Beavermere Bang

With a terrific bang, which did not so much alarm as it startled and amused the Empire, the new United Empire Party, founded less than a month ago (TIME, March 3), burst last week into its constituent atoms.

Some hundred thousand dollars had been contributed to the new party's "war chest" by more than half a million persons. Suddenly they got their money back, every pence and pound of it, each contributor receiving a crisp cheque and a "personal" (mimeographed) letter from the leader of the party, the man who was to have been Prime Minister, William Maxwell Aitken, Baron Beaverbrook.

Blandly he wrote that his aims had been achieved, he had gotten the Conservative party to accept his program, and so he was sending back the money and leaving the party in the hands of Viscount Rothermere, with whom he no longer agreed.

As everyone knows, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere are the "Hearsts of England," blatant makers of colossal newspaper fortunes, once bitter rivals, then friends and collaborators in the United Empire Party, and today goodness knows what. Last week Harold Sidney Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere seemed to have been made a fool of by his blatant twin, seemed to have been left with a penniless orphan party on his hands, which he doggedly announced he would bring up "until we have achieved all our aims!"

If there was a hero in the smoke produced by last week's Beavermere bang, it was Stanley Baldwin, stodgy leader of the Conservative Par.ty, which is now "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition," a rich man without ideas who has been twice Prime Minister, a man reviled as a blithering, blathering ass less than ten days ago by the then united Beaverbrook and Rothermere press.

But last week Mr. Baldwin made a speech. Grotesquely enough he had gathered leading Conservatives in the ballroom of the Hotel Cecil, now in course of being demolished to make way for an office building. In these bizarre circumstances the Conservative leader, who less than a fortnight ago had called the Beaverbrook Empire Free Trade Policy (TIME, Feb. 10) "impossible of realization," now adopted it as his own to the following extent: he promised that if returned to power as Prime Minister he would call an Imperial conference on the question, submit its decision, if any, to a national referendum (a most unprecedented course in Britain, where referendums are considered contrary to the spirit of parliamentary institutions). Within an hour after Baldwin's about-face, Baron Beaver-brook's Evening Standard splashed out in what was said to be the largest headline type ever used in London: MR. BALDWIN DECLARES FOR THE EMPIRE. Below, Beaverbrook declared for Baldwin.

Significance. Up to last week the most responsible British editors were saying that the new party would split the Conservatives and give Labor the next election by a huge majority. With the split averted by "Hero" Baldwin, the barometer of political futures swung, of course, toward the Conservatives, was accelerated by an announcement that David Lloyd George had finally gotten his Liberal party's rebellious members (nine) in hand, and would swing them to the Conservative side in an effort to upset the Labor cabinet at once. Together the Liberals and Conservatives have 320 votes and Labor only 290, which means, of course, that if Messrs. Lloyd George and Baldwin decided last week to upset the MacDonald government they can do so. Most dopesters, however, believed that they would not dare, that they would fear the effect on British public opinion of toppling over a government in the middle of the Naval Conference.

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