Return of the Beaver

Lord Beaverbrook is a smart publisher first, a stubborn Tory second. The last three men he has picked to edit his London Evening Standard (circulation: 608,000) have been bright young journalists first, fiery leftists second. The advantages in each case were mutual--but temporary. The Beaver got a well-edited paper. For the leftists, the Standard was a soapbox, a springboard--and a handsome meal-ticket. So long as they could agree on "fundamentals" (Churchill as a war leader, aid to Russia) the wary alliance lasted. Last week the last of the three leftists gave it up.

First to go was tall, flamboyant socialist Frank Owen, 39, a "Sudeten Welshman" and at 23 a Member of Parliament, who was drafted in the midst of arguing loudly for a Second Front. In Manhattan last week, now a major on Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten's staff, he admitted what everyone long suspected, that he was through with the Standard.

After him came Michael Foot, 31, a tough, cocksure radical who knew how to argue warmly and reason coldly. He and Beaverbrook got along fine for a time, singing and drinking together. In expiation for his Tory flirtations, Michael Foot anonymously wrote two books that damned Tories as appeasers at best, fascists at worst. Beaverbrook put him out to pasture, in the lush acres of his morning paper, the Daily Express (circulation: 3,000,000). Eight months later, Foot booted his -L-3,000 job, went to work for the Laborite Daily Herald.

Up stepped a third leftist: slight, parchment-faced Sydney R. Elliott, 43, who made his mark on the consumer-cooperative Reynolds News, though the Beaver hates the cooperative movement. Elliott lasted as long as Beaverbrook was pouring his immense vitality into the war effort. Through most of the war Churchill has leaned heavily on Beaverbrook. But last month the Beaver decided that the foreign war was going well enough for his Express to pay more attention to the domestic wars, and opened his recruiting campaign for the Conservative Party with a frontpage editorial: "The Daily Express . . . refuses to conform to the current worship of the state. . . ." Leftist Sydney Elliott decided that it was time to go. Said he last week: "It was easy to part with the Beaver on political grounds, but it took a lot of courage to make a personal break . . . the old man is a fellow of great charm." He thereupon moved his leftist luggage over to the tabloid, sexy, socialist-supporting Daily Mirror.

In Elliott's place, the Beaver appointed grey Herbert S. Gunn, who signalized the end of leftist tomfoolery with his first memo to the Standard staff: "The chief function of an evening newspaper is to TELL THE NEWS." But the Standard still had one rugged warrior to keep its tattered leftist ensigns flying: famed, impish Cartoonist David (Colonel Blimp) Low, who is not above caricaturing his own boss (see cut).

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