GREAT BRITAIN: Kind Words

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As one of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's more steadfast opponents, Conservative Winston Churchill has long been the cat that walked by himself when he was not clawing the Government for its haste to appease and its tardiness to arm. Like the sly puss in Kipling's Just So Stories, he has had to sit beyond the cozy Government hearth, destined never to warm a Cabinet corner unless somebody spoke him a kind word. Presumably because Winston Churchill is not only the Conservative Party's best brain but its most unpredictable personality, safe & sane Conservatives withheld their kind words until last week. Sly Puss Winston Churchill purred gratefully when he heard them.

Purred he at a dinner given for appeasing Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax by London's ultra-Tory 1900 Club: Lord Halifax "is an Englishman, a fox hunter and a friend." For the Government's present policies he now wanted nothing so much as "a united Party, a united Nation and a united Empire." He even did a little appeasing himself. "Not a single element representative of the British nation," said he, "would support for a moment designs against the peace and safety of the Reich and its legitimate prospects of growth and expansion."

Purred back appeased Appeaser Lord Londonderry, longtime friend of Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop: "[I wish Mr. Churchill] were a member of the Government this moment." With a scrape heard round the world the Conservatives thus made Puss Churchill a path to a place by the fire, and politicos with second sight could already see Winston Churchill snuggled into a reorganized Chamberlain Cabinet, probably as First Lord of the Admiralty, the post he filled brilliantly during the World War. In any case, with this great reconciliation a united Conservative Party could brave not only the perils of German aggression, but the prospects of a general election in the fall.

Sampled recently by the British Institute of Public Opinion, the British public also spoke kind words; 56% wanted Winston Churchill in the Chamberlain Government; 26% did not; 18% did not say.