The Press: Cassandra of the Mirror

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As "Cassandra" of the London Daily Mirror, biggest daily (circ. 4,535,687) in the world, owl-shaped, sharp-tongued William Neil Connor, 45, is the hardest-hitting and most-quoted columnist in Britain. Cassandra combines the terrible temper of a Westbrook Pegler with the calculated irreverence of an H. L. Mencken. "It is a pity," Sir Winston Churchill once said, "that so able a writer should show himself so dominated by malevolence." Even his own paper often finds his comments hard to take, but suffers them because of his circulation-building appeal. Says Mirror Editorial Director Hugh Cudlipp: "Cassandra disagrees with almost everything the Mirror stands for. He is armed with intolerance, bigotry, and irascibility. But the Mirror would be a duller place without him."

Last week, covering the Labor Party conference at Scarborough (see FOREIGN NEWS), Cassandra gave a demonstration of what Editorial Director Cudlipp means. Writing in the Laborite Mirror, Cassandra blasted Labor Party Chief Clement Attlee: "The whole effect [of his report on his trip to Red China] was that we can do business with Peking ... It is a sinister theme ... It is also a tempting theme ... It was the hope of the Foreign Office and also of Neville Chamberlain that both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia would destroy each other by their complementary antagonism . . . Kicking this dream around is like pretending that there are nice burglars and nasty ones."

"Disastrous" President. Scarcely a fortnight before, Cassandra had jolted his readers with an even more radical column. For years Cassandra has led Britain's anti-American chorus, hammered the U.S. for its "climate of fear," compared congressional investigations to "Communist trials," called President Eisenhower one of the most "disastrous" U.S. Presidents.

Last month Cassandra publicly confessed that he has changed his mind. He made his confession while giving advice to left-wing Laborite M.P. Aneurin Bevan, who, like Attlee, had also just returned from the Far East. Cassandra urged Bevan to make a trip to the U.S. Wrote Cassandra : "When you have made up your mind to dislike people, it is disturbing when you discover that they are very likable persons indeed. And by far the great majority of Americans are friendly and generous to a degree that you do not always find in these islands. Going around disapproving of Americans is very tiring work indeed. Their many and obvious virtues make it very uphill work." Cassandra now scorns Bevan's and Nehru's "neutralism" with the same scorn he once heaped on the U.S. He also advocates the same strong anti-Communist foreign policy that the U.S. has been advancing. Why did Cassandra change? Explains he: "When you lose your distrust and dislikes of a person, you are able to entertain his views with less prejudice. I've been to America seven times in the last year or so."