Foreign News: Up Front

Rebellious Nye Bevan automatically took a back seat in Parliament nearly two years ago when he resigned the Labor Ministry and began his long feud with then Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Last week Rebel Nye moved up front again. By the narrowest of squeaks, the Laborites in Parliament voted him into the twelfth place (out of twelve) in the Opposition’s “shadow cabinet,” which faces the real cabinet across the open floor of the House of Commons. It was a Pyrrhic victory for Nye, for as one of Labor’s official Parliamentary spokesmen, sitting on the front bench Nye would now have to preserve at least a semblance of party unity, behave politely to Opposition Leader Attlee and save his insults for Prime Minister Churchill, whom he once described as “a bloated bladder of lies.” From across the way, Churchill would doubtless find him, as he had before, “a squalid nuisance.”