GREAT BRITAIN: Redheaded Information

Prime Minister Winston Churchill this week tackled a problem on which some of the sharpest criticism of his administration has been centered: the setup of the Ministry of Information. He did so in the course of a minor Government reshuffle.

Out from the Ministry of Information went suave Alfred Duff Cooper, Minister since Winston Churchill became Prime Minister last year, whose suavity has suffered somewhat in defending the organization of the M.O.I. from caustic Parliamentary critics who like it as little as he does. Still in the Cabinet, Duff Cooper was given the dutiless post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, assigned to go to the Far East to report on the coordination between military, administrative and political authorities there—a job which should keep him busy for some time.

Boosted to the Cabinet and Duff Cooper’s portfolio was Churchill’s own Parliamentary Private Secretary, white-faced, carrot-topped Brendan Bracken.

Talking to the press in his new position, Minister Bracken can say that he used to be a kind of a newspaperman himself. He is chairman of London’s Financial News, is a director of a firm that prints Bibles. Far more important than his avocation of publishing, however, is his profession of being a disciple of Winston Churchill.

Bracken has admired and worked with Churchill politically since 1923. Since last September he has lived at 10 Downing Street and hardly left his boss’s side. He shares Churchill’s taste for black cigars, voluminous reading, vigorous talk. He also shared his distrust of the British appeasement group, was known to them as “The Redheaded Beast.” As Minister of Information, Bracken has one inestimable advantage. He can be counted on to spring no surprises on his boss.

In the same shuffle new jobs went to Churchill’s M.P. son-in-law, Edwin Duncan Sandys, who was made Financial Secretary of the War Office; to Richard Austen Butler, who, after ably defending the Government in Parliament as Under Secretary of the Foreign Office, was made President of the Board of Education.