A Spectator's Notebook LORD SALISBURY Should be congratu- lated on
his decision to resign on a disagreement over policy—the first Conservative Cabinet Minister to do so since Duff Cooper in 1938, and I am glad to have been proved wrong in my belief that this particu- lar crack in the Cabinet was to be papered over. It is interesting to speculate what would now be happening were he in the Commons as, say, MP for Bournemouth East. Would his constituency association now expel him for having rocked the boat? Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that he resigned on an issue that even some of his most obvious potential allies, like Captain Waterhouse, feel was trivial. Lord Salisbury ought to have re- membered the advice his grandfather gave to Lord Lytton eighty years ago : 'The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies; when a mast falls overboard you do not try to save a rope here, and a spar there, in memory of their former utility; you cut away the hamper altogether. And it should be the same with a policy.' The policy of marooning. Arch- bishop Makarios has been dead since the day he was taken to the Seychelles; the decision to release him is no more than a belated admission that for so long the Government has been clinging to a corpse.
Previous page
