Since King Edward's accession, officials of the Court have found His Majesty always ready to do his duty but difficult to find,* and with great perspicacity they took advantage of the fact that one day last week he would naturally spend at Buckingham Palace, the day on which Mrs. Simpson had to be alone at Ipswich to get her divorce. Shoals of British dignitaries had audience of Edward VIII that day, the Court Circular released next morning was one of the longest of his reign, and the Court staff congratulated themselves on a good job. It was next the duty of His Majesty to prorogue Parliament after its short session last week and reopen it again this week, each time with a Speech from the Throne.
The insomnia of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin abated during his prolonged vacation (which had continued up to last week since last July), and he was back at No. 10 Downing Street to shake up the British Cabinet before it again faced the House of Commons. Mr. Leslie Hore-Belisha, the smart, young Jewish Liberal who seems never to take a vacation but fills British newspapers all summer with personal publicity about his "Belisha Beacon" and other traffic gadgets (TIME, Nov. 26, 1934), was rewarded by promotion of his Ministry of Transport from sub-Cabinet to full Cabinet status. Minister of Agriculture, Walter Elliott, the tall, taciturn, sagacious Scot who has long been considered one of the Conservative Party's ablest younger men, was shelved by giving him the sinecure Secretary of State for Scotland, and the Prime Minister made his especial favorite at the Treasury, Civil Servant William Shepherd Morrison the new Minister of Agriculture.
In the House of Commons last week, British tradition insured the hearty cheers by all parties with which the Prime Minister was greeted on his return to Parliament. A few minutes later his Cabinet's continued refusal to sell arms to the radicals of Madrid caused radical Labor M. P.'s to shake their fists at Mr. Baldwin and shout at his Cabinet, "Butchers! Murderers!"
Aplomb never leaves Squire Baldwin, but Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was visibly nervous as he denied that Britain had put pressure on the radical French Cabinet to force them to propose the Neutrality Agreement barring arms shipments to Spain. "I wouldn't believe Eden on a stack of Bibles!" bawled Communist William Gallacher, M. P., and then savagely attacked Adolf Hitler's new Ambassador to Britain, onetime Champagne Salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, who last week arrived at his post in a Nazi brown shirt. "He comes with his hands red with murder!" shrieked Red William. "I demand that this man, who is not an Ambassador but an agent for War, be driven out of this country!"