The Peer & His Peers

"Take that!" said the little man, and as newsreel cameras whirred, he slapped the young peer in the face. "It didn't hurt me a bit," said 33-year-old John Edward Poynder Grigg, second Baron Altrincham of Tormarton, as his assailant was led away, but throughout the length and breadth of the United Kingdom there were those, particularly among his peers, who felt Altrincham had got off a lot too easily. In Bow Street court next morning, the slapper proved to be a paid agent of a group of nostalgics who call themselves The League of Empire Loyalists. He was fined a quid ($2.80) for his violence, but the sentiment that prompted it--disgust at a young peer who had dared to call his Queen a prig in print (TIME, Aug. 12) --was echoed even in the words of the sentencing magistrate, who declared that "95% of the population of this country are disgusted and offended by what was written, but your action only made a most unsavory episode more squalid."

"He should be sent to the Tower," said a Tory group from the town of Altrincham, whose name the young peer bears. "A very silly man," said the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Other journalists before Altrincham had said harsher things about reigning royalty, but coming from a member of the peerage --well. In point of fact, Lord Altrincham is no more to the manner born than Earl Attlee or dozens of other latter-day lords in Britain's Upper House. His father, a journalist and longtime civil servant, did not get his barony until 1945, ten years before his death. His son (Eton, the Guards) is an earnest and articulate advocate of what he calls the New Toryism.

"I am quite prepared for what is coming to me," said Altrincham as the storm broke about his head. "I can only hope that when the dust has cleared, the furniture will have shifted a bit." As the week wore on, the letters pouring into his own mailbox gradually turned favorable to Altrincham by a ratio of three to one. Letters to the working-class Daily Mirror were four to one in his favor, and even the middle-class Daily Mail, which at first received a rush of what-a-cad letters, found the mail turning more evenly to the lord as the week went on.

Nobody agreed aloud with his diagnosis that the Queen's ghosted speeches were "a pain in the neck," but many a newspaper, while tut-tutting, managed to slip in a needle at the Palace too. "There is some danger," said the Spectator, "of the monarchy leaning too heavily upon a single class." "In all the virtuous and vicious huffing and puffing," said the Economist, "the real point about the article has been lost. It is that its author is a sturdy monarchist."

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