Beaver in the Pot

Britain's ambitious, supercharged billikin, onetime War Production Minister, now Private Citizen Lord Beaverbrook, was back in the political stew last week and the stew began giving off strange smells. It was hardly the Beaver's fault: he had only been quietly filing his teeth when somebody tossed him into the pot.

As a man who knows a good popular issue when he sees it, the Beaver has championed a second front since soon after he left the Cabinet last February. His Daily Express is the 1942 second front's loudest journalistic advocate; Editor Michael Foot of his Evening Standard is its most eloquent. Since Prime Minister Churchill usually tries to respond to clear-cut public demands, and since Winston and the Beaver are old friends, what could be more natural than that they should chat about the possibility of the Beaver's re-entering the Cabinet?

Possibly Mr. Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook did have a little talk, but its importance was hardly as great as the furor the mere rumor aroused. Newspaper stories reported that the Prime Minister might offer Lord Beaverbrook the post of Defense Minister; that, if he did, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Minister Without Portfolio Sir Stafford Cripps might resign; that, if they did, so violent a Parliamentary rebellion might take place, that a general election might be necessary, in which event the situation might be similar to that of France before her fall.

Behind all this iffy clamor lay the simple fact that to Britain's two strongest political groups the Beaver smells to heaven. High Tories consider him a Canadian upstart who has betrayed the class to which he never quite belonged. Labor leaders dislike his gusty independence, his appeal to the extreme Left. Since there was little likelihood that either Anthony Eden or Sir Stafford Cripps would resign if the Beaver were appointed, it looked very much as though the Beaver's Parliamentary enemies were trying to scare the public with a witches' brew.

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