—Portrait of the Week
THE SUSPENSION of H-bomb tests must not, the Russians deCided, be only for a year—as the West wants; it must be for all time, or the Russians will decline to co-operate—though they are prepared to attend the Geneva conference, in the hope that something will come out of it. In the meantime, they are continuing tests (as are the Americans). The Russians this week made two further con- tributions to the cold war : a loan of over £30% million to Egypt towards the building of the Aswan dam; and a rocket for Boris Pasternak, Who was awafded a Nobel prize—for which he has been damned by an aged party wheel- horse in Pravda, and expelled from the writers' union. He later refused the award.
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AFTER SEVERAL false alarms on Sunday, when the traditional smoke-puffs from the Vatican chimney confused onlookers by starting as white, then turning to off-white and to dirty brown, the con- clave settled down to three days of voting, eventu- ally deciding in favour of the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Roncalli, who elected to be known as Pope John XXIII.
THE OLD PARLIAMENT having been prorogued, a new session opened on Tuesday with the electors for the first time able to see and hear the Queen's Speech on television. Mr. Robin Day provided an astringent counterpart on ITV to Mr. Richard Dimbleby's BBC commentary on the ceremony. Labour fears that the Conservatives would exploit the occasion—by making it sound as if the Queen were a good Tory—turned out, Mr. Gaitskell thought, to be unfounded : he found the speech dull. It promised new schemes for educa- tion, pensions, mental health and crime, and the removal of remaining emergency powers and controls; but it shied away from such terrifying possibilities as legislation on gambling, obscenity, or prostitution.
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THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS invented a new form of warfare for the offshore islands dispute: hence- forth the islands are to be bombarded only on alternate days. France offered a cease-fire to the Algerian rebels, with safe conduct for the delegates of the National Liberation Front to attend the negotiations; the offer had a promising initial reception, but subsequently fell on stony desert ground. The Americans completed the withdrawal of their forces from the Lebanon; the evacuation of British troops from Jordan was completed a day or two later.
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IN cvPRus, attempts at conciliation failed again, the lifting of a curfew being invariably and promptly followed by fresh outbreaks of violence; and the NATO conference, which had seemed to promise a ray of hope, received a rebuff when the Greeks announced their refusal to attend. NATO also received a backhander from General Montgomery; its higher regions, he complains, are 'complicated, cumbersome, and overstaffed.' The opinions of NATO and other officers of General Montgomery, in the light of his autobiography, were just as freely 'and forcefully, but less publicly, expressed.
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THE GOVERNMENT announced the date for the
Reginald of Nigeria : October 1, 1960. Mr.
neginald Maudling uttered a heart-cry from Paris, urging the six Common Market powers to get on with the job of working out an agreement on a curopean Free Trade Area. In a minor ministerial reshuffle, Mr. Fred Erroll was appointed Parlia- mentary Secretary to the Board of Trade. The machinery for compulsory arbitration in industrial t',isputes was scrapped, and the • last controls on purchase and renting of goods lifted. The 1/4iovernment is to offer financial aid to building societies to encourage people to buy houses.
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