Portrait of the Week
LONDONERS have no doubt been delighted to see strange celebrities flooding into town for the conference of Com- monwealth Prime Ministers, r the London disarmament talks (now in what will probably turn out to be their most decisive stage), and the Wimbledon tennis fiesta. The celebrities themselves are prob- ably delighted not to have to sweat it out in the heatwave they have just missed.
In another sense the omens are that, of the three, Wimbledon is likely to be the most heated. The Premiers, it is said, have come all ready to forgive and forget the unfortunate contretemps of Suez last October; Mr. Louw has expressed his hearty wish to talk things over with Dr. Nkrumah in spite of the colour bar; Mr. Nehru does not propose to mention the thorny subject of Kashmir, and has no intention of leaving the Commonwealth; Mr. Menzies has given Dr. Nkrumah a picture; in fact, everything is sweet- ness and light. But it will be interesting to see how Mr. Macmillan, that great European, deals with the problem of Imperial preference and the European Free Trade Area.
Bargaining at the disarmament talks is likely to be harder, particularly since a great deal of talking has already been done by others more illustrious than the delegates gathered in London —Mr. Dulles, Mr. Macmillan and Mr. Gromyko have all gone on contradictory, even self-contra- dictory record, on the subject during the last week. The American view as expounded by Mr. Dulles, as distinct from the American view as expounded by President Eisenhower, is that any agreement on the suspension of nuclear tests must be tied to the control of fissionable materials and a 'cut-off' in the production of nuclear weapons. It is difficult to predict what Mr. Dulles will think next week, for it appears that eminent American scientists have been besieging the President with information about a new 'clean' bomb with negligible fall-out which a few more tests would perfect. Mr. Dulles was unfortunately embar- rassed by a report which leaked into the press of a speech made by General Norstad, Supreme Commander of NATO, in which he had claimed that the West possessed the power to wipe out any military installation in Russia. Mr. Gromyko seized the opportunity thus offered to suggest that the American presence at the disarmament talks was merely a cover for the desire to continue the arms race. Mr. Zorin, the Russian delegate at the talks, was accordingly not very effusive over the American proposals for the limitation of armed forces on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Mr. Macmillan claimed that the present Russian mood of reasonableness was probably due to the emergence of Britain as an atomic power.
The UN made a brief reappearance from its recess into the limelight with a damning report on the Russian intervention in Hungary, since claimed by Russia to have been dictated to the impartial members of the committee by the State Department. It has also, by American proxy, sent more arms to South Korea as a reprisal for 'gross breaches' of the armistice by North Korea.
The American forces in Japan are to be reduced as a result of Mr. Kishi's visit to Washington; whether this will placate him in case the Supreme Court refuses to allow a Japanese court to try the American soldier charged with manslaughter of a Japanese woman remains to be seen. The Egyptian court which tried four Britons on charges of spying in Cairo has sentenced two of them to terms of hard labour.
A Select Commission of Congress, undismayed by recent judgements of the Supreme Court, has proposed legislation making compulsory the rigorous scrutiny of the beliefs and morals of all Government employees of any grade, and estab- lishing a Central Security Office. The new Cana- dian Cabinet has been formed; there are still appalling floods in the Po valley; Archbishop Makarios has produced 317 alleged cases of British torture in Cyprus. Parliament has reassembled after the Whitsun recess prepared for a great hullabaloo about the telephone-tapping business; the suspicion, made explicit in a question to the Home Secretary, that even Members of Parliament have been sub- jected to this procedure has struck terror into many hearts which might otherwise have remained unmoved. The Prime Minister's tiller to discuss the whole matter with the leaders of the other parties has only momentarily lulled the storm.
The price of coal is to go up by 6s. 6d. a Ion and postal rates will probably follow pretty soon. The Mayflower project has run into some un- pleasant difficulties which have been far fron promoting the transatlantic goodwill that wa originally intended; but then the original voyag was not all roses. England won the second Tt s Match against the West Indies, and British ca scooped the kitty at Le Mans. An angry mob Harringay Greyhound Stadium has given tit meaning to the word 'dog-fight.'
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