MR. CHURCHILL

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 239, 9 October 1942, Page 2

MR. CHURCHILL

POWER IN COMMONS

"FORTRESS AGAINST FEAR"

Before the opening of each sitting day the House of Commons joins in prayer. The chaplain at the table reatls out the lovely and accustomed words, and the Members gaze with bowed heads upon the backs of the benches upon which they are about to sit. We pray for many things, but among them we pray to be freed from "all partial affections." I am not a party man, but I confess to two partial affections which are deeply embedded in my soul, wrote the Hon. Harold Nicolson, M.P., in The Spectator, after the no-confidence debate.

I have a partial affection for Mr. Winston Churchill, upon whom I gaze, as Grattan said of Charles James Fox. "with tenderness and wonder." There he sat, hunched and sombre, wearing his bull-dog mask. It is noticeable that since Dunkirk the thrust of his chin and lower lip has become more pronounced, the truculence of his really alarming gaze more pugnacious. Yet under and over this pugilistic mask ran little tremors of feeling; little gusts of amusement, boyishness, mischief and sorrow. It is amazing to me that anyone so tough can be so sensitive, that the qualities of fighter and artist should be so curiously commingled. And when at the end he rose and faced the assembly, standing there stockily with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his Victorian watch-chain glinting against his sombre clothes, the rest of the House seemed suddenly reduced to purely numerical proportions. I am not at all surprised that the whole force and ingenuity of Dr. Goebbels' machine should be concentrated upon shaking our confidence in Mr. Churchill For they know, over there, that if the whole world were to crash around hftn its ruins would strike him unperturbed. They know that he is the embodiment of the country's will-power, our fortress against fear.

If I have another partial affection it is for the House as a whole. I am sensitive to the fact that when the Mother of Parliaments behaves foolishly her momentary aberration is patent to all the world, whereas her underlying wisdom, ailthough permanent, is also obscure and dark. There were many things said last week which ought not to have been said and which will be used by our enemies with damaging effect; vet there were many other things which ought to have been said, which were said, and which it was good to hear. The intemperances of individual Members cancel each other out; the abiding temperance of the House as a whole remains, as I have said, the reservoir of the nation's calm.