GREAT BRITAIN: New Life

Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Kingsley Wood, 62, died suddenly last week. He was five feet high, ruddily Pickwickian in appearance, utterly efficient, unoriginal and orthodox. Wrote the London Economist: “Starting at the Exchequer in 1940 from the premise of sound and conventional budgeting, Sir Kingsley Wood was the Chancellor in office when this country crossed into the land of promise where the nation’s real resources and not its money became the basis of public economics. . . .” Mourned Winston Churchill: “We shall not easily fill the gap.. . .”

The war required that the gap be swiftly filled. Prime Minister seized the chance to reinvigorate his whole Cabinet:

Sir John Anderson, member of the seven-man War Cabinet and Lord President of the Council, moved into Sir Kingsley’s place. Sir John has been the candidate of British finance to succeed Churchill, has immense power on the home front and will continue as chairman of the Reconstruction Priorities Committee responsible for postwar planning. The new Chancellor is as conservative as leather chairs and old claret; an ironhanded Scotsman who battened down recalcitrants in Ireland and India after the last war.

Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) re-entered the Government as Lord Privy Seal. A benevolent old pirate with indefatigable asthma, he is contemptuous of anyone who does not admire Churchill’s Britain, Stalin’s Russia, the U.S. and its women, folk songs, gangster movies. “The Beaver” has led the cry for a second front in Britain, does not beg when he differs with Crony Winston—something the Prime Minister appreciates. Commented London’s Daily Mirror: “Mr. Churchill has brought over to his side again the most persistent critic of the Government.”

Major Clement R. Attlee, Leader of the Labor Party, and Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, took on Anderson’s Presidency of the Council. Major Attlee’s chief recommendation for any Cabinet post is his hierarchical position in the Labor Party.

Viscount Cranborne (Robert Cecil), Leader of the House of Lords, became Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, a position he held from 1940 to 1942, when he became Lord Privy Seal. Cranborne lives at Cranborne, where he raises roses rare and magnificent, plays a smacking croquet game called “golf,” collects Low cartoons (see p. 38), talks good British politics. He resigned with Anthony Eden over Britain’s appeasement of Italy in 1938, is impersonally competent.

Richard Law, 42, son of the late Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was given a new title: Minister of State in the Foreign Office. Dick Law has worked on U.S. newspapers, writes waltzing British prose. He is perhaps the most up & coming of young Conservatives, opposed the Chamberlain Government just before it fell, headed the British delegation to the United Nations’ food conference in Virginia and the refugee conference in Bermuda.

The Cabinet changes indicated a calculated swing to the moderate right. Winston Churchill passed over Laborites like ambitious Herbert Morrison, crotchety leftist Sir Stafford Cripps, right-wing Tories like Samuel Hoare (see p. 38). On the whole, Britons approved the shifts, decided that Churchill felt strong enough to swing the country behind his kind of Conservatives now and after the war.