In the Box

Thirty years a civil servant, and ever the diplomat, 51-year-old Sir Hugh Foot, Britain's governor on Cyprus, last week turned salesman. His pitch: if the Greeks, the Turks, the Cypriots and the British themselves will all show restraint, Britain's new plan for limited self-government on the island can be made to work. Foot strolled unarmed through the tense Turkish quarter of Nicosia, appealing in person to startled Turk Cypriot shopkeepers and stallholders for calm. And to show the Greeks how ready he was to negotiate, Foot released the text of a secret offer that he had written last April to Colonel George Grivas, leader of the Greek Cypriot terrorist organization EOKA: "I am prepared to go any place at any time you nominate to meet you. I would come alone and unarmed and would give you my word that for that day you would be in no danger of arrest."

Labor Pains. After his visit to the Turkish quarter, Hugh Foot, looking tired and taut, flew to London to confer with Harold Macmillan's Conservative Cabinet, but, more important, to plead with the Labor Party (to which his brothers Michael and Dingle belong) not to rock the boat with an all-out attack on the government's plan. At a meeting of Labor M.P.s, red-haired Barbara Castle, a fiery left-winger, made an impassioned plea for the party to stick by its earlier pledge to allow Cypriots to determine their own future, i.e., allow the Greek Cypriot majority on the island to vote for union with Greece. Governor Foot emerged from the meeting not fully reassured.

That afternoon, when the House of Commons met to debate Cyprus, Hugh Foot took a seat in the "box," a seat under the gallery reserved for officials whose knowledge may be needed by a Cabinet minister. Aneurin Bevan, so long the terror of the Tories, summed up Labor's position: "We do not commend these proposals . . . but we advise the Greeks and Turks not to reject them out of hand." And if agreement was reached, added Laborite Jim Callaghan, "we would not seek to overturn it." In the same mood of conciliation, Prime Minister Macmillan noted, "We have of course no special pride of authorship which will make us stick obstinately to this or that detail of the plan. We shall certainly be flexible." Labor did not want to upset the mood by forcing the issue to a vote.

Frozen Difference. But Labor did have one grave objection to the "partnership" plan: to provide for separate assemblies of Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, and to invite both the Turkish and Greek governments to share a kind of condominium with Britain was to freeze differences into a permanent mold, rather than to let them work themselves out. Perhaps for this reason, the Turks, though rejecting the plan, found it reconcilable with their cries of partition. The Greeks for the same reason were considerably upset. On Cyprus, Colonel Grivas issued a defiant leaflet distributed by boys on bicycles. It described Foot as a "Trojan horse" and the British plan as a "new monster." It told Foot: "Chew your plan and swallow it." But the Greek government of Constantine Karamanlis, though accused by the opposition of betrayal, dropped its longstanding demand for an advance promise of self-determination before entering any negotiations.

As a further conciliatory gesture, Sir Hugh Foot had written a letter to the exiled ethnarch of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, offering to let him return to the island once violence ceased. Climbing down slightly from past positions, Makarios no longer rejected a "transitory stage of self-government." But he was not likely to be made happier by the amazing gaffe committed last week by the Archbishop of Canterbury on a TV broadcast. Explaining why he had invited Makarios to attend the forthcoming Lambeth Conference of bishops in London, the Archbishop of Canterbury said, "By tradition he is one of the officials invited." "But then," he added, "I know as well as anybody what a bad character he is."

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