GREAT BRITAIN: Useless Eustace

Politely last week the Rt. Hon. Lord Eustace Sutherland Campbell Percy resigned from the British Cabinet. Reason: He had nothing to do. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin regretfully accepted the resignation. The bluest of blood and the highest of brows has Lord Eustace Percy. The seventh son of the seventh Duke of Northumberland, he is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror’s chieftain, William (“als Gernons”*) de Percy. A brilliant undergraduate at Oxford, he has served in the Ministry of Health and the Foreign Office, was President of the Board of Education from 1924 to 1929. He is still, a Governor of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, frequently visits the U. S. to lecture educators on their trade. A Conservative with liberal tendencies, he is popular with Laborites. It was largely to calm the latter that Stanley Baldwin, swept into office with a Conservative majority last September, made Whiskery William de Percy’s descendant a Minister without Portfolio, “to think out long term policies for the Government” at £3,000 a year.

The British Press promptly nicknamed Lord Eustace “Stanley Baldwin’s Thinking Machine.” The Thinking Machine’s first published thought was the announcement that the then Assistant Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was “the greatest diplomatic genius this country has produced for a generation.” Since then Lord Eustace has painstakingly bombarded every other ministry with elaborate projects on what they should do for the next six months. Nobody paid any attention. Resigning last week he wrote Prime Minister Baldwin: “Let me assure you that I am in complete accord with the foreign policy of the Government, but I have always regarded my post as temporary, and if is difficult to justify its continuance into the new financial year.”

*”With the whiskers.”