Lordly Style

The House of Lords, that citadel of leisurely, mannered and soporific debate, has lately echoed to talk of unexpected bluntness and considerable significance. It comes from Britain's new Foreign Secretary, Lord Home (pronounced Hume), the first secretary in 22 years to sit with Lords. Last week Home proclaimed that Britain would no longer vote with the U.S., as it has for the past ten years, to keep Communist China out of the U.N. In doing so, he left no doubt of his feelings for Red China itself.

"One must admit," said Home, "that a nation which has lately smothered Tibet, is infringing India's frontiers and rejecting all attempts at conciliation, and which has publicly proclaimed its belief in the necessity of war, has few of the credentials of a peace-loving nation in the United Nations. Nevertheless, we have always felt and feel now that the facts of international life require that Communist China should be seated in the United Nations. We can make no progress toward disarmament unless she is there."

That Hard Look. Lord Home even hinted that the U.S. was preparing to change its own stand. As he put it, "It is for the United States to say in its own time" whether it would stop insisting on "the choice between the admission of Communist China and the breakup of the United Nations." This brought a sharp denial from the Kennedy Administration that London's decision was "the result of any consultation between our two governments." Actually, Home was launching a campaign to pressure the U.S.

Home, who was ridiculed by newspapers following his appointment last July as a "faceless stooge," is unexpectedly emerging as one of the key men around Prime Minister Macmillan. Supremely self-assured, schooled by a lifetime of politics, the earl talks with much more vigor than did his plodding predecessor, Selwyn Lloyd. Now the newspapers are recalling a colleague's prescient prediction of last July: "One thing will help if he tangles with old Khrush--Alec just doesn't give a damn. Just looks at you with that 'damn your eyes' look and goes on with what he's doing."

That Hard Sound. He scorns the casual optimism of so many official British statements about East-West relations. Last December Home warned his countrymen "to stand united because I cannot remember a time when the whole way of life in which we believe has been under such relentless pressure and attack." He has proved unashamedly pro-American. At a Pilgrims' dinner in London he said: "Those who accuse the Americans of being warlike are those who either do not know them or who find the Americans' championship of liberty standing astride their path of ambition." Last week, Lord Home told the Lords that in the U.N. debates with the new countries of Asia and Africa, Moscow seems to regard hostility to the West as a "true criterion of independence, and I am simply not prepared to see our country become the victim of a frame-up, and that is what it is."

In New Delhi last week, the thorny question of Red China's membership in the World Health Organization ended in a U.S. victory. By the margin of 38 to 24, with 15 nations abstaining and 20 absent, delegates blocked a Russian resolution in favor of admitting the Chinese Communists, voted instead for the U.S. Surgeon General Leroy Burney's counterproposal to seat Nationalist China.

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