to Russian girls.
THE INDUSTRIAL COURT AWARDED a rise in pay of about 14 per cent. to hospital almoners and psy- chiatric social workers. The nurses had another look at the offer made to them of 24 per cent., and Mr. Selwyn Lloyd said that an award of more than 24 per cent. was 'a snub for the community,' that his pay pause had been a success because it had stemmed the rising tide of wage demands, and that he intended to persevere in his policy. The National Union of Railwaymen called for a nation-wide protest against Dr. Beeching's plan to cut railway services and staffs, and the Chair- man of the Railway Staff National Tribunal, which will soon have to consider the railway- men's wage claims, asked to be allowed to resign.
A CEASE-FIRE AGREEMENT WAS REACHED between OAS and FLN in the area immediately around Algiers. Mr. McNamara, United States Secretary of Defence, emphasised the 'indivisibility' of NATO's nuclear system: his observation that national H-bombs were 'dangerous, expensive, prone to obsolescence and lacking in credibility as a deterrent' was held to be directed at Britain and, even more pointedly, at France. Lady Violet Bonham Carter wrote a letter to the Times to say that that was what the Liberals had been saying all along. Mr. Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, said that he believed that we could reach a draft agreement on the Common Market by the end of July, in good time to put it to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers conference in September. Mr. Menzies and President Kennedy had differences of opinion on preferences. A new American high-altitude nuclear test failed. More detainees have been released in Ghana.
THE TOBACCO MANUFACTURERS AGREED with ITA that their television commercials phould no longer suggest that smoking cigarettes was a proof of masculinity, desirable for young people, socially acceptable, ecstatically pleasurable, or enjoyed by people in the public eye, but only point out their various brands' flavour, individuality and general excellence. Italy banned certain tranquillisers that had caused women to give birth to deformed babies, and Scotland Yard detectives boarded a British cruiser and arrested Messrs. Yang Hi Lou, Kan Ping Kwok and Ah Lee Wong, later charged Wider the Dangerous Drugs Act.
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