Word: rearmaments
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...like a portly Puck before the House of Commons one day last week, to report on the state of Britain's muscle-straining $13.1 billion defense program. In other circumstances, what he had to say might have embarrassed a Prime Minister; things are still not going well: ". . . The rearmament program is much more likely to be carried out in four years than in three." But Churchill was in good spirits: he knew that his opposition came not from those who thought he was doing too little, but from those who thought the government was doing too much...
...hours the House echoed with the polite rancor of a strange debate-strange because the quarrel was all on one side of the House. Attlee pointedly ordered all Labor M.P.s to support rearmament. Churchill just sat back, smiling in anticipation of the pleasure to come at voting time...
When it came, the Labor Party's pent-up quarrel broke into open mutiny. In the vote on Labor's own pallid motion (combining censure of Churchill with approval of rearmament), Nye Bevan and 39 of his followers stayed stolidly in their seats. Next came the vote on the government's motion approving the Churchill program. Attlee and the bulk of Labor stayed in their seats, abstaining but not voting against. But 40 Bevanites and another 15 Laborites, most of them pacifists, filed into the lobby in open defiance of party orders, to record Noes ("Nyes...
...myself." In Labor's reign, he handled the tough Ministry of National Insurance, later was Secretary of State for the Colonies. Respected by both Attlee and Bevan, Griffiths last week was giving no indication that he had even heard the talk about him. In the confidence votes on rearmament, he voted stoutly with Attlee...
...answer reached Beverley (like most of his answers) in the form of a three-decker cliché. He was unhappy because "the clouds were gathering over Europe ... the tragedy of Geneva hastening to its final act ... the disciples of rearmament beginning to raise their voices." And what, if anything, could a playboy like Beverley do to disperse the clouds, delay the final act, silence the raised voices? All I Could Never Be, Nichols' second autobiographical book, tells exactly what Beverley did; but, as it is well spiced with rose-geranium anecdotes and set against a backdrop of Mayfair...