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War, Peace & Bashan. An even closer personal crony of Stanley Baldwin than Sam Hoare is Viscount Halifax, remembered as Lord Irwin when he was Viceroy of India. His extremely conciliatory attitude toward St. Gandhi drove Tory Die-Hards wild and stirred up more opposition to Leader Baldwin within the Conservative Party than any other issue. Sturdy Mr. Baldwin stuck by gangling Lord Irwin as Viceroy and last week made this worthy peer who got on so well with St. Gandhi the War Minister of Great Britain.
A bigger surprise in the new cabinet lineup was Prime Minister Baldwin's retention of that cheerful onetime engine-cleaner, Labor Turncoat James Henry ("Jim") Thomas as Minister for the Dominions. Notorious for months has been "Jim's" inept treading on the Dominion toes of Irish Eamon de Valera, but half a million British railwaymen still have a kind of liking for "Jim" who used to be their union secretary, and he may mean votes for the National Government at the next election.
Extremely odd to Britons, who could recall no precedent of a father and son in the same Cabinet, was the promotion of Ramsay MacDonald's studious Son Malcolm to full Cabinet rank as Secretary of State for the Colonies.
King George, according to Whitehall gossip, nipped last week the chances of brilliant young Anthony Eden to achieve a major Ministry in reward for his spectacular work this spring as the Empire's Traveling Peaceman (TIME, April 30, 1934, et seq.). Mr. Eden is 38 and that, His Majesty was understood to have intimated to Prime Minister Baldwin, is "too young." Since Mr. Eden is the Prime Minister's special protege he was nonetheless given full Cabinet rank as Minister Without Portfolio for League of Nations Affairs—promptly dubbed last week "Minister for Peace."
In most British newsorgans the National Government has so long been accepted as a group of comfortable, fairly adequate plodders that Prime Minister Baldwin's reshuffled National Government excited small comment in London, the city merely noting with vast satisfaction that "safe" Neville Chamberlain remains Chancellor of the Exchequer.*
Only one new Cabinet member was really new to the British public, ebullient Mr. Ernest ("Bashan") Brown, Minister of Labor and a National Liberal. In the House of Commons he is extremely well known as the fastest talker (250 words per minute in one magnificent spurt) and the loudest, whence his nickname "Bashan."
Tweedy, Bible-quoting Mr. Brown lives in slummy Clerkwell, owes his post to Tory tolerance and is supposed to be under Mr. Baldwin's thumb, but makes a mighty uproar in season and out in defense of The Masses. At shouting down a Red Orator and disconcerting him with statistics from an encyclopedic memory, "Bashan" Brown has no equal. He was Lloyd George's passionate disciple once, then decided that the Welshman was "betraying Socialism," and today the two men greet each other, if at all, with frigid nods.