◆ SpookStack

t effectively. It has now all the time that it could ask to peepare }it¢ positions. But T do not thiak that, when Parliamebt re-” * agpembles, it will be allowed to fog the issue. I am no} in a- sition this week—since this column has to be written Before the White Paper is published—to comment on the details of the scandal. But oue aspect of it seems to me to deserve ‘ immediate comment, I have several times suggested that what ” * Ecall the ‘Establishment’ in this country is today more powers -ful than ever before. By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean “only the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it~but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially. - Auyone who has at any point been close to the exercise of power will know what I mean when I say that the ‘Establish- ment’ can be seen at work in the activities of,-not only the ‘Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Eark Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the , Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor-of The Times Literary Supplement, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Caster. ~ p. : Somewhere neat the heart of the pattern of social relation- tships which so powerfully controls the exercise of power in {this country is the Foreign Office. By its traditions and its _ Methods of recruitment the Foreign Office makes it inevitable j that the members of the Foreign Service will be men (and «: the Poreign Service is one of the bastions of masculine Engligh. : Speiety) who, to use a phrase which has been used a lot “the past few days, ‘know all the right people.” At the time ff . isappearance of Maclean and Burgess, ‘the right people": sessment moved into action. Lady Violet Bonham Carter was the active and the most open. A study of her activities during tht past twenty years would reveal how power in this countrf | can still be exercised by someove who has, politically, bees stripped of it, But Lady Violet Bonham Carter was not alone. No one whose job it was to be interested in the Burgess-. Maclean affair from the very beginning will forget the subtle but powerful pressures which were brought to bear by thosd who belonged to the same stratum as the two missing men. - From those who were expecting Maclean to dinner onthe - very night on which he disappeared, to those who just ‘hap- | pened to have been charmed by his very remarkable father; the representatives of the ‘Establishment’ moved in, and how- effectively they worked may be traced in the columns of the more respectable newspapers at the time, especially of The: Times and of the Observer. : eS . Theard recently a story which iuminates many of the ways” in which the “Establishmen?’ now works. Mr. Maurice Edel- ' man, the Labour Member of Parliament, was asked some | time ago by an American magazine to write an article about 4 Princess Margaret which could be published to celebrate. her. twenty-fifth birthday. (That Labour Members of Parliament 4 should be assumed to know about the Royal Family seems to! i me to be an amusing comment on contemporary British society ° in eel.) Mr. Edelman wrote his article, which contained 2 sentence which was in no way disrespectful but which might be construed as a criticism of Princess Margaret, Then, being - Mr. Edelman, he submitted his article to the Lady-in-Waiting ' of Princess Margaret. The next that he heard about it pas | when he was called to Mr. Attlee’s room in the House of Cpm- + front of Mr. Attlee, was the offending arte."