GREAT BRITAIN: Sequel to Munich

In Oxford last week came the first British by-election since Munich. Labor and Liberal candidates had withdrawn to better the chances of the anti-Chamberlain candidate, Alexander Dunlop Lindsay, 59, famed Master of Balliol College. Widely respected as a “Fabian Socialist,” The Master of Balliol offered himself this time as an “Independent Progressive.”

The Conservative, pro-Chamberlain candidate was the Hon. Quintin McGarel Hogg, 31, making his political debut. Son & heir of the Lord President of the Council, Viscount Hailsham (who served as Acting Prime Minister briefly in 1928), Mr. Hogg is rated one of the most brilliant young lawyers in London. Whether the 30,000 assorted voters of the city of Oxford would take to him and to Munich in preference to The Master and his League of Nations line was an exciting question.

When ballots were counted, 12,363 were for The Master and 15,797 for Mr. Hogg. Said he modestly: “It is not my victory but Chamberlain’s.” Six more by-elections will be run off in Britain during the next few weeks and at these the public’s estimate of Munich will be further tested.

Cabinet Shifts. Viscount Hailsham gave out some time ago that once his son the Hon. Quintin Hogg was elected he would retire from public office. This week Lord Hailsham was succeeded as Lord President of the Council by Viscount Runciman as a “reward” for the Mediator’s unsuccessful labors in Czechoslovakia. It was typical of ponderous British politics that not until last week did Neville Chamberlain name a successor to First Lord of the Admiralty Alfred Duff Cooper, who resigned just after Munich because he could not swallow it. High-spirited young Duff Cooper was succeeded by the completely unexciting Earl Stanhope, who had been droning along as president of the Board of Education.

Lord Stanhope was succeeded as Minister of Education by the Earl de la Warr, a National Laborite protégé of the late James Ramsay MacDonald. It was Lord de la Warr who kept in touch with Soviet Foreign Commissar Litvinoff during the Crisis, reported to London that Moscow made no “precise promises.”

Another National Laborite, Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, son of the late great Ramsay, has been called Neville Chamberlain’s “favorite”‘ among the younger Cabinet Ministers. This week the Dominions Secretaryship was added to studious Son MacDonald’s portfolio, thus uniting it again with the Colonial Secretaryship from which it was divorced by Ramsay MacDonald (TIME, Nov. 16, 1931).

Only mildly sensational among these Cabinet shifts made as the Prime Minister prepared to go before the reassembled House of Commons this week, was the giving of a post to “Ruthless” Sir John Anderson who, when Governor of Bengal, put the fear of the Raj into its notorious political thugs and terrorists. Drastic Sir John was given a velvet Cabinet sinecure, Lord Privy Seal, but is supposed to have been put in to ginger up, by his personal influence, Sir Thomas Inskip. the somnolent Minister for the Co-Ordination of Defense.

Meanwhile, Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare made the Cabinet’s only drastic move, announced that next time there is a war scare the State will force upon the owners of the stately homes of England “compulsory billeting” of refugees from the cities.

World War or Bluff? In a broadcast to U. S. listeners the British Foreign Secretary, long, lean Viscount Halifax, said last week of Munich: “My own conscience is clear. . . . The sufferings of Czechoslovakia would have been far greater had we and they acted otherwise. . . . The Government . . . and the Prime Minister . . . acted rightly.”

Lord Halifax thus argued from the premise that Germany would actually have fought if Munich had not given Hitler what he demanded — a major premise now challenged by critics of the Prime Minister, who insist that “Hitler was only bluffing. There was no real danger of war.” Last week Franklin Roosevelt said of Munich in the course of his remarks on the Dies Committee (see p. 7): “Three weeks ago the civilized world was threatened by the immediate outbreak of a world war. Cool heads pleaded for the continuance of negotiations. People may properly differ as to the result of such negotiations, but the fact remains that bloodshed was averted.” The President thus lined up with Chamberlain and Halifax on the major premise that not only war but a “world war” did actually threaten, that not fake but authentic “bloodshed was averted.”